Over 12 years and more than 500 episodes, Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast has been one of the most consistently engaging, entertaining and occasionally even illuminating shows around. Each instalment pitches the comedian into conversation with a guest – less a formal, structured interview than an unpredictable, freeform ramble. In recent years, Herring has started taking the podcast on tour around the country, booking guests with a connection to each specific venue – and tonight it’s Cardiff’s turn.
The secret to the show’s success lies in its host’s unorthodox questions, fondness for gentle irreverence and verbal jousting, and penchant for making shameless personal confessions; the latter in particular inducing guests to drop their guard and reciprocate with equal candour (most famously Stephen Fry). In many ways, then, Charlotte Church is a perfect first guest – open about her past, honest in her opinions and willing to indulge Herring’s silliness.
Taking off her shoes and socks and curling up on the armchair with a glass of red wine like she’s settling in for an evening in front of the TV, Herring – briefly taken aback – says that he won’t follow Church for fear of offending people with his “horrible Hobbit feet”. Recently, he adds, he stood on a drawing pin but felt nothing. Whereupon, barely two minutes in, a child superstar of yore is talking about “necrotic flesh”. Subsequent chat charts Charlotte’s fairytale discovery and a teen-era career travelling the world performing for popes, presidents and royals.
At times, the conversation is heavy: topics include the hoarding of obscene wealth, sexualisation in the media, and Church’s struggle to escape expectations and find her own voice. Conversely, there are laughs at her declaration that, having sung at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding as a teen, she’d now happily pay to sing at his funeral; at her cautionary tale about meeting your heroes (in which Kelsey Grammer discussed his young girlfriend’s diarrhoea on a Republican Party bus); at the Church family’s yardstick for her success being an advert on Cardiff public transport. She and Herring attempt to perform Pie Jesu as a duet, a highlight second only to Church’s immortal line “The Woodland Trust are cunts” – quite a statement when spoken with the voice of an angel.
Herring’s second guest of the evening is unlikely to have his face emblazoned on buses any time soon. Benjamin Partridge acknowledges that he’s hardly a household name even in Cardiff: Superted and Maureen from Driving School must have had prior engagements, he says. But he’s appearing fresh from winning what the host insists on calling “the Richard Herring Award” – Best Podcast at this year’s Chortle Awards – for Three Bean Salad, created in conjunction with Henry Paker and Mike Wozniak (whose appeal, he claims, is predominantly to “horny mothers”).
Hitting the ground running by riffing on the idea that the onstage rug might be a magic carpet, what follows is an hour of near-constant hilarity (aside from an interlude when the pair justifiably bemoan the dearth of creativity and unfulfilled potential of the podcast medium). Host and guest are very much on the same wavelength when it comes to comedy, with Partridge admitting that he finds humour in the relentless repetition of a stupid idea, namechecking Herring’s Someone Likes Yoghurt standup show and explaining that this is the principle behind his long-running spoof industry podcast, The Beef And Dairy Network.
One of Herring’s patented Emergency Questions – “What’s the largest creature you’ve had to try to get out of your house?” – elicits not one but two fox-related anecdotes that are so funny as to cause physical pain, and another leads to the duo debating whether a self-pleasuring Russian prisoner of war might be able to escape via his own arsehole. By the time Herring has managed to hold himself together long enough to bring the evening to an end, Partridge has won himself a legion of new fans.
Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Tue 5 Mar
words BEN WOOLHEAD
