The Road to Riches

Last year, in an unassuming Portakabin behind the Pleasance Courtyard, a little-known comedian named Adam Riches unveiled one of the most original and entertaining comic characters at the Edinburgh Festival. Unfortunately, at the time, barely a handful of people noticed.

Victor, his one-man show about a maverick Copyright enforcer from the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) who tours the country giving Al Gore-style lectures on the evils of DVD piracy was a painfully funny yet criminally neglected Fringe performance. It perfectly parodied the organisation’s ludicrous anti-piracy adverts, while throwing in a series of truly bizarre set pieces that created a magical comic tension between the audience and the Victor Legit character – part pity, part scorn, part terror.

The 2007 show marked Riches’ Edinburgh debut as a solo performer, having spent the best part of a decade writing and performing in London – although not always as a character comedian and not always to an audience.

“I started doing plays, traditional plays, about ten years ago,” he says. “I moved to London in 1998 to do some work at the fringe venues there and I just wrote loads. I must have written about 40 or 50 plays. I would just write and write and write and put on plays… and no-one would go to see them. We must have had two people come and see about three months worth of work.

“It was only really in the last two years that I started taking characters from the plays and seeing if they could be improved in the comedy world.”
Riches laughs as he recalls the evolution of Victor Legit from bit-part cameo to leading man.

“He was very, very different to begin with. He was just this guy in a locker-room, an ordinary policeman, in a few of the plays I had written. Whenever there was a locker-room scene, there was always this Victor character in there, and he’d only ever be wearing a towel.

“Back in those days, I would draw a six-pack on my chest with a marker pen [Riches now wears a muscle suit], giving some definition to my chest and trying to look as buff as you could do with a felt-tip pen and a towel. I think from there he had a nice attitude. He had that arrogant swagger, that confident swagger that he got from his body.”

It took three years before the 35-year-old decided to run with the character, but was unsure where Victor would fit in among a series of spoof detectives already doing the rounds on the comedy circuit.

“I felt like there wasn’t enough difference between Victor and these other characters. Then I came up with the idea that maybe he wasn’t a policeman after all; that he had all this bluster because of the low-prestige job that he’s got.”

The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place when Riches saw the results of a FACT questionnaire published in a magazine, in which two per cent of the public said that they would take the anti-piracy message more seriously if the campaigns were funnier.

“I thought it was hilarious, the idea of FACT reading this report and someone in the office going: ‘Right, that’s what I’ll do, then. I’ll take our message into the comedy clubs.’”

This year, Victor returns to Edinburgh among a motley crew of masculine misfits in Riches’ new show Alpha Males, an exploration of the machismo of modern man.

“I decided to use the theme of masculinity to bring in some of the other characters that I’d done and tie them all together as men, all at different stages of their lives and all with different strengths and weaknesses. These men have all had their masculinity questioned in one form or another and have either come out on top or been usurped.

“I was debating what type of show to do at this year’s Festival. I really wanted to do a complete follow up to Victor; do another forty-five or fifty minute show. However I just felt I needed to open myself up a little bit more, y’know, introduce him to a larger audience before I could really do that kind of show.

“One of the issues I found when I did Victor last year was that it took a while to get the FACT world across to people who weren’t familiar with it. There isn’t really an easy ‘in’ with it because the terminology is quite dense and I think the writing was quite dense as well. But a year on, the fake DVD trade has progressed a little more, it’s a lot more high profile and FACT are more high profile so the jokes are going across a lot quicker. I actually think Victor’s doing a good job [spreading the message] bit by bit. Maybe I’ll get a campaign out of it myself...”

Bizarrely this quip is not too far from reality. A couple of months after last year’s Fringe, Riches was actually approached by the object of his ridicule, the Federation Against Copyright Theft itself.

“I got an email from their head of communications. It read: ‘You’ve been flagged up on our system, it says you’re doing a show about our organisation. We’re very curious to find out what in particular is very funny about what we do for a living.’

“So I met him for a coffee and a chat and explained the show to him. I told him: ‘Yeah, we do all these bits in Victor where we show how ridiculous FACT is… I even end up shoving a [DVD] disc up some guy’s arse!’ After that, he just sat there staring at me like he’s thinking ‘What the hell are you doing to my job?’”