7656/20595
Up to Nottingham for the second best attended gig of the RHLSTP tour so far. The Playhouse hadn't sold out, but there were approaching 500 people in, which is a very high number for a Richard Herring gig. If I could sell 500 tickets for every gig I did, I would be a very happy (and wealthy) man. As it is I am a very happy and reasonably wealthy man. So it's all good.
I am not sure why Nottingham is such a good city for me, though I did used to do lots of previews of my stand up shows here and the Playhouse is a great venue so maybe it's partly down to their work, but I do love coming here, if only to keep my quarter of a century old Tales of Robin Hood gag going for as long as possible. It got turned into a Tesco about 13 years ago and not they're talking about turning it into a gym. It had better be a gym with a Robin Hood theme, with lots of logs placed over water that you have to fight people on.
I had great guests, but I think they'd all admit that they are not huge names, so it was gratifying to be selling well mainly on the name of the podcast. It doesn't happen everywhere and outside of London it's interesting that big name guests don't sell as many tickets as you'd expect. RHLSTP exists in its own little space. Of course it passes most people by, but even a TV star can't tempt non-disciples in. Watching the sales is a stressful but exciting process. I am hoping to hit 66.6% sales (made more difficult by playing huge venues in Tunbridge Wells, Bedford and Hull where I am likely to only hit 20% attendance). So far we've sold 55% of the tickets across the whole tour and we're about halfway through. Every 200 tickets sold is another 1%, so I need to sell around 2500 more tickets to hit my goal. Basically it's around another 120 sales for every gig to come (though 3 of those are sold out and 1 has only 50 tickets left), but the London date with no guests announced has 380 tickets left and the fame hungry cockney cunts will buy those tickets if I get a star, so that would be a big step forwards. Of if I can book Paul McCartney for Hull that should get another 1000 tickets sold!
Will my modest ambitions to sell two thirds of my tickets come to fruition (it might help that I've been moved from a 1255 seater venue to a 600 seater in Cardiff).
I have no idea if I will do it. Or exceed my wildest dreams and sell seven out of ten seats.
I wonder if Peter Kay has to worry about this kind of thing. I pity him. He never has the experience of wondering how many tickets he will sell, just the boring inevitability of selling tens of thousands of tickets the minute they are on sale.
My guests were terrific. Lloyd Griffiths is a fascinating man who straddles the worlds of choral singing, football and comedy and is also a fine actor. He revealed a bit of the story of how he got a starring role in a Hollywood movie, but then lost it, which is a little bit heartbreaking, but I have little doubt that more breaks will come for him. And it was lovely to meet Scott and Jemma Bennett in person after chatting with them online a couple of times. Scott is a monoball and though only about one in 270 men have one or fewer balls (that stat is a bit mangled, like our balls, as it's actually about how many men will get testicular cancer), he is not the only uniballer I will be chatting to this tour, as Simon Munnery will be my guest in Leicester. It's a cabal and I will always promote the one and no-balled over the two-balled, which is pretty much the exact opposite process by which showbiz has traditionally been run!
We had some fun talking about the house hunting experience from yesterday. It's solid tragi-comedy and the laughs come from a dark and literally shitty place. But the laughs come regardless.
Even though mainly nicely spaced out, this is a relentless tour and yet so far I am still enamoured with the podcast and haven't had a duff guest yet (though occasionally I have been a duff host). All three guest tonight were fans of the show too, which is not only a lovely thing to hear, but means they are going to get the tone. Lloyd was particularly amusingly annoyed when I said "You're still in your forties, right?"
He turned 40 two weeks ago.
