Circuit Training 20: Rich Fulcher

Are you heading up to Edinburgh this August? Do you have a pulse? Then be warned: Eleanor is on the prowl. The self-proclaimed Tour Whore is the provocative alter-ego of Rich Fulcher - he of Mighty Boosh fame, and Snuff Box infamy - and she'll be adding a frisson to the festival's latter stages. Lock up your partners.

It was the Edinburgh Fringe that first brought Fulcher to Britain many moons ago, and he's now very much part of the furniture; a loveable, slightly lumpy old armchair perhaps, with a few painfully-protruding springs. Circuit Training took a seat and questioned Rich about his old shows, his new show, and the whole whoring business...

You're still fiddling with Eleanor's Edinburgh show - is it an audio-visual extravaganza?
It's an extrava-ganga, if you're a weed smoker. But yeah, it didn't start out that way, for some reason the more I started getting involved, the only logical thing was for Eleanor to do a Powerpoint presentation, with songs, music, explosions.

A lot of people probably don't think of you as a stand-up...

A lot of people don't think of me, period. Even Boosh fans don't think of us as live performers but we started out live. We did [Edinburgh] '98, which I did but then I couldn't come back because I had money problems. Then '99, and 2000, then we did the radio show, then the TV show. So a lot of people just know us for TV, and when we went out on tour people went 'oh, you're just gonna do stuff from the TV show,' but it's easy to come up with stuff. That's how we get material. Touring is great with those guys. It's like sleeping in silk.

Isn't that how Eleanor came about, from on-the-road improv?

Yeah, we were on the bus mucking about, and I sort of came up with this character where I was coming on to everybody on the bus, then they started asking about my past 'who are you?' '[Adopts impressively sultry voice] I'm Eleanor, I've been with every band that ever lived.' It went from there.

Is she based on an actual groupie?

No, it just sort of happened, it's a common combination of Xanax and wine. Then I started doing it as a stand-up act, and when the third series came along Julian and Noel said 'lets do an episode with Eleanor.' And then in the beginning of this year there was a point where we might have gone on tour in the US, it was touch and go, then Julian and Noel decided 'lets do the CD, and write the film, instead of the tour,' and I thought that would be a good time to explore Eleanor.

I first (ahem) came across her on MTV2, interviewing bands.

Oh my god, you're the guy that watches MTV2! The MTV thing came about because Brown Eyed Boy became interested - they do How Not to Live Your Life, and some other stuff - and the guy who runs that thought it'd be great to interview young bands and call it Eleanor's Up and Coming. We were trying to use that to get a show, and hopefully, over time...

When the Boosh TV show started, did people instantly get it?

It's interesting, yeah, mostly you'd get good stuff from your friends, but you could sort of tell when people didn't approach you that they didn't like it.

Were you just thinking 'we'll do one series, and that'll be it'?

I think we were just trying to make each other laugh, we weren't really thinking about anything. But it helped because we'd already done several stage variations, then the radio show, and it took that for the executives to think 'oh well, they can do a half hour narrative thing if they can do a radio show.' It almost took that to get their minds around it, because they'd see us on stage and go 'I love it, but [dopey voice] I don't know what to do.'

Did you get more adverse reactions to Snuff Box?

Oh God, yes, loads! I mean, mostly when I go out to the US and around now, people say really positive things, but I would get a lot of 'what was that all about?' The problem was, it only aired once at 11 o'clock, and if it had been on BBC2 there would have been a lot more negative reaction.

Did it only get commissioned because of your Boosh links?

That was part of it, but it was also exactly the same time that Little Britain went from BBC3 to BBC1, so they were basically without a sketch show. They commissioned us as well as Man Stroke Woman and Chitty Bang Bang, and out of those three we didn't get picked up.

Matt [Berry] and I were initially pitching other things, but they approached us and said 'hey, why don't you guys write a sketch show' and we were thinking 'well, if we do do a sketch show, we want to do it on our own terms,' and they said 'sure!' So it was only a couple of people that really looked at it as we were doing it, and they would give notes and sometimes we'd ignore them. Most of the time we would just say we did them, and it went through all the hoops. So we thought 'ok, they must like it' and then it aired, and then it just disappeared. But there's a lot of people petitioning to get it on the air again.

Back to Eleanor: she'll be prowling the Fringe for 10 days?

Yes, I'm calling it Eleanorburgh. Ideally it would probably have been better to do the whole festival, but Eleanor's a bit of a diva, so she wants that attention for a short amount of time. Anything can happen, and it's quite scary because she does bust in on other people's shows and things of that nature. But it'll be fun, and I think the show being at 11.30pm will be a bit of an experiment.

Indeed, she'll have the whole day free to...

...get lubed up.

An Evening with Eleanor the Tour Whore will be at the E4 Udderbelly from 21st - 30th August, at 11.30pm. For more information and a video see our Listing