Lee and Herring are about to take over Sunday Iunchtimes on BBC2 Ben Dowell probes the comic duo on the content of their new show

Comedy duo Lee and Herring are of that rare breed of Edinburgh performer who have managed to wow the boards up North by making it on telly, setting a generous and important precedent for their peers.
Showbiz is, of course, a funny old world, a point amply illustrated by rumours that Al Murray King of Beers will soon be getting a television show and an anecdote the boys reeled off when we met to chat about their new BBC daytime TV spoof show, This Morning with Richard Not Judy which starts this Sunday. The duo were guests with the real Richard and Judy about a year ago, and after the show, went into the dressing room occupied by another group of performers who were also being interviewed. A little known act called the Spice Girls, one of whom (Mel B) was so excited to meet the two from Fist of Fun that she phoned her boyfriend to say how thrilled she was.

This Morning with Richard Not Judy started out in 1994 as a live solo Edinburgh effort by Richard Herring – the fat one who was nearly awarded The Stage’s occasional ‘worst beard in showbiz award’ at Edinburgh last year. He is Cheddar’s answer to Orson Welles and round as he may be, Herring has always been a fine straight man and not what Stewart Lee described as the duo’s equivalent of Denise van Outen “in that he is largely superfluous”. Herring (who will “probably” go up to Edinburgh this year) is good at acting the amicable buffoon (as in his play Punk’s Not Dead or Excavating Rita which Canton are interested in) and is best when setting up situations for Lee’s witty one-liners. He is the grafting midflelder, with Lee as solid, reliable, Shearer-esque centre-forward, the Batty to Lee’s Le Tissier, a roly poly prop to Lee’s Jeremy Guscott. The straight man/funny man side to the real Richard and Judy was what appealed to the duo in the first place, as the (kind of) funny man of the two and The Sunday Times rock critic Lee explains:

‘They are like a good comedy double act. Richard is increasingly wayward and uncontrollable and says unpredictable things, and Judy has to constantly come in as the straight man (or straight woman in her case) and keep him in line. “It’s like they have a double act chemistry but theirs is completely accidental which makes it all the more joyous to watch.” (And in spite of the pair’s jokes to the contrary, Granada has assured The Stage that the real couple are not in the least bit bothered). The show also contains the curious orange; celebrity guests, two bigoted crows, cartoons and a gang of inanimate objects from the human body which call each other things like Henry Heart and Lily Liver. “It is being voiced by Brian Cant who is still alive,” says Lee.
Promising not to swear is one of the duo’s many aims, but one emphatically peripheral to their five main manifesto objectives. Cue Herring: “Our first aim is to marry Britain’s oldest mother with Britain’s youngest father, force them to copulate whether they like it or not creating the ultimate tabloid pregnancy story. “‘We also want to cause the financial collapse of the BBC by overspending hugely on our budget. “Thirdly, we want to prove that Bill Clinton never had sex with Monica Lewinsky or anyone else, including Hillary Clinton. He is a virgin and has no genitalia.
He reproduces by sending spores out on to the wind. “And then we want to counteract the problem of global warming by getting everybody in the world to blow on the world as if it were soup.” Lee elucidates the fifth: “We want to organise a fight between ourselves and the team from the Friday Night Armistice for the title of most unpopular topical satire show that no one really watches,” (at this point the BBC press girl started squirming). “In a fist fight we have got more to lose than them because they are really quite ugly.

“To conclude, our main aim is to provide 45 minutes of reasonable entertainment at 12.15 on a Sunday afternoon for hungover people who have just woken up. It will also be shown again at 11.45 on Friday nights, and they assure us that “if Channel 4 does not work then this is the best thing that is on”.
Herring could not resist mischievously chipping in that if any viewer has a new friend around, that they “met on Saturday night” who had “gone strangely quiet”, their show will give them “something to look at and laugh at, and hopefully start a nice relationship. Our show may stop the one-night stand for good”.
Well, if a show which may achieve nothing more in the end than simple amusement (and, possibly, a cult following for its two silent characters Trevor and Natalie) it will still be worth it.