Issue 104 / October 2019

PREVIEWS
can put it out’, and it was just for fun, really. People were saying,
‘You’re doing stuff and you’re not being paid, why are you doing
it?’ But it’s worth more to me to get the ideas out there.
Something like the snooker or the stone clearing, it was just, ‘Oh,
I wonder what would happen if I try and do this for, you know,
the rest of my life’ – ha! See if it turns out to be a fruitful idea,
see if it turns out to be boring and, if so, that’s funny, see where
it goes.
Some people are making hundreds of millions of dollars being
podcasters, so, you know, I’d like to say I was a genius and I saw
that coming but that wasn’t my motivation. My motivation was
to get ideas out there and on my own terms. Some of the really
big ones – No Such Thing As A Fish, My Dad Wrote A Porno and
The Guilty Feminist – they’re playing the Albert Hall and doing
massive worldwide tours. My Dad Wrote A Porno has been
going three or four years and none of them were particularly
famous before it. So to go from nothing to a world tour where
you’re selling thousands of tickets everywhere you go… a
stand up would look at that and go, ‘What the fuck, how’s that
happened?’
But I think my things have always been a little bit more niche and
when I was on TV it wasn’t mainstream stuff, and obviously a lot
of things I’m doing online are deliberately kind of almost trying
to get rid of listeners! Not so much RHLSTP, but it’s still not
kowtowing to the mainstream ideal.
COMEDY
RICHARD HERRING
Everyman Theatre – 23/10
The Podfather opens up about the art of subversiveness,
and how far his podcasting fame might take him.
Comedian and podcast stalwart RICHARD HERRING
brings his live interview show RHLSTP to the
Everyman in October. From his Hertfordshire home,
he talks to Sam Turner about the reasons for the
show’s success, the allure of podcasting and his other more
esoteric projects – podcasting snooker matches against
himself and clearing stones from a field while walking his
dog.
It’s interesting that there have been quite a few big personal
revelations on RHLSTP considering it’s a live performance
podcast.
I think people have got their reasons. There’s something
about the format, the weird
[emergency] questions, which
“People were saying,
‘You’re doing stuff and
you’re not being paid,
why are you doing
it?’ But it’s worth
more to me to get the
ideas out there”
I started doing in case I ran
out of things to say. It has a
knock-on effect: people have to
talk about something they’ve
never talked about before, it
opens the door and they feel
like they can talk about other
stuff. It’s not like a traditional
interview when you’re asking
the same questions and you
have your standard responses.
I’m not trying to find stuff
out and I think therefore it
relaxes people, and if they
want to reveal something
they reveal something. It’s just
conversations and if people trust you then hopefully they’ll give
you some good stuff.
And I suppose you never know what to expect. It could be a
light-hearted discussion, or deep, or political. I suppose that
keeps it interesting for you?
Yeh, I never really know and I’m quite good at adapting to who
the guest is and working out what they want to do. I guess it’s
just having that empathy to listen and understand when you’re
pushing things too far. Certainly over an hour you can’t just keep
the laughs going all that time. Maybe with Greg Davies and Bob
Mortimer you can, but with most people there’ll come a point
when it’s time to talk about something a little bit more seriously.
There’s the occasional one where it’s harder to get stuff out of
people or where it’s a bit more awkward, but people tend to like
those ones more! What I like about it is we put nearly everything
out. People can see how much stuff is good, how much stuff is
not that interesting, or where something doesn’t work. It proves
that the rest of the stuff is genuine. You
don’t get that on TV shows. Chat shows,
panel shows are all edited down, all the
eggy bits are taken out and all the leadup
bits are taken out.
Do you think what you do now is
a reaction against that over-edited
version of a lot of media? You’ve got
RHLSTP, but there’s also Me1 vs Me2
Snooker podcast and the Stone Clearing
podcast. Those are probably unlikely to
get commissioned as TV series…
Well, you never know! There was a series
for Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse
so there might be for Stone Clearing, give
me another 10 years! What attracted
me in the first place was the autonomy.
When I started with Andrew Collins, just after the Russell
Brand and Jonathan Ross thing, there was a crackdown on
offensiveness and swearing and upsetting people. And also,
you’re waiting months and years sometimes to get a project
green lit on the radio or the TV. So, I thought, ‘This is great, we
Do you get new podcasters asking you for advice in the same
way you’ll get comedians asking you for tips?
Yeh, a little bit but the advice for everyone is just, ‘Get on with it’.
I think asking for advice on any of this stuff is just a delay tactic,
really. If you want to be a stand-up get out and go and do some
shows. And with podcasting it’s the same. You don’t need to
hang around, you have this outlet and if you have an idea just
crack on with it – and if it’s terrible you can delete it. You’ve got
to build up an audience. I’ve been podcasting for what I think is
12 years now, and that’s what people don’t want to hear, it takes
a long time.
But there is a sort of meritocracy to it. People can say TV doesn’t
let certain people do this stuff and that’s true, it’s hard to get
involved in that world, but with a podcast, if you’re good there’s
no reason why you can’t go from nothing to the Albert Hall in
three years.
And some people might want to do it just as a way of
expressing themselves, they may not want to play the Albert
Hall…
Absolutely. With the snooker, the express idea was to have no
listeners. I think it started with about 30,000 in the first week
and it went quite quickly down to 5,000 but I can’t shake those
5,000 off. With Stone Clearing it’s… both of those are slightly like
art projects with tongue in cheek. The idea of doing something
relentlessly for a long, long time that has no end; they’re both
sort of similar themes. The snooker is kind of a battle against
yourself and the Stone Clearing is a sort of battle against your
mortality and the environment and the kind of uselessness and
the pointlessness of existing. They’re both sort of about that, but
then just the stupidity of someone doing it I hope is entertaining,
which I think it is. I genuinely think the Stone Clearing thing is
one of the best things I’ve done.
Even though the podcast is about me creating this wall [from
cleared stones] I was doing it before the podcast. I was genuinely
quite obsessed with it before I started doing the podcast, it’s a
heightened version of that obsession and me being paranoid. But
it’s weird, it gets into this transcendental thing where I’m being
paranoid that I’m being observed, which I am. I kind of don’t
want people in my village to know, but obviously they probably
do because it’s a podcast, but you sort of are hallucinating out
there and I’m seeing stuff and weird stuff is happening so it’s
quite an interesting look at the human mind! But it’s mainly sort
of how long can a man talk about one subject.
Yes, and people will use it for different reasons – the
meditative aspect being one…
I think people generally use it to go to sleep. People find it boring
enough that it sends them to sleep and then they’re annoyed
because there’s some quite jarring music at the end, ha! But
I quite like that. But when you create something you have no
power over how it’s going to be interpreted or what people are
going to do with it. Once you’ve put it out there it belongs to
whoever is ingesting it. I don’t think Salinger thought, ‘I’ll write
Catcher In The Rye and that’ll get John Lennon assassinated’.
It’s not Salinger’s fault directly, but that’s what happened. So, if
anyone gets assassinated because of Stone Clearing it’s not my
fault is what I’m trying to get at here. I just want to get that in. !
Words: Sam Turner
richardherring.com
RHLSTP With Richard Herring comes to the Everyman Theatre
on Wednesday 23rd October.
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