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A really cracking double bill of RHLSTP tonight with the very funny Roisin Conaty and the endlessly fascinating Johnny Vegas. It’s always a long and intense evening, that uses up a lot of mental energy, but I am finding these so rewarding to do. We had some great laughs, but my favourite thing was hearing the utter silence from the 300 strong crowd as Johnny discussed the complex relationship between the real him (Michael Pennington) and the character who emerges once he’s been drinking (Johnny Vegas). He was honest and vulnerable and the only downside of doing this show and meeting so many brilliant comedians is realising my own limitations. Johnny/Michael shows an incredible commitment to what he is doing, but also has a divine spark of genius which leads him to places no one else would tread. Sometimes there is a good reason for that, because the place that he gets to is somewhere no one should be, but he is prepared to take that leap into the dark (or his character is) and leave the repercussions and shame for the host of the madness. He's on another level to me and consequently his work and his life go into some amazing directions. Fearlessness and foolhardiness lead to some amazing places. Ultimately I am too sensible and afraid to go off into these kind of wild orbits. The snooker is the closest I get.
I love that RHLSTP can incorporate a discussion about whether having sex with a robot would count as cheating on your partner (which leads to working out if having sex with some amstrad emailer phones in the shape of a person would be OK) and quite deep analysis of the duality of human existence. And perhaps because of my own pathological honesty, the guests do seem to open up and reveal stuff that they might not talk about elsewhere. It’s a friendly and welcoming environment, which is as much down to having a great audience who understand what’s going on and don’t act like tools (too much).
I’ve now done over 70 of these interviews (with another 28 to come this year) and I think I am getting pretty good at it now. I enjoy the way that the mood changes based on the guest. With Roisin it was a light-hearted conversation with us both telling stories and riffing off each other, but with Johnny it was more like an interview, with him doing most of the talking, with me nudging him in the directions I hoped to take things. I didn’t do many emergency questions with Johnny, because it became clear that that wasn’t the way things were meant to go with this one. For the first time the cash for questions question was in danger of derailing the chat, but luckily I managed to sneak it in in a way that opened up another avenue of conversation, with the slightly sillier question tagged on at the end.
Amusing in the secret backstage interview with Johnny I asked him if he’d ever seen a ghost and he thought that I’d asked if he’d ever seen Ghost (to begin with I thought he was doing this as a deliberate gag - and he may have been, but then I thought that it was a genuine misunderstanding). But of course there’s a famous pottery scene in that film which is why he thought I was asking him about it (he famously used a potter’s wheel in his early stand-up).
And much of what Johnny talked about resonated with me and I found it very interesting that he has put the Johnny Vegas costume in a suitcase in his attic, in an attempt to escape from it. It feels like a very ventriloquist thing to have done and his character is very much like the a ventriloquist dummy that has to share his body. I hope in his new stand up show that he will bring that suitcase on to the stage with him and maybe have it rattle and shout occasionally, but I also hope that he will keep the old Johnny at bay. Michael is content in his life now and worried that he will no longer be angry enough to be funny and obviously that’s also one of the themes of my new show “Happy Now?"
Tonight showed that Johnny can be very funny without the character, but he’s also like a walking play written by Samuel Beckett and Mike Leigh in a bewildering collaboration. I think you will enjoy this one. But then all of this series has been quality so far. It's still a dirty little secret and maybe it needs to be. If this was more popular or on TV I don't think we'd get the same responses and honesty from the guests.
These podcasts won’t be out till late July (and the Johnny Vegas one is still without a sponsor, so make us an offer and you could get a 30 second advert at the start of the video - in which I might take the piss a little bit - contact me at herring1967@gmail.com - and still some availability on other podcasts too, but I know this is going to be a good one that gets lots of views).
I managed to knock out three more hand-painted T shirts for the kickstarter rewards today, which takes me to 50 made and 24 still to go. And I haven’t even started on the Hermione hands yet as we’re getting special bits of card with frames printed on them to do those on. I will have no time to write or learn my shows with all these extra bits I have to do, but never mind. You can view the terrible T-shirts here.
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