Exclusive interview with cult comedian Richard Herring

You may remember Richard Herring from such cult ’90s TV shows as Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, both of which he co-created and starred in alongside his long-term writing partner, Stewart Lee. In recent times, Richard has been focusing on stand-up work, and this month brings his Oh Fuck, I’m 40 tour to Dublin.
A previous tour found Richard musing about whether it was appropriate for a man of his age to still be performing as a stand-up comic. Is this an issue he’s still grappling with in Oh Fuck, I’m 40?
“I do talk about it in the show, although in reality I think it’s better for an older man to do stand-up comedy,” replies Richard. “But I think it’s funny to discuss on stage whether it’s the kind of thing an older person should do. At the moment, I’m quite ill just from the driving around, so maybe I shouldn’t be doing it (laughs).
“In a way, stand-up is a young man’s game, because there’s a lot of driving and hard graft, but I think it’s good to have a few older voices in there as well. I wasn’t that good when I was in my early twenties, whereas now I think I’ve got a much better handle on it.”
What other subjects does Richard cover in the show?
“It’s about me denying that I’m turning 40, and trying to come to terms with it,” he responds. “There’s a lot of mid-life crisis stuff and stories about stupid things I’ve done, like having fights with people and inappropriate sexual encounters. It’s quite self-mocking really. People seem to identify with what I’m saying, but I didn’t really intend for it to be a general show about turning 40, it’s more about my own experiences. It’s quite a personal look at it.”
In tandem with his stand-up tour, Richard is also developing a couple of television projects, including “a sitcom about Scrabble players”. One hugely successful TV show he has already worked on is Little Britain, for which he served as script editor for the third series. Had he been friends with Matt Lucas and David Walliams beforehand?
“I’ve known them for a long time,” Richard affirms. “Although Matt had been on Shooting Stars, in terms of them working together, they were the next double act after us, really. So we met up quite a few times and we were friendly. I was looking for some script editing work and that came up, and they wanted me to do it. But to be honest, it was a pretty easy job, because it was the third series and they knew what they were doing already.
“I was just there as a sounding board really, and I’d chat over some ideas with them. A couple of things I thought weren’t very good, but they basically just did what they wanted, which is fair enough – they’re doing quite well (laughs).”
As a writing team, Lee and Herring’s breakthrough came with their work on On The Hour, the groundbreaking Radio 4 news spoof which was effectively the Big Bang of ’90s comedy, launching the careers of Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan and many other writers and performers. It must have been a fantastic show to have written for.
“Yeah, and it was one of the first things we did, so I don’t think we necessarily realised quite how amazing it was,” reflects Richard. “We’d been working on Weekending, but apart from that it was pretty much the first job we got. Obviously, it was an incredible group of people all at the beginning of their careers. It was a very interesting time, although we were just writers on it. We would meet up with Armando, who was producing it, and give him ideas, which he would then take to the cast.
“Chris pretty much did his own bits, and we met him every now and again at parties and award ceremonies, and possibly at one or two meetings. But we would mainly meet up with Armando and some of the other writers. It wasn’t like we were in a big gang, although myself, Stewart and Simon Munnery did end up doing a sketch show in Edinburgh with Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work out and it could have been a lot better.”
As it happened, a disagreement over the ownership of characters meant that Lee and Herring never contributed to On The Hour’s equally brilliant TV spin-off, The Day Today. They did, however, go on to create Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, both of which showcased their highly imaginative brand of comedy to wonderful effect. Does Richard have fond memories of working on those programmes?
“It feels like a different person, it’s so long ago,” he says. “We worked really hard through our twenties, and it was very fractious and difficult. There were lots of really fun times, but I also remember it being really hard work. There was a lot of arguing with producers and just trying to get stuff done. Also, This Morning was live, so it was pretty stressful. But we had a really lovely cast of people, and it seems incredible to me now that we were doing live TV.
“It seemed like a natural thing to happen at the time, but looking back on it, it was just this incredible privilege to have, first, our own BBC2 show at nine o’clock in the evening, and then a live show with This Morning. Now I sort of wish it happened three or four years later, because it was a bit before its time. It was a bit like a DVD show before DVDs came out, because there was so much going on in it.
“And yet it’s never been released on DVD. There was a live video, but because the BBC never really got behind it, they’re quite rare as well. You can sell them for a lot on eBay if you’ve got them.”
Although Richard’s erstwhile writing partner, Stewart Lee, caused uproar amongst certain Christian organisations with the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera (the TV broadcast of which received a record number of complaints), the duo were actually well used to outrage from religious groups thanks to several controversial sketches on This Morning With Richard Not Judy.
“We did very full-on religious sketches live on Sunday mornings,” recalls Richard. “We didn’t get into that much trouble; it was a bit below the radar. I got in a bit of trouble for a show I did in Edinburgh called Christ On A Bike, which I’m thinking of doing again this year. You’re bound to annoy people with material like that, but I think it’s okay as long as you’re sure what you’re doing is worth it. You’ve got to be responsible, but I think religion is well worth looking at and talking about.
“Any closed system of thought is dangerous, and comedy’s job is to question things, even if you question it and find out it’s right. If it’s right, it’s okay to question it. The only way I can see people get upset about questioning religion is because when you question it, it starts to fall apart quite quickly.”

Richard Herring plays Tripod, Dublin on March 8