Lee & Herring Interview (unedited version)
Lee & Herring are disgustingly young. At 28, theyâve written two series of Leonard Nimrodâs Inexplicable World, contributed to R4âs On The Hour (which later become BBC2âs The Day Today), and written and starred in four series of Fist of Fun, the latest of which was recently broadcast by BBC2. And now theyâve topped it all by appearing at the Sands Centre, Carlisle. OTR caught up with them backstage:
Is this a short tour. RH:Itâs a run up to an Autumn tour, to give us an idea of what size audience to expect after our last TV series. SL: Itâs the first tour weâve done where people might know who we are.
Hecklers throwing them out.
RH: There were a few bits where people recognised stuff from TV. What we were trying to do was take old stuff and do new stuff with it.
SL: You write them at enormous length, perform them at half that length and then they get cut down to two or three minutes on telly. So itâs nice to put all the bits back in and do extended versions of them.
RH: Itâs a learning curve. Because we were a little bit shaky at the start, they were expecting us to be very slick but we started very laid back and relaxed.
Another series between this and autumn tour?
RH: Weâre doing other things, weâre doing a couple of shows at Edinburgh
SL: Rich is talking to Nick Owen
RH: Nick Owen of Good Morning with Ann and Nick, weâre going to do a show with him, because heâs out of work now.
SL: And heâs writing a sitcom about his experiences as a cave guide in Cheddar
RH: Itâs called Sex Amongst the Stalagmites. Weâre busy. So we wonât be doing another Fist of Fun before the autumn tour.
SL: Weâre going to see the Sex Pistols reunion at Finsbury Park as well.
RH: Yeah, weâre all going to see it.
Kevin: My house is near to Finsbury Park
RH: Weâve been very busy so thereâs not been much time to write new stuff, I donât know if thatâs what people are expecting.
That guy at the beginning was straight in, wasnât he?
RH: yeah, weâre okay at dealing with heckling, no one ever does it any more, especially at theatres.
Do you try out stuff on your own?
SL: Rich does stuff on his won and we write stuff for him and the ridiculous sound of his three voices but then he does a play in Edinburgh every year. And I do my stand up shows. You tend to find that you write something on your own and the other person always makes it better anyway.
RH: Itâs weird weâre finding increasingly weâre starting to write each others stuff, even with the characters we do.
SL: Youâve more of an idea of what the other personâs like, you know them in a way they donât even know themselves. Weâd like to say that the things we write for ourselves are based on us but things we write for Kev in no way reflect his personality.
RH: Just the Rod Hull one.
Obvious question, how did you start off?
SL: We met when we were students but weâd both done things at school and then we met on the stand up circuit and then we started doing radio together.
RH: We wrote Lionel Nimrodâs Inexplicable World for R4 and then I think because R4 were a bit bamboozled by what we were doing, so we did it for R1. We were travelling round the country and somehow Kev managed to wheedle his way in and we canât get rid of him now.
RH: Weâve told how we met so many times weâll probably start lying about it.
SL: We met in a brothel in Amsterdam
RH: You canât say that in a local paper
RH: : No we met at college and weâd done the Comedy Club then started doing the comedy circuit but never did the same place at the same time, because one of us had exams or something, but then we got together because we sort of disliked what everyone else was doing and wanted to try other stuff. And then we met Pete and then Kev, you find you just bump into people. Things like the Rod Hull character come out by accident. Weâd done a couple of jokes about him on the radio and we thought weâd do him as a vox pop in this thing and Kev had a sore throat and just shrieked this thing and we all rolled around the floor, so we got him in every week on the radio show and people started ringing in saying âIâm Rod Hull, not himâ and it took off from there. The really good things happen by accident, you canât sit down and say, letâs write a character about a man who thinks heâs Rod Hull but really he isnât
Kev: I am donât be stupid.
RH: Two thirds of the way through we relaxed into it. I think we were worried we were a bit under-rehearsed.
Do you ad-lib based o the audience
RH: You need to feel the audience are with you but itâs good fun really, it stops it being boring for us. The nicest points for the audience are when we are making each other laugh. The fact that youâve let the artifice fall doesnât seem to matter with our stuff.
Kev: Iâve watched them a lot on tour and quite often in the middle of a routine theyâve done a lot on tour they go off at a tangent and you get a whole routine out of it. And usually really good stuff comes out of what happens on the night.
RH: Itâs usually when youâve relaxed. Itâs hard to do it on the first night of the tour.
SL: By the end of the last tour we were completely off the script. Weâd use the script as a starting point and then work it around.
RH: When weâre rolling I think you canât really tell what weâve scripted and what we havenât. Itâs quite good fun to try a line and watch Stewâs face. Often you do things that make you laugh on the bus while youâre on tour. Thatâs quite pleasurable for us and I think the audience can tell.
The audience tonight, half of them seemed to know you from TV, the other half not.
SL: The acid test of that was every week on telly weâd start with a really contrived topical joke, the sort of thing youâd find on Weekending, and when he was doing that tonight, as a piss take, a bloke in the audience thought it was real, âI paid ten pounds for thisâ.
RH: I think sometimes you get a heckler whoâs really horribly personal and you meet them afterwards and they say how much they like you. Theyâve seen the relationship on TV and think, well Stew always slags him off so he wonât be upset by me slagging him off. That slightly bowls you over a bit.
SL: You were crying inside.
RH: I was.
You seem very confident on stage
RH: We werenât tonight. I donât ever really get nervous
SL: Iâd get much more nervous about meeting somebody I didnât know, than having to go up on stage. Tonight was a bit nerve wracking because it was the start of the new tour.
You do a lot of anti-Somerset jokes, despite both coming from there â for example, the tour leaflet says: âWarning - electric light will be used to illuminate this show. The management cannot accept responsibility for any Somerset people who are startled by their flashing or who become entraped in their glare.â Do you ever get any resentment from the West Country?
SL: We went to Glastonbury last year , to the festival, and after this Somerset Hellâs Angel, about twenty stone, drunk from cider, saw us and came up to me and went, âYou bastard, stop taking the piss out of Somerset,â he started shaking me around and stuff and then he went, âA ha ha had you going there, really frightened you there.â
RH: Nice thing about Somerset, which isnât true of many minority groups, is that theyâve got a sense of their own funniness and itâs water off a duckâs back. It comes down to what Iâm trying to get at in the sitcom, people in the city think that people in the country are stupid but people in the country know that people in the city are stupid because they live in the city. I quite enjoy the stereotyped thing. Iâd love to do a gig in Somerset.
RH: Weâve done mainly student venues up to now but we want to do theatres this time round. Itâs going to be interesting.
SL: For the autumn we can do more set pieces for theatre.
RH: Itâs a bit weird this week, I canât imagine after seven days weâll be ultra confident and can just leave the script. In the last tour there was 50% of the material which hopefully people didnât realise wasnât the script because weâd left it behind.
Are you consciously trying to appeal to a young audience?
SL: Not consciously no, we just do what we think is funny.
RH: It takes longer for older people to see new stuff as good. If the people who like us now grow up with us and carry on liking us itâs going to be interesting
SL: I think Reeves and Mortimer have got lots more references to popular culture than we have, to neighbours and things. But theyâre like stupid sentences that go round in circles.
RH: A lot of 28 year olds like the references they understand which Iâm sure goes over the head of the teenage audience. We try not to do too many pop references. And on tv, the second series was deliberately geared not to look like a youth programme. Our producer at the BBC felt it was alienating older people by looking like a youth programme. I donât think it was and Iâd hope the contents were enjoyable for anyone.
In the last series you had all those bits flashing up on video.
SL: We didnât do so many of them this time. One the BBC thought it looked too young and flashy, secondly we couldnât afford it because the budget was cut and thirdly the first tv series we made the shows with like a ten day gap before transmission but last series we made them it was a day, so we didnât have time to do a lot of that sort of stuff. Also in the first series, no one had done that before, but by the time we came to do the second lots of people had done it, adverts and so on. In the last series we had time to watch the edit and think weâll make a comment on that but in this series we were editing the first half as the second went out.
RH: So we didnât have time to do much of it. Lots of people wrote in and said we can't see the stuff, our videos arenât good enough, so part of the enjoyment was that it was annoying people and they werenât really worth reading anyway.
RH: And you wreck your video pause button. On the last listing we put is your video machine broken as a result of videoing these captions, well why not take it to the Lee and Herring Video Repair Shop in Balham High Street where Rich and Stew may be working for the rest of their lives. Itâs nice that people spot it.
SL: In one sketch, the BBC made us bleep out a word, which really annoyed me because in a less well-written drama theyâd have allowed someone to say it. So we put up a caption saying that the F word has been censored here, if you would like a picture of Stew saying it, please write in. We got 208 requests.
RH: And it was up so quick youâd need an excellent video to catch it. If you can give people an extra level, there is a certain amount of clever comedy in it but we donât push it like John Sessions.
SL: Thereâs loads of arcane bits of poetry in Simon Quinlank but itâs there for people who find it.
RH: Itâs nice to give levels. We always sign autographs and we always write back to the fans.
SL: The thing about touring is itâs probably better financially for us to stay in a room in London and write articles for magazines and things but youâd never develop any new stuff
RH: And itâs fun
SL: When we went off for two months last year we got into the swing of it and had fun
SL: I donât think weâll do that in a week
RH: Thatâs why weâre going off to have fun in a minute. Not that weâre not having fun now. Touringâs weird, when you do it and look back at it you think that was fun but when youâre doing it and having to eat pizza every night and chips every meal.
SL: You get so sick of those service station meals. Itâs so hard in this country to get fast food. We went to the states in the autumn and drove for a month and it was so easy to get good food.
RH: I think Stew and me are writers ultimately and weâre happy to perform but I donât see that as a career decision
SL: Weâll both get to a point where we canât do the things weâve written and itâll be better to get someone else to do it
RH: We can always write things we can do and itâs fun writing. Itâd be interesting to write films. Itâs like a job to fall back on. We can always do interviews and stuff.
SL: I nearly interviewed Spike Milligan. I went to his house but his wife came out and said heâs gone mad today, he canât do an interview, so I was shown through the house, out of the back door and had to go home again.
RH: Just say theyâre horrible blokes.
22 May 1996
