For touting tickets to their own debut

Flight of the Conchords could have been booted out of their first Edinburgh Fringe for touting their own tickets, fellow comic David O’Doherty has revealed.

The Irish stand-up, who got friendly with Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement during their breakthrough 2002 Edinburgh debut, has told how the duo were 'so broke’ that they resorted to desperate measures.

The then unknown Conchords had been given plenty of complimentary industry tickets for their show because 'you're allowed 10 comps when no-one's going to your gig' O'Doherty told Jessica Knappett on her Perfect Day podcast.

'And so Bret had printed off the 10 comps, was going outside the Gilded Balloon box office and going up to people in the queue and pretending to be a ticket scalper.'

For punters hoping to see 'Ross Noble or Bill Bailey, Bret would be like, "I've got these tickets for Flight Of The Conchords, I'll give them you them to you for three quid each."

'And one of the people he approached was Karen Koren, boss of the Gilded Balloon. She was going to throw them out of the festival, because selling your comps is a big no-no.'

Fortunately for the Conchords, she changed her mind. 

The next year the Conchords were nominated for the Perrier Award, had a Radio 2 series the year after and landed their own cult HBO show in 2007. Despite generally focusing on solo projects nowadays, the duo  make a cameo appearance together in the second series of The Horne Section TV Show, which begins on Channel 4 next week.

Elsewhere in O'Doherty's chat with Knappett, the two reminisced about when they had first met, on the set of Stuck, the Irish comic's 'failed' 2017 Sky sitcom pilot.

Based on Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1917 Antarctic expedition, which had inspired O'Doherty's 2011 Fringe show, the cast also included Jennifer Saunders, Joe Thomas, Phil Wang, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and O'Doherty himself, with Knappett recalling that she was playing 'a woman disguised as a man.

'But when you cast me, I was a bit pregnant. And by the time we came round to filming, I think I was like nine months pregnant. So I was a woman dressed as a man but a heavily pregnant woman dressed as a man.

'A lot of women actors get pregnant and then they just become unhireable. So it was genuinely both baffling and incredibly kind of you and sort of very modern of you to hire me … But I also remember thinking, "they can't fire me. But I think they don't want me to be in this because it looks ridiculous". 

'My part just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It must have been so expensive because someone was brought in to be my substitute as well… I went into labour, which is all so mad. But just like so many layers. The plot was trying to find a woman on the boat wasn't it?'

The predominantly male crew, trapped in the ice for months, had 'tried to make a woman out of snow and then someone was like, wanking over a biscuit tin or something?' Knappett remembered. 'That was really very funny.'

For his part, O'Doherty felt that he had tried to write a 'Blackaddery' type of historical sitcom but 'could have done a better job.

'I didn't really know what I was doing because it's a very specific type of writing, because every single line has to be a setup … people walking in and slamming doors, there are very strict rules to those things that I wasn't well enough aware of because no one had made an audience sitcom for years.'

One person who knew exactly what they was doing though, was Saunders.

'My main recollection of it, there were certain times along the actual process where I was like, "Oh fuck, that's how you do this!" Jennifer Saunders was in it and was just so utterly brilliant.’

The Ab Fab creator played the cook and in one scene  fluffed her lines – then lifted her skirt to reveal a double dildo.

'And the audience exploded,’ O’Doherty recalled. ‘Then she immediately drops the skirt and just does the scene perfectly. What a pro!'

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 16 May 2025