“We’re no longer really earning enough from ads to pay everyone properly.” That line comes from Richard Herring’s own Substack. It’s the part of the RHLSTP announcement worth reading if you’re a comic with a tour to shift this autumn, and it’s tucked in among the jokes about merchandise.<\/p>\n
Herring is winding up Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast after nearly fifteen years. He’s careful with the wording. Chortle reported him saying the next three live recordings will be “the last three live RHLSTP shows I do”. He qualified it: “at the very least I am going to take a break from” it. Meanwhile the show’s website still carries a membership button, and the wording on it does the arithmetic for you: “Join now to help us pay for the recordings, and to get all manner of benefits.”<\/p>\n
The final three live recordings are at the Leicester Square Theatre on 28 September, 26 October and 16 November 2026, all three on a Monday. James Acaster and Isy Suttie are the guests for the first of the three. The other two dates were still unbooked when Herring posted the announcement, which is awkward for a man whose stated problem is that guests have got harder to get.<\/p>\n
The last live recording and the last episode are two different dates, and it’s worth keeping them apart. Herring told readers he has “enough to get us to the end of January 2027”. Shows banked this autumn will keep dropping well into the new year. The RHLSTP Book Club strand carries on as well: “my plan is to continue doing Book Club episodes and releasing old RHLSTPs each week”. Those are recorded remotely, with nobody needing to get across town on a weeknight.<\/p>\n
Chortle’s roll call of guests over the years runs Steve Coogan, Michael Palin, Sarah Millican, David Mitchell, Alexei Sayle, Russell Brand and Stewart Lee. Add the 2013 Stephen Fry episode, in which Fry disclosed a previous suicide attempt. That’s the highlight reel, and it’s the bit every obituary of the show will lead on. The weekly booking pattern was scruffier and considerably more useful to the rest of us. The show’s own site had Paddy Young at RHLSTP 628 on 23 September, and Mike Bubbins on a Retro RHLSTP two days before that (number 163, which is a lot of numbering for one man to be running in parallel). Amy Matthews, Finlay Christie and Joz Norris turned up in its news column.<\/p>\n
That’s the rung of the ladder being removed. A mid-level touring act could get a proper hour of conversation there. Wikipedia’s entry describes the format: “performed in front of a paying audience, but released for free download and streaming”. So the promo reached everyone, not only the people in the room who’d already bought a ticket. There isn’t an obvious replacement that books at that level with that reach. The celebrity-fronted shows Herring is describing do not, as a rule, keep a slot open for somebody doing their third Fringe hour, and with UK comics down to 2.5 gigs a week, free promo that actually sells tickets is not a luxury item. Acts who were counting on a podcast spot to warm up a tour announcement are going to need a sharper pitch to regional programmers instead<\/a>.<\/p>\n The money side had been wobbling long before Herring got tired of it. Wikipedia notes that “Series Seven was the first to be financed by a Kickstarter campaign in order to cover the costs of production.” The free-to-listen, paid-to-attend, hope-the-ads-cover-the-rest model has been leaking for a long time, and every patch applied to it has involved the audience paying directly.<\/p>\n Herring’s own diagnosis names the competition without naming any individual show, which is the honest way to do it:<\/p>\n there is so much competition now, (mostly shows hosted by huge household names), which also means that it’s much harder to attract guests, listeners and audience members<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n He added that he should get out “before the quality starts to dip (from an admittedly low start)”, which is the most Richard Herring sentence in the entire post. An analysis published by the London Business Journal on 18 September puts some scale on the ad problem: of 6,693 active British podcasts studied, “only around 24% of active UK shows carry detected sponsorship or paid placements”, working out at 1,575 sponsored shows against 5,118 without. Treat that as indicative rather than gospel, because it’s a single study and sponsorship detection is a blunt instrument, but the shape of it will be familiar to anyone who has tried to sell advertising against a comedy interview show this year.<\/p>\n For what it’s worth, Herring reckons he did all right out of the thing, and said so in a way that makes the books impossible to audit: “My million pounds was the friends I made along the way. Also maybe an actual million pounds if you add it all together”. His merchandise pitch in the same post ran “Money raised will go to me… no wait, we’re putting it towards making more podcasts. What is wrong with us?”<\/p>\n The strand that continues is the one with no venue to hire, no ticketed audience to fill and no guest to wrangle into central London after their own gig. Herring has said that Book Club episodes will carry on, alongside a weekly re-release of old RHLSTPs. He is also heading to Brighton to film an indie comedy called Zak The Ripper, which is a title I enjoyed typing more than I should have.<\/p>\n He has left himself a fire exit, mind. “It’s possible I will miss it and that all I actually need is a break and it might come back, but my feeling is that that won’t happen (unless an eccentric millionaire wants to inject a huge amount of cash into the project)”. Any eccentric millionaires reading: the man has a membership page and it takes cards.<\/p>\n None of this is happening in a vacuum. Fest magazine folded and left its Fringe reviewers unpaid<\/a>, the BBC axed Live at the Apollo with a series still untaped and the thing moving into that space is a podcast made for YouTube<\/a>, and comics who want a special increasingly end up funding it themselves at a club in Soho<\/a>. Leicester Comedy Festival’s collapse, for its part, left comedians sitting on a creditors list against \u00a3184,510 owed<\/a>.<\/p>\n The two unbooked dates are the interesting ones. Herring has 26 October and 16 November to fill and, on his own account, a harder job than ever getting people to say yes. That’s two guest slots going spare on a podcast with a fifteen-year back catalogue and a free release, and after 16 November there isn’t another one. Two Mondays in Leicester Square, still without names on them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nSeries Seven was paid for by Kickstarter<\/h2>\n
\n
Book Club survives because it’s cheap<\/h2>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
\n