Making An Old Grumpy Man Slightly Less Grumpy

Last night, Sal, myself, and a couple of friends (some of whom for some reason choose not to describe the minutiae of their lives on the InterWebNet, but most of whom do) went along to see how Richard Herring would produce an hour’s worth of comedy entertainment out of the series of modern-day Herculean tasks he’s been attempting (and documenting on his own corner of the Internet, thus cementing his position as “king of the nerds”).

His erstwhile comedy partner Stewart Lee had also initially been on the bill, but having “got a better offer” he was replaced by some young comics about to head off to Edinburgh and lose a lot of money, interspersed with the “talents” of compere, Logan Murray, performing (according to the copy of Time Out on my desk) as the character of Ronnie Rigsby, whose act was either meant to be awful in an ironic way, or just genuinely sub-Harry Hill rubbish. Given that he was actively encouraging the audience to heckle, (because his act mainly consisted of telling said hecklers to “fuck off”), I’m tempted to plump for the former, but either way it created the curious effect that, whenever one of the acts got into his stride and started to warm the crowd up, he had to go off to be replaced by the compere who cooled things back down nicely. Out of the five acts on the bill, four of them were passably amusing in a “I’ve seen a million stand ups do this sort of thing at this level” kind of way, and one of them was a man whose entire act consisted of encouraging the audience to throw chocolate bars at him.

Hercules… itself turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be, although judging by his blog today it sounds like this was the first time the show itself really came together. It’s a shame I probably won’t get to see the finished version, if only because I won’t find out how he’s going to get all 12 tasks into a one hour show, given that he got through about 4 last night (and despite encouragement from the audience refused to carry on with the rest of his material), but what we heard was very funny.

After the gig, he did look rather taken aback by the gaggle of slightly drunken fans (curse those cheap Red Stripe pitchers) chatting to him at the bar, including the actually not drunken Angel, who settled for having parts of her body signed, having failed in her initial plan to throw her underwear at him (in an ironic way, of course. Aaah.)

After that we stumbled out of the venue and into Chinatown for a quick Chinese meal that I can barely remember, during which I made a rash promise to try out some hair product for the benefit of a certain large chemist store’s magazine, before catching the last tube home. I awoke this morning to find a monumentally painful splinter of indeterminate origin in my little finger that Sal helpfully suggested I should leave in there “until in grows out”. Painful business this comedy lark.