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Warming Up #1
Bye Bye Balham
On November 25th 2002, comedian Richard Herring began writing a blog. He called it Warming Up as his hope was that the exercise would help him overcome his writer’s block and get in the mood for a day of writing. It didn’t quite work out as he hoped. Most days Warming Up was all he achieved. But he has kept on writing, every single day, for over six years and instead created an insight into his life and the inner recesses of his brain.
Bye Bye Balham is a collection of the first couple of hundred days of this impressive project, all in handy, easy to carry book form. Plus Richard reveals what was going on behind the scenes at the time, detailing the things that seemed too personal to mention at the time, as well as a retrospective of what he makes of the 35 year old him, now that he is in his forties.
It’s an hilarious, compelling and weirdly compulsive read.
Bye Bye Balham is a collection of the first couple of hundred days of this impressive project, all in handy, easy to carry book form. Plus Richard reveals what was going on behind the scenes at the time, detailing the things that seemed too personal to mention at the time, as well as a retrospective of what he makes of the 35 year old him, now that he is in his forties.
It’s an hilarious, compelling and weirdly compulsive read.
288 pages
First published December 1, 2008
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49 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 10, 2015
Richard Herring has been updating his Warming Up blog every single day for a frightening and allegedly record-breaking amount of time (though the jury's still out on whether it constitutes the Biggest Leaf). Sometimes controversial, at least with a handful of flustered-sounding types on Twitter, it's always an amusing and often thought-provoking read crammed with comic riffs that will amuse his many devotees and probably baffle everyone else.
Running to nearly three hundred pages, this is a collection of the first one hundred entries, and while it may appear that he hadn't quite decided what he wanted to do with Warming Up just yet, this does in fact mean that they end up almost accidentally telling the weirdly dovetailing stories of a relationship breakdown, a house move, the writing of his first book Talking Cock, and trying to spot a ridiculous amount of car plates in numerically ascending order. All of which (yes, even the car plates thing) in their own way combined towards his eventually having to say Bye Bye to Balham, known to all fans of Fist Of Fun as the home of Maston News. Wonder what old John Majors would have had to say about that?
You'll find the starting points of his later live shows in here, but it's not just the blog entries themselves reprinted, as they come accompanied by copious amounts of footnotes, latterday additional comments and updates, and even the odd bit of exciting futuristic hyperlink interactivity. An idea that Stewart Lee would later use to great effect in his own books. I'm not saying Richard Herring is Jesus, though. That's for him to say.
Running to nearly three hundred pages, this is a collection of the first one hundred entries, and while it may appear that he hadn't quite decided what he wanted to do with Warming Up just yet, this does in fact mean that they end up almost accidentally telling the weirdly dovetailing stories of a relationship breakdown, a house move, the writing of his first book Talking Cock, and trying to spot a ridiculous amount of car plates in numerically ascending order. All of which (yes, even the car plates thing) in their own way combined towards his eventually having to say Bye Bye to Balham, known to all fans of Fist Of Fun as the home of Maston News. Wonder what old John Majors would have had to say about that?
You'll find the starting points of his later live shows in here, but it's not just the blog entries themselves reprinted, as they come accompanied by copious amounts of footnotes, latterday additional comments and updates, and even the odd bit of exciting futuristic hyperlink interactivity. An idea that Stewart Lee would later use to great effect in his own books. I'm not saying Richard Herring is Jesus, though. That's for him to say.
March 1, 2009
On the 25th of November 2002 the comedian Richard Herring started to write a daily blog. His original intention was to use it as a daily writing exercise to break the writer's block that was stopping him from getting on with his work on writing a book, but it quickly grew beyond that original remit.
You will find entries about the minutiae of life in Balham, drunk people on tube trains, odd hecklers at gigs, the temptation of playing scrabble on a gameboy rather than working, comedic rants and flights of fancy that were to grow into fully fledged routines and musings on life, growing old and mortality. The book also includes the genesis of the game of Consecutive Number Plate Spotting, which I have now been playing for more than five years, reaching a pathetic total of 313 recently.
The original entries have been tidied up a little, with additional comments added with the perspective of hind sight on a failing relationship and a move from a cramped flat in Balham to a much too large house in Shepherd's Bush. Of course, you could always go and read the blog online, but I don't begrudge buying the book as a handy alternative to the computer screen. I wonder if these paper based blogs will ever catch on?
You will find entries about the minutiae of life in Balham, drunk people on tube trains, odd hecklers at gigs, the temptation of playing scrabble on a gameboy rather than working, comedic rants and flights of fancy that were to grow into fully fledged routines and musings on life, growing old and mortality. The book also includes the genesis of the game of Consecutive Number Plate Spotting, which I have now been playing for more than five years, reaching a pathetic total of 313 recently.
The original entries have been tidied up a little, with additional comments added with the perspective of hind sight on a failing relationship and a move from a cramped flat in Balham to a much too large house in Shepherd's Bush. Of course, you could always go and read the blog online, but I don't begrudge buying the book as a handy alternative to the computer screen. I wonder if these paper based blogs will ever catch on?
July 30, 2017
As a Richard Herring fan, I always knew I was going to love this book. It's a collection of blog entries (with additional extras) and is written with his usual flair. Prepare yourself to laugh and to get sucked into playing CNPS!
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February 3, 2023Didn’t finish
July 29, 2011
This book is actually a collection of blog posts from Richard Herring from 2002/3 (with some additional material that explains things that were too personal or embarassing to cover in any detail at the time). So in essence it reads like a diary.
And once you get into it, it is laugh out loud funny. The blog was started to help Richard get into the habit of writing, and it worked (he has done this every day for over six years now). Not every entry is here - ones that he thought were rubbish have been edited out (although they can still be found online) but it is compelling. It is not a diary as such (he always tries to talk about one thing that happened and where that took his mind) and actually it is suprisingly touching in places, and also reads as a complete story. Perhaps it is because it ends with him moving house and finishing his book, it really shouldn't work as a single narrative as it is a segment of an ongoing work. But it does. Hilarious in places, touching in places... I enjoyed this mar more than I expected to and I cannot wait for volume two...
And once you get into it, it is laugh out loud funny. The blog was started to help Richard get into the habit of writing, and it worked (he has done this every day for over six years now). Not every entry is here - ones that he thought were rubbish have been edited out (although they can still be found online) but it is compelling. It is not a diary as such (he always tries to talk about one thing that happened and where that took his mind) and actually it is suprisingly touching in places, and also reads as a complete story. Perhaps it is because it ends with him moving house and finishing his book, it really shouldn't work as a single narrative as it is a segment of an ongoing work. But it does. Hilarious in places, touching in places... I enjoyed this mar more than I expected to and I cannot wait for volume two...
September 21, 2014
The collected blog posts of Richard Herring are made even more interesting by the additional feature of his looking back on them and commenting. This book reminded me that we think about the future a lot and about our future selves but we can only experience the now. As well as the big career and relationship stuff that Herring thinks and writes about there are also all the ephemeral thoughts that clog up his brain. These too get a go at being examined amusingly, making this a light read with some serious soul searching bits too. I’ve already read the second volume and would buy the third if Herring publishes it.
January 22, 2012
Quite enjoyed this one, a collection of the first six months of Richard Herring's 'Warming Up' blog. The man himself says he's working on the next volume, and in the meantime I'll be seeing what else he's written that I can get my hands on (in lieu of a miraculous DVD release of TMWRNJ).
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews