STOIC presents an interview with stand-up comedians Lee and Herring recorded backstage at Imperial College Union 4.11.95.

I: You've actually come to IC before several times, haven't you?

RH: Well, a few...

SL: Well, we've come here once together before, and I've come and done stand-up here about four times.

I: Why the fuck did you come back?

RH: Ah, student...

SL: It's one of my favourite gigs, actually. Yeah, we really enjoyed it here together last year, and I've had some really good fun on my own here as well.

RH: You get... you get good meal, don't get sandwiches, get a hot meal, you get a lot of beer, and a lot of Diet Coke.

I: (inaudible)

SL: No, I tell you what they do here, they actually promote it properly here as well, you see posters up and stuff, and most student places get in and you go to the, er... (RH reaches over to SL's mouth)... hair coming out of my mouth, I've been eating some hair, sorry, (RH laughs)... most student places, you get to the venue and you go in the ents officer's, erm, er, office and he goes, "'Ello, who are you then?", and you go, "Oh, we're on tonight," and he'll have, like, a big pile of posters, (RH laughs) and he'll go, "Oh, I suppose I should have put some of these up then", whereas here, actually seeing like, ten up, is, like, really great, and that's probably why it was so full, because someone's done it properly...

RH: But mainly... but mainly it's because we enjoy it. And we love you. No, but it's good, it's good, well, both the gigs I've done here have been good, and you had a very good one here, haven't you...

SL: Yeah.

RH: So, you know, it's nice, it's nice to be somewhere properly organised, where the people sort of appreciate it and...

I: Presumably you're trying out a lot of material for the new series.

SL: No.

RH: Not really, no. We might, we... er... er... we... not at the moment, actually. But we're going to during the tour, but this is still pretty much the beginning of the tour, and we haven't had time to really...

I: Is that why you still think you can get away with the gag about the postcard?

RH: Yeah, well, literally we haven't done that for so long, but he, you've seen him do it as, er, his stand-up, and we're going to... we've got, er, we've got, er, a video coming out with that on, so once the video's out we're going to stop doing it.

SL: I know, it's weird, like, you... pardon?

I: (inaudible) The dog's on the wrong side, yeah, the dog can't be playing the bass...

RH: Yeah, I know, I say that...

SL: Yeah, I know that, yeah, but I chose to ignore it (RH laughs). It's weird though with stuff like that, because, erm, like... erm... you get people coming up to you and saying, after a thing, and they go, "Well, I've seen that before." And then other people say, "Oh, why didn't you do all that stuff I really liked that you did last time."

RH: So...

SL: ... so you try and...

RH: ... compromise, by doing some new stuff, and some old stuff...

SL: ... compromise. And also, realistically, we're probably, you know, the first time we went on telly, we... we'd have been seen by more people in one go than saw us in the previous five years of performing four nights a week really, so you know, sort of... er... if someone says, "Oh, I saw that bit you did on the telly
in a club in front of ten people, six years ago," (RH laughs) you think, "Well, you know..."

RH: We can't... we write a lot of stuff, I mean, we write much more than most people, and we've also got a great big backlog of stuff from both stand-up and radio, and TV, so we've got much more material than I think most people have... erm, so it's not like we're lazy, and we do... we are aware of, like, always changing stuff, adding new stuff in, like we get bored of stuff as well, so...

I: Did you find you get a different atmosphere, or did the joke with the Venn diagram go down as well anywhere else, or is it...

SL: Erm, well, that one, we used to do that... yeah, that usually went all right most places, actually...

RH: People remember Venn diagrams...

SL: Yeah, but again, I think, you see...

RH: The Venn diagram, people remember it from school, so...

SL: I couldn't do that in this show, 'cause it's so differently paced. Like when I do something on my own, it's really, really, moronically slow, whereas this is like lots of things happening, so, you know...

I: When did you actually get together as the two of you, rather than one...

SL: We met nine years ago. So it's really weird when people say to us, "Oh, you've had an overnight success this year," it's quite galling, because we've had...

RH: (laughs) we've been working...

SL: Nine years!

RH: And we actually worked together... we worked... we were students and we met at college...

SL: At a disco...

RH: ... and did stuff together, and did stuff together, and, you know, we've been working all the time together, and separately. So, I mean, Stew's stand-up stuff which was sort of, you'll have seen him doing his stand-up stuff, his went better than I did and I did sort of Edinburgh shows, and, you know, so it was in a diff...
we were working on different things but also working together all the time. So, you know, it's weird, when we're actually... this year in Edinburgh, we've been up in Edinburgh... one of us has been up every year for the last nine years, you know, erm, Stew's been up nearly every year, and, erm... no, people suddenly would come up and be going, "What, you're doing something on your own? I can't... I can't believe it, how can you do that without Stew, or without Rich?"

SL: Yeah, you've been doing it on your own...

RH: ... and you're thinking, you've been there, you know, we do stuff on our own and we are capable of operating without one another! But yeah, and we've been, you know, we just sort of, basically, sort of agree about what's funny. We're not, like, we don't agree about everything, but we, you know... in life, but... as far as
comedy goes we seem to be fairly on a same wavel...

SL: At the very least, we dislike the same things.

RH: Yeah.

SL: Which is, you know, a start.

RH: And I think we both laugh at each other's stuff that we do separately, it's different to our own stuff, so it's, you know, it's something we wouldn't do ourselves, it's something we find amusing, hopefully, most of the time. (laughs)

I: So how much of the, er, the sort of, the banter onstage, the taking the piss out of each other, how much of that is scripted, how much is ad-libbed...

SL: None of it was scripted tonight, really, of that, you know, it all just came out of our...

RH: And a lot of it is... a lot of it is stuff that we've ad-libbed once and are doing again, we haven't scripted a lot of it, so a lot of it changes anyway. Erm... sometimes we do the thing with people saying how that went, that thing, and getting people to... you find people laughing at "That didn't work", and then people
laughing at "But then it worked then!", and, you know, we could make that last for ten minutes sometimes. So it just varies, and I mean, a lot of the stuff, most of the stuff tonight was... was actually made up. We made up all the OJ Simpson stuff and all the... erm... most of all... most of the banter. "Cunt-Fu", that... we'd never done that before... I have a feeling we won't do it again... (SL laughs), but, er... it got us some good laughs... are we allowed to say that? On your... on the telly? "Beeep-Fu". Yeah? Good. I like student telly. You can say "cunt" on the telly? (RH laughs)

SL: No need to overdo it.

I: (inaudible)

RH: It's all right, good.

I: You said, erm, the ad-lib thing, does that mean, like, the characters you play, you portray, they're similar to yours in real life?

SL: Yeah.

RH: I think with the ad-libbed stuff, I think, yeah, I think what we're doing more... we have to go back a bit with the telly and start again, and, and make the characters a bit more black and white...

I: I mean, that's something you (inaudible)

SL: Yeah, you know with Pete as well, because on the radio Pete's got, like, a whole world of, sort of, people that he knows in Balham now, and...

RH: Yeah.

SL: ... but we had to go back to square one, really, and just him as the... er... disgusting, scrap-eating man, because, er, new people don't know where to join, you know, the "new readers start here"...

RH: So we had to start again with our characters being a bit more extreme, I think on stage we're more like we really are in the...
I'm a bit more lippy to Stew, sometimes make Stew look an idiot, rather than making me look an idiot all the time, which is something we've developed, you know, for people who've seen us more, and... it's something we've developed, but we have to start...

I: So it's different on the stage than it is on TV...

RH: Yeah. But hopefully, you know, we'll get there with the, with the TV, it's just that we had to... you know, it's just like, literally, there's one million nine hundred thousand people who'd never seen you before, and ten thousand, maybe, who have, so (laughs)

SL: If that...

RH: ... who have heard of you before, so... yeah, if that, really... so it's important to start getting some of that and just go, well, "understand this relationship".

I: Where do you get the ideas for the characters like Simon Quinlank?

SL: Simon Quinlank's, erm... Pete writes his own thing, but Simon Quinlank's sort of a mixture of people we've met who do, like, fanzines and collecting stuff, and also just from our own, sort of, interests in like, knowing about... like Rich is a real comedy fan, and he knows...

RH: ... Indeed (inaudible) and you into records and stuff... We just like obsessive people, you know the bloke, I think it started off with a bloke who, er, did a fanzine for Janet Ellis, from Jigsaw...

SL: Nicholas Hall, that was him.

RH: Yeah, that's him. And he was just like... and he was a real... it wasn't a joke, it was a very serious fanzine, a slightly sinister fanzine of Janet Ellis. You know, do you remember her - from Blue Peter and Jigsaw... the cameraman remembers... and that's the whole point, sort of like such an obscure figure... and Lucy Benjamin as well, he did one about Lucy Benjamin who used to be in Press Gang and Jupiter Moon, it was just like really... not really...

I: Was she the fit one out of Press Gang?

SL: The blonde-haired one.

RH: The blonde one. Not Julia Sawalha. Really weird. He used to...

SL: He used to like, take real pride in how many facts he got together and like, diss other fanzine writers who didn't know as much as him.

RH: And liked them, but there was a slight sexual element to it that in a sort of... you know, thirty years old and he was sort of like... Simon Quinlank. (RH and SL laugh) And slightly odd! Hope he doesn't see this, but I guess he won't!

SL: And also some of the people who really like us as well, it's really weird, you meet them and they know much more about you than you do...

RH: It's just that obsession thing, we just like... we think that obsession thing's funny and collect... you know, and I think it's all... it's not like taking the piss, it's sort of like celebrating obsession, 'cause everyone's obsessed with something, and why is being obsessed with pop music cooler than being obsessed with trains, really, at the end of the day?

I: Do you go out of your way to bring in, erm, particularly obscure references from time to time, just so you can... see who can relate to it...

SL: No, not really, I mean, erm...

RH: Not out of our way...

SL: We don't go out of our way. I mean, I don't like it with John Sessions, right, where the jokes, you get 'em if you've got a degree in classics, if you haven't, you don't. I don't think humour should be like that, I think you should be able to understand it. I think there should be enough information in the joke for someone to be able to laugh at it, whether they, you know, whatever they know about.

RH: Sometimes the joke is that it's obscure, you know, like when we mentioned Ice-T video where Evil E jumps over a hive with no clothes on, but no-one's ever seen that apart from us. So it's like, to make a joke about that (SL laughs) in front of 500 people is just stupid, you know, and we make a joke of the fact that no-one's going to know it, so we try to make sure both ways there, and with pop stuff and with... and you know, and with the more young stuff, less so at university, because, you know, you trust the people are sort of aware of popular culture. But I think it's even... it's annoying when, like, comedians are doing stuff about Blur or Oasis and you're 35 and you've got no idea what's going on, you know... or more obscure than that, maybe. So we try to make sure that if there is something clever or something obscure underneath, we try and make sure you can laugh at somebody else and then there's an extra laugh for people who are in the know.

I: Not being able to understand it...

RH: Not being able to understand it or there's just something else they can laugh... I mean, with the Ice-T stuff you might not know who Ice-T is, but there's enough to laugh in the Ice-T shoplifting routine, there's enough in there to laugh at if you don't know who Ice-T is 'cause almost it's almost self-explanatory anyway, but if you do know who Ice-T is and you know a lot about Ice-T it's funny as well, so... you know... that's the way it sort of works...
(long pause) what is your Next Question?

I: I don't know.

RH: Read it... oh, you're just reading it off a piece of paper anyway...

I: We're just reading off a piece of paper...

RH: Don't pretend to hold it down like that when the camera's there...

I: Oh, we didn't, obviously, sitting in the audience, actually, erm, actually record tonight's show as such, so we can't wind it back and watch those little subliminal thingies...

RH: Oh right. (RH laughs) They were there!

I: I can't do it at home, otherwise, er, well, because the video's buggered, so...

RH: Yeah.

I: ...what the fuck are they all about?

RH: Aaah...

SL: Well, there's all sorts of things in there, erm, lots of them were, er, comments on stuff that happened in the show, er, loads of them were just, loads and loads of extra jokes, like listings of events you might want to go to and stuff like that, but...

RH: Which were largely in our book...

SL: ... most of them are in our book, that comes out, about a week's time. So get that. And then you won't break your video if you were one of the people that stopped everything... well, it's amazing how many people did stop them, 'cause we put in things like, "Write in about this" and people who had, like, stopped it, and... and we got loads of letters about stuff that we put in...

RH: I mean...

I: Are all the e-mail addresses and stuff actually real in there?

RH/SL: Yeah, yeah...

SL: We had to go through all the e-mail, and we spent hours and hours sifting through all the e-mail.

RH: Other than that is we're trying to reply to everyone, and we haven't replied to everyone on the e-mail, because we, we're not... that... competent at doing it. Sorry! Anyway, it was like the BBC address, but hopefully next series we'll put up, we've got our own Internet thing now, so we'll put up our actual own office and then we can reply to people. Directly. I mean, you know, there's... thousands of e-mail, we got a lot of e-mail, erm...

SL: A lot of the e-mail we got first was just people going, "Eeuurghm, I'm, I'm on the Internet," (RH laughs) basically, and then after a bit you started to get quite good things.

I: And I've got a video that I can read the screen now.

SL: Yeah.

RH: But I quite like the, I quite like the fact that, it's just... annoying, and it's annoying if, it's annoying both to old people who don't like flashing things up, and young people who can't afford videos. We can't do it on our videos, you know, and the thing is...

SL: Our videos weren't good enough to...

RH: We're not, we're not, we've never, you know... with... the TV... success, you know, we've been very poor really, or... you know, I was, a year ago I was about five thousand pounds in debt, so, erm, now I'm sort of about even. So I can't, we haven't got anything like fancy videos or anything like that, so we can't do it ourselves! (laughs) Which, you know, but I quite like that, I quite like the fact that people might be straining to read...

SL: I can, because I went out and I rented one, an extra-expensive video (RH laughs) so that I could actually, er, watch the things that I'd put into the show that I'd done.

RH: We've been...

SL: Our producer's gone on for ages, saying, "Everyone'll be able to do it," and I was saying, "No, most videos don't work", and I don't know anyone who's... who's, I, er, none of my friends have got good enough videos to be able to stop it, but there are vi...

RH: You need a very sophisticated... but you can do it if you stop it and then just realign and then go back and... someone did, someone last night told us they broke their video doing it, literally... which made us laugh! (laughs)

I: Do you, erm, do you prefer Burger King or McDonald's?

SL: Burger King.

RH: Burger King 'cause they do a vegetarian burger.

SL: And also because you don't, even though they're a massive corporation, you don't feel quite like you're buying into such a degrading thing.

I: If you've got a...

SL: Yeah, if there's a choice...

RH: Wimpy's best though.

SL: If there's a choice between Burger King and McDonald's we'll go Burger King.

I: But Wimpy's has been bought up though.

RH: There's still a few left, that's what I like about it, that's the only reason I like it. It's horrible, but I like it, because it's... British, and because, er... there's only very few, and they sit down, you can have plate service at some of them. Actual china plate. That's nice. They want that at Burger King.

SL: There's one in Islington, it's really nice.

RH: Yeah. There's one in Clapham Junction.

Pause.

SL: Is there?

RH: Yeah.

I: There's one in Pakistan.

SL: Really?

RH: What, there's a Wimpy? Wow. There you go, you see, they're still going.

I: It's not a real Wimpy.

RH: It's a Mr Wimpy.

SL: Or something.

RH: Mr McWimpy. (laughs)

SL: No, Burger King's better anyway.

RH: Burger King's fine, and they get better toys. They've got better promotions.

I: The other obscure question...

RH: Lion King's better than whatever McDonald's do.

SL: They're doing, erm... McDonald's are doing, erm... er, Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer.(RH laughs)

I: Have you... have you ever blatantly stolen a gag from someone?

SL: Did one by accident, about, er, a month ago, on the video, which they actually, which I said, "Oh Christ, edit that out, it's one of Harry Hill's lines," didn't even realise I was saying it, but no...

RH: Is it still on?

SL: No, it's gone. But never, er, never blatantly.

RH: Occasionally you do by accident, just in the heat of the thing, er, you know, suddenly, you think, er, you know, especially if you watch comedians, I did one of, er, Simon Munnery's the other day about Stew, it was a joke on Cluub Z, and then I suddenly realised, "Oh God, that's actually someone else's joke, not me being very witty." But no, we, er, I mean, we sort of pride ourselves on trying to be original really. Despite all the jokes about Newman and Baddiel, which is just because of annoying journalists comparing us to them. Erm, you know, we actually, you know, that's what we've always done, it's just trying to do something new, so, you know, that's why you make a comment about, what, some jokes being a bit easier, whatever, because, you know, that Apollo 13 joke for example is not anyone else's joke but it's the kind of joke a lot of people do. So, erm, you know, we actually want to try and be original and hopefully be funny as well, I mean, it's important to be entertaining, I think, but, er...

SL: Nah... (RH laughs)

RH: At the end of the day, but, you know, if it's only to a select group of people then that's fine, as long as it's, you know, that it's genuinely entertaining, but you want to be original really.

I: Do you have anyone that you, you kind of draw on, or, or take inspiration from, or...

RH: Well, again the inspiration is from, like, people like Monty Python or, erm, The Young Ones or something, who were doing something different. So to take inspiration from them is to not copy them, if you see what I mean, because they're... what was good about them was that they were different to everyone else.

SL: Tends to be not comedy, I think, tend to find like, erm, what was that documentary series you thought was really funny, about jobs?

RH: Oh yeah, er... Situation Vacant, or something.

SL: Yeah, that was good.

RH: You see people, you know, you see funny characters and stuff. You know, and just... all sorts, I mean... inspiration from that, I think Ice-T's actually quite an inspiration in that he's got a sort of sense of humour behind his stuff...

SL: And William Blake.

RH: William Blake, Ice-T...

SL: We were just laughing at something by William Blake in the dressing room before we came on... (RH laughs) that's how clever we are. What was it, he said something like, er... something like, er, Christ, "Christ took after his mother, and this is just one of the things that made him weak." (RH laughs)

RH: In that respect... he was a fool.

SL: In that respect, he was a fool... really funny.

RH: William Blake, he's a poet, you wouldn't know, 'cause you're scientists. No, I'm joking. I was being John Sessions for a second. (laughs)

I: I didn't do it at school.

RH: No, I don't know anything about it. He does.

I: You didn't do A-level English, you see.

RH: Ah no... ahhh...

I: I didn't go to public school, that's why.

RH: Ohhh... I didn't go to public school either...

I: There he is...

SL: I did. (inaudible)

RH: I did Maths and English A-level. (laughs) Did you go to public school? Where did you go?

I: Are you a warped and twisted child?

RH: He went to public school, didn't you?

SL: Got a scholarship, though.

RH: He was very poor, and I went to a comprehensive school. In Cheddar. So there you go. We both went to Oxford though, so that makes us public school...

SL: Honorary members of the upper classes... (RH laughs) By default...

RH: And due to our fantastic A-level results, though.

I: Have you or haven't you played the biscuit game?

RH: We haven't

SL: Haven't... is that something you remember from...

RH: Did you play it?

I: No I haven't (inaudible) played it whatsoever...

RH: You did!

I: I did not!

RH: You obviously did!

I: I did not!

RH: Look at you!

I: It's a myth that the state schools manufacture to bring us down.

RH: I hate public school, and anyone who ever went to one. All right mate, I'm in with you now. D'aaaah... myself from him a bit, and him as well.

I: He's not so fucking... he was only a day boy.

RH: Yeah, well, he was, you know, he was, he got a scholarship. He was a poor bloke from Solih... from Birmingham, you know, he got a scholarship (SL laughs). He's like a wolf-boy (SL laughs), they adopted him... said, "Come on, no, no, come on, we'll look after you, come on," and they put him in, they sort of had him as a pet there, really. But he managed to sort of grow, and, and naturally become cleverer than any of the other people there. And there's a lesson there. It's like a fable.

I: On that remarkably trivial, unsavoury note, I think we'll say thank you to, er, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring.

RH: Thanks for having us. On the telly.

SL: Thank you, Imperial College.

RH: It's good to be on the telly, however small a scale it is. (SL laughs)

I: (inaudible) people never watch it...

RH: I don't care. At least I know I'm, somewhere I'm on the telly.

I: It's only on at lunchtimes with no sound!

RH: Shut up. Bye!

Long pause

I: Cut off... cut off whenever you like...

FADE OUT:

CREDITS