Well hello and a happy new year! Right, now that’s out the way I can get back to just going on about myself for a bit. I was in Alan Carr’s New Year Specstacular again on 31st December. You can check it out on 4OD. I play a detective called “Officer Steve” interviewing Alan as Cheryl Cole in a sketch parodying “24 hours in custody” at about 29:40 in (I speak at 32:23), and then I pop up as an arresting officer in a sketch parodying White Dee at about 1:08:07. I speak at about 1:11:07 (one of the best lines possibly ever uttered on TV), although you do also see me briefly as another character (wearing the production manager’s glasses) very near the beginning, so don’t get confused. Here’s a couple of screen grabs:
Sorry about Simon DeSlilva’s arse in that one.
Also, I don’t know if you’re into Vine at all, but every now and then I do one that amuses me if no-one else. Here’s one I did yesterday:
So now they’ve officially announced it I’m allowed to say that I’m actually in the film (see previous post). In preparation I recorded this ‘hilarious’ interview at home on my phone, which I edited with loads of jump cuts then Luke and Sam edited it again into 4 separate videos just to reduce the picture quality even further. The ‘joke’ is that I’m actually not in the film very much. Do you get it? Did you watch them? I’m not really that arrogant. Or am I? I’m also not talking to a person, just the wall. The magic of cinema.
Back in 2011, Luke Kaile and I peformed in his play, A Criminal Audition. The play was about being framed for money for someone else’s crime, and was actually pretty good! I posted about it at the time. Most of my role, as I remember, involved me smearing myself in shaving phone, chasing people round the stage and generally acting mental. Since then, Luke has adapted the play into a movie: The Criminal Audition. The film is a lot darker, my character is now a woman (no longer played by me), and there is an Indiegogo campaign now underway if you fancy checking that out… I helped out by hanging around in my pants covered in fake blood in the above video. Even if you don’t fancy contributing it’s certainly worth checking out the site for the various interesting updates they’re wheeling out over the next few weeks.
A couple of nights ago I was in the Feeling Nuts comedy night. As you can see I’m having a very serious conversation with Angelo Epithemiou (Dan Skinner) on the streets of Camden, while he has some fake testicles hanging out of his trousers. I thought this segment was actually appearing in the Stand up to Cancer night and that I’d missed it but it was part of a separate show. I say about two words. We did a few takes, my role being slightly reduced with each one, but to be fair with this kind of thing it’s not about me, it needs to be brief and Dan Skinner does seem very nice. Barry from Watford calls me a twat as well, which is probably a reasonable claim to fame? Oh, and no, I never did find out what he has in those carrier bags.
I’m in a McDonald’s advert at the moment. I think it’ll only be on for a week or so – it’s the first in a series for their My Burger campaign where they have different burgers designed by the public. I believe the one I’m pretending to eat at the end is the Big Uno designed by Tammy Rose . If you haven’t seen it, I look like I do in the above photo, except I move and talk cos it’s the TV and you can do that, it’s amazing.
So that’s that. Edinburgh over, all done. 12 shows, 8 guests, possibly 2 or 3 laughs. When we turned up and realised we had a stage a fraction of the size we were used to, someone had broken the lights (Luke Graves sorted that out), we had to buy our own cables, try and balance the projector on a speaker, as well as having to do our own tech, we thought it was going to be a bit of a disaster. Actually the first night was a bit of a disaster really: we’d spent so much time sorting out tech issues that we barely flyered and actually thought we had no crowd at all. Having convinced ourselves that we would just pull our first show, not worry about it and get back on the horse the next day, some people actually turned up! Being about 20 minutes past our start time and in the mindset that we were just going to get drunk, we then had to cut most of our planned show and quickly cobble together some part stand up/improvised show that included our first guest Dan Nicholas wearing a bear head and skimpy knickers (lots of pubes on display) and a lot of bantering with a crowd of young guys who seemed to be laughing a little too hard (probably on “drugs” I would imagine, those youngsters).
After that though it got a lot easier. We accepted that the show we’d performed in Camden would have to change to suit the Edinburgh free fringe. We’d already had to cut some stuff for length anyway, but we had to make the show more inclusive, more interactive and more loose. Luke and I would improvise a lot more, talk to the crowd more, making light of the tech issues we had, and actually I think it became a much better show as a result. I certainly had some great nights. We even got better at flyering and getting people to actually come to the show. We even made some money. Well, not overall obviously.
What we do isn’t for everyone, and I know some people didn’t enjoy some of our darker moments, and when we had good numbers in and the bar was busy it could be difficult for people to hear at the back and some walked out, but who cares? Others definitely enjoyed it, and that’s what matters.
A big thank you to our guests Dan Nicholas, Richard Pulsford, Lorna Shaw, Jenny Collier, Andy Holloway, Greg Simpson, Eleanor Morton, and Ali Brice. Yes, some people did more than one night – you worked it out.
Luke and I shot a lot of footage over the festival for our film Kaile, Keeble & Kuntz, which I’ve been working my way through when I can. It should be a mixture of show footage with behind the scenes banter and pieces to camera… hopefully funny and released…. somewhere. I’ll let you know.
That’s right kids. That young upstart Luke Kaile and I are heading up to the fringe this year. We’re doing 12 shows from the 13th to 24th August at 18:45 at the Globe Bar, and if the London shows were anything to go by, it’s gonna be great! Speaking of which….
Thanks to Miranda Dawe, James Bennison and Wes Dalton for joining us in those shows. As you can see, a lot of the show involves me swearing and pulling faces. You’d pay good money to see that wouldn’t you? Well you don’t have to cos it’s on the PBH Free Fringe. Check us out right here! I also did a little interview with Short Com which is right here!
Anyway, as that trailer says, we’re making a bloody film out of our journey. We’re driving up in a camper van, and filming all the hilarious goings on that that’s bound to inspire, like me needing to pull over for a wee, and Luke not looking when pulling out of a junction. Amazing! We should have some great guest stars on board as well! And maybe we’ll do some podcasts! Maybe there’ll be more Backgammon on the Toilet! I hope so! I’ll try and bombard you all with as much tedious, annoying shit as I can! See ya soon!
If you haven’t listened to Richard Herring’s Me1 vs Me2 Snooker podcast, then you’re really missing out on the type of podcast that revolves around a man playing a popular game against himself while commentating on it…. and not much else. To be fair, although I think the main humour is derived from the fact that he’s actually done 40-odd episodes of it, and people like me are actually listening to it, it can be genuinely compelling and enjoyable listening.
Which is where Backgammon on the Toilet comes in. Instead of a man playing snooker against himself, how about a man playing backgammon on his iphone, while sitting on the toilet and talking random shit? That’s exactly what I’m doing. This is the future:
Oh hello you. I’m sure it’ll be the highlight of your day, evening, or even your year, to learn that you can now buy tickets to see the live show I’m doing with Luke Kaile at the Camden Fringe. We’re doing 3 nights from 28th to 30th July at the Etcetera – tickets available here. Please come! It’s the Kaile, Keeble & Kuntz show that we did an early version of back in November, except this time it’s a lot shorter, and a lot funnier. It’s definitely a lot shorter. The show contains, apart from sketches and prerecorded bits, individual stand up from us, for which we’ve been trying out bits of material about the place. That’s what I’m doing in that photo. Please come along to one of those if you fancy it. I’ll probably tweet about it, and Luke and I are trying to do the same nights together, just so you can easily see how much funnier I am than he is. Cheers.
… and now specifically onto All in the Method. We were lucky enough to have Episodes 2 and 5 screened at LA Webfest in March. Looks like someone won an award….
Well done to Pete on that one! He did a great job. If you weren’t aware of our free All in the Method podcasts on itunes where Luke and I give a little insight into our workings as well as slag each other off and come up with random shit, please check that out, along with our LA Webfest special Episode 4 recorded in LA! Yeah!!! (Don’t forget to subscribe!)
And of course here is the episode featuring the wonderful Mr Glover if you need reminding:
Guys! Guys! Guys! It’s me! I’m here! It’s been a long time since I updated, and there’s been quite a lot going on, so I’m gonna be brief but I am splitting this post into 2 parts Firstly, we just released a K&K sketch – this one we actually showed during our live show in November, but it’s now online – Shakespeare on the toilet:
We also released this the other week which was also part of our live show – The Date:
In other news it also looks like we’ve got our Camden and Edinburgh Fringe dates confirmed and we’ll be previewing more sketches as well as doing some stand up open spots so stay tuned for more info on that…!
Hot on the heels of Episode 1, here’s Episode 2 of Against the Clock, with me in an even more humiliating cameo than before. You can only imagine how much that smelled…
If you like to see me in embarrassingly compromised positions, then check out this little 2 minute episode of new web series Against the Clock. It was written by that dirty son of a bitch, Luke Kaile, and stars him and Cristina Lark. Luke very kindly gave me a recurring cameo (well, he wanted it to be good, right?), presumably confident that I would embrace the degrading nature of the character wholeheartedly. Just wait till you see what I’m doing in episode 2…. urgh….
Here’s me as the bookshop manager in the first episode of the new Birds of a Feather series on ITV. In preparation for the role I took time out to actually work in a bookshop, eventually becoming manager a mere 7 years later. I hope you’ll agree that my preparation was worth it. I’m also expecting a call regarding my own spin off series any day now.
I believe you can watch the episode on a thing called the internet.
Hi there! Thanks for coming down to the live show if you did! It went far better than we could’ve imagined and were very grateful to everyone’s support! Stay tuned for future live shows as we try and evolve it into something…. funny.
Now you may remember I’ve been involved in a couple of Hunka Wunda sketches, well here’s the latest one and if you check it out you’ll see it’s a pretty amazing piece of work with some quite incredible animation and special effects. Yours truly is doing the voiceover. Make sure you actually click on things otherwise it won’t cue the next video! Catch ya later!
I’m sure by the time you read this it’ll be too late, but we’re doing a live show at the Drayton Arms tonight. It’s a mix of sketches, solo stand up, and exclusive pre-recorded VTs, which is a work in progress if you like for our Edinburgh show next year. It’s called Kaile, Keeble & Kuntz, and here’s the poster:
It starts at 7.30, tickets are available here, although I’m sure you can get some on the door. The show also features the excellently funny Miranda Dawe.
Now if you were thinking how brilliant those cartoon versions of Luke and I are, they were created by another amazingly talented friend of mine, Jon Shortt, and these are actually taken from proper animated versions that form the titles of our new online sketch show, ‘hilariously’ titled the Kaile & Keeble/Keeble & Kaile sketch show. You see, the joke there is that we can’t agree on who’s name should go first, and in fact the first episode below is based on that very premise!
Oh hang on. You’re saying that if you have to explain a joke, it’s not that funny? Shit.
You may have just seen me in Episode 4 of Fool Brittania on ITV, freaking a guy out in a lift looking a bit like this:
Then you may have seen me trying to get a lady’s money for some fake charity looking like this:
If you didn’t see it of course, you can check it out on ITV player here for a few days. The Lecter scene is after about 4.45 and the chugger scene is about 14.37
Looks like they’re only showing one of each of these scenes, but we did a whole day in that lift doing each scene several times, and I seriously freaked out a lot of people in that Lecter mask. Most people actually legged it out the lift after I was wheeled in.
We also did a riot police scene, which was in Episode 2, but I didn’t actually say anything in that one, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.
There we are. Episode 1 of All in the Method screened last weekend at Raindance. It was so exciting it’s taken me this long to blog about it. Sort of. Doesn’t Luke look happy in that photo? It was great to be a part of it – a lot of people were very kind about our show. What was annoying though was how good some of the other web series were. Bastards. We made some new friends though, and I intend to suck up to them for my own gain from now on.
So you heard the news? Yes, it’s true. I will be in the new series of Birds of a Feather next year. Oh hang on, you mean the actual news is the fact that there is a new series next year, rather than the fact I’m in it? Got you. And yes, I suppose there is a chance I will be edited out isn’t there. Thanks for bringing that up. Let me start again: I did some filming on Birds of a Feather on Monday. There you go, then. That remains true, even if they do edit my line out.
Anyway, considering I had such a small part, they treated me like I was one of the regulars. Lovely people. Cast and crew. “Rich, that’s your car to take you to set.” Thank you. Oh, who’s this sharing the car with me? Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke is it? That’s fine.