Comedy: Richard Herring – What is Love Anyway?

The award-winning podcaster, sitcom writer, author and all round creative adventurer comic comes to town

Richard Herring has just recorded another podcast – this one about playing snooker against himself. It’s only the fourth in a new experimental idea he’s playing around with, but as someone constantly riding high in the iTunes podcast charts with his self-penned award-winning As It Occurs To Me (AIOTM) show, as well as the Collings And Herrin BBC podcast, Richard Herring Warming Up podcast and the popular daily show online that ran alongside his main show at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011 every day, he’s allowed to play around with the format he’s pretty much conquering.

One of the running jokes in AIOTM is that Richard really wants to be on television, but with this explosion of podcasts, can he really still be that interested? “Well, it’s more the persona on the AIOTM podcast that wants the television fame,” he concedes. “It actually came from when I first started with Stew (Stewart Lee) and I was young and thought that fame and a television show was what I really wanted. We had four series in the 1990s and I think I was just cross that the BBC didn’t see them as the masterpieces I thought they were.”

Herring and Stewart Lee released the first series of the Fist Of Fun shows themselves due to fan demand at the end of 2011, and have already made their money back with its success.

So is fame still important? Richard admits not. “With over 20 years in the business and performing at pretty much every Edinburgh Festival since I started I’ve got an audience from my podcasts, from shows, plays, from Time Gentlemen Please (Al Murray’s sitcom Herring co-wrote with Murray) and from my partnerships with Stew and with Andrew (Collins) – they’re from all over and pretty much fill a middling sized room that let me play about with ideas.”

So, he’s got a Goldilocks audience and his new show is about how happy he is with his girlfriend after many years of playing the field. Life must be pretty sweet for Richard Herring. And he’s funny. The b*****d.

Richard Herring – What Is Love Anyway?, Komedia, Weds 8 Feb, 7.45pm, SOLD OUT, www.komedia.co.uk/brighton. First Of Fun DVD is available from www.gofasterstripe.com