Interview taken ( & edited ) from HermAphrodite #4.

GO TO: Nude Rich GO TO: Catchphrases GO TO: Scary Men ( Eldon & Mann )

And then the subject is quite definitively changed…

me: "Are you genuinely scared of polystyrene ?"

Rich: "Yes. I'm not SCARED of it on its own."

Because that would be stupid.

me: "What if it COMES at you ?"

( Becca starts giggling )

Rich: "I don't like the noise it makes if you squeak two pieces of it together."

Stu: "Tracey McCloud from The Late Show once hid behind a car to make a polystyrene noise to frighten Rich, when she saw him coming down the street."

me: ( grin ) "So if we were to advise stalkers as to the best way to freak you out...?"

Rich: ( pained face ) "If they do I'll hit them..."

Stu: "It really makes him go mad..."

Rich: "...I can't control myself."

me: ( to Rich ) "Is there anything else ? ( remember the ways of human nature ) You're obviously not going to want to share it now. ( turn to Stu ) Is there anything else ?"

Stu: "No that's all."

Rich: "That's it, just polystyrene. And just sometimes if someone squeaks across the floor... I can just about take it once, but if people carry on doing it... ( sternly ) So DON'T do it."

me: ( hastily ) "I won't."

( And from thoughts of self-torture... )

me: "Why did you write a full frontal nudal - noodle ?

Rich: "Noodle...?"

me: "...Nude scene into 'Excavating Rita' for yourself ?"

Rich: "I didn't know I was going to be in it. And then I was. And when you write something you're not thinking like that, you're thinking 'how is the best way for this to work.' The scene was quite important to humiliate the character that I was playing."

Stu: "It was meant to look awful though..."

( general giggles )

Becca - "And it worked ?!"

Stu: "It was meant to be a genuinely embarrassing moment and it was, it was funny, but it was also... This bloke gets really drunk and tries to get off with this woman he fancies by just bursting in on her naked and saying 'here's what you could have had'. It was meant to be awful - it wasn't like a comedy scene in some Carry On film."

Rich: "And it was very long, about five minutes..."

Poor darling.

Stu: "And for a man staggering around and being held up by other people naked - it was funny, but not in a 'oh there's a man's cock' kind of way. It was just the most embarrassing thing you've ever seen on stage."

Rich: "The reason I did was that it made sense to include it, as a writer... This year I'm thinking about what details of my real life I should include - I'm thinking about some of the most DISGUSTING things I've ever done, and whether I should put them in a play. Whether that would be a good thing."

Maybe. Maybe not. Though the people of Britain do appear quite capable of absorbing an awful lot of 'sick-man' stuff spewed forth from the mouth of Richard Herring.

TMWRNJ saw him planning to fill the Millennium Dome with milk, drinking the milk of a wide variety of animals, attempting to set up milk farms ( both with animals and women ), talking about milk far more than the average Sunday afternoon channel-hopper can possibly take; oh and puporting to a wild variety of nefarious activities, including swimming in sewage for pleasure, sending pictures of his 'winkie' to the Spice Girls, spawning a mutant orange human child by a grotesque coupling with a fruit-tree...

me: "In that you don't have Peter [ 'Fist Of Fun' ] any more, and Roger Mann isn't on it very much, you have become the 'mildly alarming one', out of the two of you."

Rich seems to find this very funny.

Which answers my next question, as to the dynamic of the double act.

With the two of them onstage now, he needs to be somewhere near the part of the exuberant and amiable harmless one, to balance Stu's piercing pessimism.

Stu: "The double act didn't really exist as a live entity until about '94, even though we used to do stuff on the radio. When we wrote for it it would often be a pooling of things that I'd done in stand-up and Rich had done in his one-man show. so it was very much like Punt and Dennis in the early days, which was like two stand-ups standing next to each other, who don't have a relationship, andthere wasn't a dialogue. Whereas on the last tour about two years ago we really kicked into what a double act should be, men - or women - bickering. Like French and Saunders - you have a really good sense with them of a relationship, of there being power struggles. And I think that's what we've got now. Which is why there probably are more contrary and extreme positions in the series and in the show now."

( Rich says Stu bullies him. Rich also alleges that Jimmy Saville is an necrophiliac. )

Rich: "Also, there's that the character of Richard Herring in the double-act is so harmless and pathetic that I don't think anything that I say is taken seriously, so I can actually say things that are probably amongst the most offensive things that you will ever hear, and people will laugh at them. And won't be upset by them."

Stu: "A - because it sounds like madness from Rich. And B - because there's a man standing next to him, looking disapproving."

Rich: "And I don't think you really believe anything that I say. It's just that ( smugly ) my character has Munchhausen's syndrome."

I think that Munchhause idea could have something to do with the, uh, outfit Rich has been donning for the end of each night of the tour. A tribute kind of an outfit. Still, if it makes him happy...

me: "Stu. Don't you want to dress up as Big Daddy ?"

Stu: "No, not at all. I really find that kind of thing embarrassing. I find any kind of character performing - it usually works out alright, but they have to egg me on into it. ( realises himself, grinning ) Egg..."

Rich: "Ha, egg !"

Stu: "I said EGG !"

Woohoo. They’ve just inadvertantly walked into one of the questions I’d already been pondering of them.

me: "Yeah - don't you find you do that all the time, because once you've got in that frame of mind..."

Stu: "No, not really - that's the first time I've ever done it. Really."

Rich: "We sometimes do. But when you start taking stuff out of conversations so they become catchphrases, they become really irritating really quickly."

Stu: "Yeah, we hate our catch-phrases."

Rich: "In the last few days of doing the 'businessman in his suit and tie' we've started having a go at the audience for being really pleased to hear a bloke saying a thing he says on the telly. Not in a nasty way..."

me: "Don't you think that that's weird though - if you do material twice then you're repeating old stuff and that's BAAAD, but if you do it three or four times then you're got a catchphrase ?"

Rich: ( slowly ) "Yeeeeah..."

Stu: "It is slightly different... It's not something we ever used to do - in this series there are a lot of repeated characters. Which actually I think helped to make it a lot more popular. But the only reason we did that was because we had such a short filming time, and we had to use the same sets and people over and over again. We needed to have through ideas running through it. Which is why there were eight 'When Insects Attack'..."

me: "Yeah; can I ask about the lettuce ?"

Each week, in the style of American programmes such as 'When Marsupials Attack', different people were filmed being attacked by insects ( or various insect-like creatures as they hope the audience won't be able to spot the difference ), Each week, it was a human complaining of his terror. And then there was the lettuce incident.

me: "That really freaked me out - I can cope with a half-man half-orange singing songs and screaming, but the lettuce ???"

A lettuce on a wicker chair reliving the horror of being ravaged by a slug.

Aieee.

Richard: "Did that scare you ?"

me: "Yes. ( quavering ) Slightly."

Stu: "It was me, doing the voice."

Rich: ( comfortingly ) "It was only Stu, he was moving the lettuce."

me: "I was told that by reassuring friends."

Stu: "There's a bit in our tour programme, if you come to the show, that explains how it all works."

me: "So it wasn't real ?"

Becca: "No."

Stu: "It was a real slug. And it was real lettuce. But the lettuces were bought in a shop - they were going to be eaten anyway, so it's not like they were harmed."

Rich: ( ponderingly ) "No-one else has ever been frightened of it. People are frightened of the Curious Orange..."

Yup. My friend Eleanor, for one.

Yeah. Let's move on to, ahem, more stable ground...

me: "My friend Eleanor wants to know what you were trying to do to her early in the morning with the Curious Orange, were you trying to recreate 'pissed-vision' - because quite a lot of it [ TMWRNJ ] could be quite surreal for people who've just woken up."

Stu agrees with that. They have had folks speaking to them who’ve said that the Curious Orange was the kind of thing that they’d seen with drug-addled.

Stu: "There were certain people that said there was residue of it being ( pause ) a bit strange. But it's what we'd have written anyway, we didn't think 'HA, this'll make drunk people confused' ( he starts laughing ) but I'm glad that it felt like that... I loved that camera thing they did on the Curious Orange when the music starts and they zoom in and out of his head at different angles; ( grins happily ) that was really good fun."

Rich: "We don't ever target anything really, we just try and do something that makes each other laugh... It was more like trying to think 'oh, what can we do ?' rather than 'let's create a whole thing that's freaky...'; all those things just going in I think it did work quite well, a couple of bits didn't work as well as others. Well, in different people's opinions. Like The Organ Gang. Some people really hated it, never want to see it again - and some people really love it. And it's those t-shirts that are selling the best as well."

And there I take the opportunity to thank them for The Organ Gang plotline which saw Derek Duodenum and the Vile Bile Duct become covered in glue and then explode into a pants factory. It made my week. And also further proved that quite a lot of what Lee & Herring does doesn't bear explanation. 'There's pants, and an orange...' ( trail off quietly ) People need just to watch it themselves. You try explaining Roger Crowley, the wickedest man in the world, to people AND then expect them to watch the programme with him as an incentive...

me: "Where did you find Roger Mann ? Because he is quite scary - and he looks like Brett Anderson with a pirate hat on."

Becca - "No he doesn't."

Stu: "Roger Mann, when we started doing stand-up..."

me: "Yes he does."

Stu: "...he was like a hero of ours...."

Becca - "No he doesn't."

Stu: "...He was a really brilliant stand-up comedian in the Eighties; he used to be called Paul Ramone then... He got to that point where he was really good and audiences didn't appreciate it so he used to go deliberately badly all the time; and he gave up, and he's now a computer programmer in Rugby. And every now and again we can tempt him back. But he was really good. His man in 'When Insect's Attack' who was attacked by a fly was hilarious, he worked on it so hard, he was a really good actor - he was at Drama School with Kevin Eldon actually, he got Kevin into doing comedy really. I think he [ Roger Mann ] is a lost talent, and hopefully we'll be able to get him to do something again... He's one of my friends - ( diplomatically ) he's an 'unusual' man.”

Rich starts laughing.

me: "Yeah."

Becca: "He looks it."

Stu: "And that character is partly making fun of him, because he goes on the Internet all the time, and he knows women all around the world that he has..."

Rich: VERY LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT

Stu: ( catches his eye ) "..No I won't say about that. ( continues ) He's got like computer friends all around the world that he talks to down this camera on the Internet. It was slightly mocking him - but he didn't seem to mind. Or notice, as he's never mentioned it..."

And on the subject of the more worrying people whom they work with...

me: "Is The Actor Kevin Eldon as scary as he sometimes seems - in character, and in stand-up...?"

Rich: "Only if you're a woman. If you're a man he's alright."

Stu: "He sometimes has moods, but he's alright. He's a very nice man."

Rich: "A lovely man."

( They're both being serious... )

Stu: "And he really has helped us - we used to write these characters, and we could never do them and no-one else could do them, and then when we met him... We used to do this radio show, and the BBC had this idea of recording it in other cities from where we all lived, to try and pretend that the BBC was interested in The Regions which obviously it wasn't. And one day we had to go and record it in Exeter. And you just couldn't get an impressionist or a voice person to go to Exeter for 80 quid on a Tuesday night. And I just knew Kev from doing a few of gigs with him, and I was talking to him about it saying ( plaintive voice ) 'oh we can't find anyone to go, they all charge so much money' - ( pulls a face ) which is really ironic in retrospect. And he came and he was really good. But now, since then, he's done so well through us that we can't afford to employ him anymore..."

Rich: "He was very good at doing the parts that we wrote, he's tuned into our sense of humour... There are a lot of people who don't understand how to say our jokes, because a lot of it's to do with the way that you say it rather than the actual words..."

>>> Part 3

Last revised: 26/07/01