The Collings and Herrin Podcast

The Collings and Herrin Podcast was a topical podcast produced by broadcaster Andrew Collins and comedian Richard Herring. Its title derives from the recurring Richard Herring trope of misspelling names for comic effect.
Described as a "sideways look at the news", the podcast was discursive and based mainly on humorous analysis of the week's media coverage. It was light in tone but often veered into black comedy and crude humour as satire. It contained frequent uses of strong language and was described by a review in "The Times" as unsuitable for "sensitive souls".
A typical episode length was one hour, six minutes and thirty-six seconds, due to this being the maximum length of a GarageBand recording, the software normally used to record the podcast. The podcast was made for and hosted by the British Comedy Guide and was also distributed via iTunes.
On 26 July 2008, the podcast was named "Podcast of the Week" by the "Times" Newspaper and in November 2009, was regularly being downloaded by 23,000 listeners a week, with some episodes peaking at 29,000 listeners. The "Guardian" noted that the podcast captured "the spirit of Derek and Clive."
History.
Between 10 April 2005 and 25 March 2007, Richard Herring would review the week's newspapers on Andrew Collins' BBC 6 Music radio show. These segments would often end with corpsing.
Collins and Herring have mentioned that they had felt constrained by BBC guidelines and had wanted to produce a darker, more humorous segment with a longer runtime. The idea of producing an independent podcast was first mooted publicly on Collins' blog on 14 January 2008, leading to a number of comments in support of the idea.
The first "Collings and Herrin Podcast" went live on 1 February 2008.
In June 2011, the podcast was announced to be on hiatus due to bad feelings between the pair. Andrew took an opportunity to host their old Saturday 6Music slot with another comedian, Josie Long, which Richard considered a betrayal of their double act. The podcast was resurrected on 4 November 2011 for podcast 167, but on 21 November the podcast ended permanently due to Andrew Collins feeling it was time to end the project.
In other media.
Live shows: An unusual development for a podcast was a number of recordings with a live audience, the first being on 6 August 2008 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and others following in Brighton, London, Lincoln, Cardiff and more Edinburgh Festival shows. During 2009 these were often presented alongside Andrew Collins' solo 60 minute "Secret Dancing" performances. On 1 February 2010, the second anniversary of their first podcast, the pair performed their "100th" podcast (in actuality their 105th) to a sell-out crowd at the Leicester Square Theatre in London.
Radio: In January 2010 it was announced that the duo (as "Collins and Herring" rather than "Collings and Herrin") would be filling in for Adam and Joe on BBC 6 Music from 30 January. Their residency continued until April 2011. Each week the highlights were released as podcasts on the BBC website.
CD: On 22 March 2010 they released a CD of exclusive podcasts called "Collings and Herrin: The Best of Earth, Wind and Fire* *(and water)" through Go Faster Stripe. A second CD called "Collings and Herrin: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment" was released through Go Faster Stripe on 15 December 2010.
Vodcast: A number of video podcasts have been released parallel to the official podcast count. These are usually released as bonus features on Richard Herring comedy DVDs.
Bootleg: A bootleg recording of "legendary" Podcast 123 rescued this installment from permanent loss: This episode, recorded live at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival, is dubbed "legendary" in that technical problems ruined the official podcast recording and resulted in an audience evacuation towards the end of the show. For three weeks, the podcast was assumed lost until a fan came forward with a bootleg recording of poor but serviceable sound quality.
Themes and running jokes.
Who is Virgilio Anderson?
Collins and Herring launched a culture jamming campaign, spreading the message "Who is Virgilio Anderson?" after a so-named member of the public from Macedonia used Richard Herring's name as the primary key for his Facebook page.
T-shirts were printed, Anderson-themed music videos were circulated on YouTube and many personalities (such as Steven Moffat) added the phrase to their websites. #virgilioanderson became the second most popular trending topic on Twitter on Thursday 2 July 2009 and the words "Who is Virgilio Anderson?" were scribbled in the grouting of the tiles in a toilet cubicle at the British Library (the cubicle second from the left in the east wing, first floor) on 16 July 2009.
Little is known of the true identity of Virgilio Anderson but information on his interests, favourite books and political beliefs were visible at his Facebook page, before it was deleted.