So the autograph debacle drags on. Amongst the emails I got from abroad a couple had come from the UK and so I was less sure whether they were genuine or not. One was looking for stuff for a charity and whilst a little oddly worded I decided to trust that they were genuine and another came from a girl called Loz in Sheffield, whose email address was about florida which made me a bit suspicious.
It was worded in a similar way to the others:
" Dear Richard Herring Hi, i am a very big fan of yours please can you send me a signed picture of you? heres my address:
Lauren
xxxxx
BARNSLEY
SOUTH YORKSHIRE
xxxxx
UK
Thank you very much in advance love from Lauren"
Now there are other suspicious details here that make this seem more like a template than a real request. If she was just mailing me, rather than a whole raft of people, why put "UK" in the address. I am in the UK too. I don't need this detail. See how untrusting I have become.
I had replied saying "Not trying to be funny, but had lots of spam this week from people from foreign countries asking for my autograph and saying I am their hero without giving any indication as to how they have heard of me and in an email that is clearly a template I think your email is probably genuine, but could you just email me again and mention something specific that you have enjoyed of mine. I have no problem sending signed stuff to real fans, but am sure you understand that I don't want to get into a position where I am sending it to people who (like most people) don't know who I am Will happily send you signed programmes and leaflets on receipt of another email
Rich"
Loz (as she called herself in her email header) to her credit immediately emailed back (unlike the girl whose scarred brother sees me as a hero who you think would have been more excited to get an email from me - this heroic figure). She said,
"Dear Richard Herring. Hi, i am a fan of yours. I first heard you when you was on the radio i think, i don't know what to put like you said to indicate how i have heard of you. I have never been to one of your shows but am sure they're awesome i heard that your're very funny. I just thought it would be cool to get your autograph, i suppose i seem like i'm not a big fan but i am only fifteen and i don't know what to put,sorry it doesn't matter about the autograph if you've had lots of requests. I hope you do some more shows when i am old enough to get tickets to them, that would be soo cool =) Good luck with your up-coming shows love from Lauren xxxx"
Now most of that is quite modest and disarming, but then again there are suspicious bits in it - "I first heard you when was on the radio, I think"? She thinks? It seems a bit woolly. Not as specific as I would have hoped to mark her out as a person with a genuine interest in my work. I thought I'd probably send her some stuff anyway. There was more chance of her being genuine. But I am still keen to solve this mystery and find out why my name written on a piece of paper has suddenly become so interesting to so many people. A few of you have pointed out that the idea of working through the imdb database is a bit impractical. So I wondered if Loz would help me solve the mystery.
I emailed her today to say, "I am sending you some stuff even though I am not really sure I believe you. It's nothing personal. Just because I have suddenly got so many requests like this. I would appreciate it if you're not really a fan if you would tell me where you got my details from, so I can try and shed some light on this sudden international interest in me. But if you are a fan then I hope you enjoy the stuff I am sending you. Should be with you by the weekend Good luck Rich"
Loz again was immediately responsive:
"hey thankyou very much, i understand wot ur saying, i am a fan though but i
got ur details throughyour website i think, i cant quite remeber, sorry if im no help well, good luck with your up-coming shows love lauren xxxx Age 15"
Again though there she is with that suspicious "I think", like she can't bear to tell an out and out lie so tries to qualify it by giving her a way out if this ever came to a court of law. Oh how paranoid a week of this nightmare has made me! But also weird that she repeats her age - like she's trying to make me sympathetic to her in the same way as the girl with the brother with the scarred face who I am a hero to (I really want to believe that's true- though not if I am his hero for managing to live a fairly normal life despite my own face being what some people might consider disfigured). I also hate to think that someone who was a fan of mine would have such a bad grasp of grammar and spelling, but that is just my own snobbishness coming out. All are welcome at the Herring shrine. And there seems to be plenty of room for worshippers.
Perhaps Loz's conscience had been pricked though. Or maybe she is just a nice person who wants to be helpful (maybe this helpful nature meant she failed to attend her English classes at school because she was tending to injured otters or something). She sent me another email a few minutes later which read "Hello sorry to bother you AGAIN, have you tried looking on peoples websites like. to see if they have put your contact address on, or i am a member of this website where you can ask for your favourite actors actresses comedians ect.. contact address but i have never noticed yours up but heres the address : www.autocollecting.tk hope this helps you love from lauren xxxx age 15"
So even if Loz is a genuine fan, she is also coincidentally an autograph hunter and perhaps this explains the mystery. Possibly on the forum of some such website someone has mentioned that I am usually quite trusting about autograph enquiries and happy to send stuff out, and so a few fastidious hunters who want every possible autograph they can get have written to me hoping to add another useless scalp to their largely useless collections. Alas they have made the mistake of all doing it in the same week as my email address has been mentioned. It seems the most likely scenario. All I would say is that if you post on this forum then could you tell people that I will send them my autograph if they really want it, but that if they don't know who I am then they shouldn't pretend to be my fan. Or try and make me sympathetic to them with some unlikely sob story. That if they just say "I am a nerd and want to collect all the autographs of everyone who has ever been on TV anywhere in the world, even though I acknowledge this is an impossible task, worthy of Sisyphus and can never be completed unless TV stops at some point in my lifetime and even then probably not. But can you help me try?"
Then I, a man who has completed CNPS and is casually thinking of trying to do it again but without including any of the new numberplates (I am already up to 5 truth be told) will willingly comply. It is just the deceit that I don't like. In fact it's just the pathetic easily dismissable deceit that I don't like. If people can be bothered to make up a good lie or do a minimum of research and pretend they remember some old sketch off of the radio then I will be happy to comply with their wishes. I am an autograph whore. I will happily put myself in bankruptcy sending pictures to people who don't know who I am, wherever they may be.
This afternoon I laboured hard to get my press release ready for the new Edinburgh show. As usual this was tricky, what with there being only maybe five minutes of this show in existence, but this is what I came up with. I suspect it may have to change, but if you're interested in this kind of thing then let me know. If you'd like me to print it up, sign it and send it to you at my own expense then do let me know:
Richard Herring
ménage à un
Richard Herring returns to Scotland with his twenty-first Edinburgh show in his fifteenth Festival: he has now spent more than a year of his life at the Edinburgh Fringe.
ménage à un is his second consecutive stand up show (the most masturbatory of art forms) and deals with solitude, selfishness and whether three-in-a-bed sex romps are really better than one-in-a-bed sex romps.
He reveals his ambition to be the first man to officially become an island, solely to spite the dead poet John Donne and questions whether being 39, single, childless and childish is a triumph or disaster.
Along the way Herring also finally reveals the true answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx, proposes that the English should rename apples “sky potatoes” in order to demonstrate the ultimate folly of the French and controversially calls for the disenfranchisement of the stupid.
Richard says, “I come to Edinburgh to experiment, to take risks, to push myself as a writer and performer and to spend a month getting drunk in order to forget how much money this self indulgence is costing me. I fear such financial ramifications and a trend towards promoting household names in massive venues means that we are in danger of destroying what makes the Fringe great. Thus I will be keeping my show small and ramshackle and hoping that it will develop significantly over the course of the month. I am putting more jokes in though because ultimately I want to be the new Jimmy Carr. The show will be mainly feedline punchline, next joke. Feedline, punchline, next joke. Joke after hollow empty joke. Jokes that could have been written by a computer with no moral compass. Hope you enjoy it!”
Herring’s 2005 show “Someone Likes Yoghurt” was heralded by the Daily Telegraph as the Worst Comedy Experience of 2005. In a year that gave us both Titty Bang Bang and Balls of Steel this is quite an achievement and one that he is justifiably proud of. It is the only award that Herring has won in his long Edinburgh career.
HerringÂ’s Edinburgh shows in Full
1987 Old King Cole – student production of Ken Campbell’s sublimely silly kids’ show.
The Seven Raymonds Present KMnO4 – sketch show also featuring Stewart Lee
1988 The Oxford Revue – Waving at the Pigeons - at the height of the supremacy of alternative comedy, there may not have been a worse time to appear in a student revue.
1992 the dum show – the incredible cast of Coogan, Marber, Munnery, Lee and Herring attempted to revive the sketch show, but the time was not yet right. A lost masterpiece.
1993 Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World – stage version of the successful Radio 4 show, also starring Stewart Lee and featuring Alistair Macgowan and Ronnie Ancona. It was the first sketch show to feature a voice over introduction by Tom Baker and until recently the most successful.
Ra Ra Rasputin – Years before Mama Mia and We Will Rock You, Herring came up with the idea of basing a musical around the work of a major pop band. The mistake he made was choosing Boney M.
1994 This Morning With Richard Not Judy – the first incarnation of what would become Lee and Herring’s cult Sunday lunchtime BBC2 show.
Richard Herring is Fat – a sketch based narrative about Richard’s struggle to lose weight, featuring Sally Phillips and Kevin Eldon.
1995 Lee and Herring Live – the double act capitalised on the popularity of their BBC2 show Fist of Fun.
Richard Herring is All Man – a 28 year old Richard Herring tries and fails to determine what it means to be a male adult.
1996 Lee and Herring Live- more “moon on a stick” based shenanighans.
Punk’s Not Dead – Richard’s first play, about a group of friends meeting up to see the Sex Pistols’ reunion.
1997 This Morning With Richard Not Judy – A second outing for the only Edinburgh show where you had to bid for tickets. Prices ranged from 5p to£70.
Excavating Rita – a second play, this time about archaeology, including a memorable scene in which Richard appeared in what was described by one journalist as “the most unaesthetically pleasing full frontal nude scene of all time”,
1998 Playing Hide and Seek With Jesus – A play about love, religion and turning 30.
1999 It’s Not the End of the World – A fourth play to date, about Nostradamus’ apocalyptical predictions. Spiralling costs meant that this was the end of Edinburgh Fringe plays for Herring.
2001 Christ on a Bike - HerringÂ’s first entirely solo Edinburgh show, about his relationship with Jesus and suspicions that he might be the new Messiah. The Abraham begat Isaac routine remains a career highlight for the foolish comedian.
2002 Talking Cock – A male response to The Vagina Monologues and Herring’s most critically and commercially successful show (but it’s not actually the best one. You critics know nothing. NOTHING!). It spawned a book of the same name and was translated into over ten languages and performed all over Europe.
2004 The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace – inspired by the break up of a relationship and a plaque on his new house Richard undertook a dozen modern day heroic feats, including dating 50 women in 50 days, attempting to kill the Loch Ness monster and running the Marathon.
2005 Someone Likes Yoghurt – A return to straight stand up after a 13 year hiatus
Biography
Richard Herring has been working as a professional writer and comedian since 1989.
He was one of the team behind the seminal BBC Radio 4 series On The Hour, and then worked alongside Stewart Lee (Co-creator of Jerry Springer – The Opera) on the cult shows Fist of Fun (BBC Two) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy (BBC Two). Richard co-wrote 37 episodes of the sit-com Time Gentlemen Please (Sky One), which starred Al Murray - The Pub Landlord. He was script editor for the third series of the multi-award winning comedy series Little Britain (BBC One) and the highly successful stage version of Grumpy Old Women. He co-writes and stars in historical sketch show That Was Then, This is Now, the second series of which will be broadcast on Radio 2 in September and is a regular panelist on Banter on Radio 4 which is also starting its second series in the autumn.
He has obsessively written his weblog Warming Up every single day for the last four years. You can read it at www.richardherring.com/warmingup .
He is currently working on a sit-com called You Can Choose Your Friends for the BBC and a comedy drama called Double Act for Channel 4.
What the Press have said about Richard Herring
Someone Likes Yoghurt
“For my money Richard Herring, delivers the sexiest, most seductive comedy on the Fringe….. a masterful comedian.” ***** edinburghguide.com
“He enjoys playing with the stand-up form, and after nearly 20 years doing it, you would hope any intelligent man would want to do the same. The skill is that he’s not being challenging for its own sake, but that he’s created a lively, hilarious, part-sublime, part-ridiculous hour in which to get his points across. If only more Edinburgh shows were like this.” **** Chortle
“Brilliant….A triumphant experiment in the art of tedium” **** Fest
“The most splendid paranoid rant I have ever witnessed on the subject of yoghurt” Daily Mail
“Irritating, relentless, pathetic, petty, pedantic, arrogant, embarrassing, pointless and endlessly funny” Stewart Lee Sunday Times.
“Worst comedy experience 2005” Daily Telegraph
THE TWELVE TASKS OF HERCULES TERRACE
"Richard Herring hasn't just written a new show for this year's Fringe, he's started a new religionÂ…Herring has taken the researching and writing a one-hour comedy show to its extreme and the gods should justly reward him." *****
Shona Craven, Metro
"For a show that's ostensibly about depression, this is a remarkably feel good night out. Mainly, of course, because Herring conquered his demons, but also because of the jaunty, playful touch he brings to this impressively well-constructed show. Make it your task to catch it." ****
Steve Bennett, Chortle
"Triumphantly funny"
Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard
"HerringÂ’s marvellous reaction to a broken heart proves that there is little wrong with the world that a nice obsessive compulsive disorder canÂ’t fix."
Simon Armstrong, Sunday Times
TALKING COCK
“Herring's visual presentation is perfectly pitched… Featuring more euphemisms than you can shake a porridge gun at.” ****
The List
“A very thoughtful and thought-provoking show… mixing earthy humour with delicate sensitivity.” ****
Edinburgh Evening News
“His Cock is as funny and fascinating for women as it is for men. I loved it. I only wish it could have been longer… Witty, charming, original and incredibly funny.” ****
The Scotsman
CHRIST ON A BIKE!
“Hilarious. Makes the Bible something of a comedy classic. One of the highlights of this year’s festival.”
The Guardian
“Hilarious. Anyone brave enough to wear David Icke’s turquoise shell suit is a god in my book. Fantastic.”
The List
“This show comes as something of an epiphany. Bubbling over with his usual cheery confidence, Herring soon wins over even his harshest critics.”
Edinburgh Evening News
