‘I’m from Coventry. I guess to David Sedaris, that was something exotic’

How producer Steve Doherty forged a partnership with a comic genius that’s lasted nearly 30 years and counting

A new series of Meet David Sedaris started last night on Radio 4, and so for the next few weeks the world becomes a better place. I’ve been marvelling at Sedaris’s writing in the New Yorker magazine for years, and I’ve loved his broadcasts. I’ve also taken as many opportunities as possible to see him perform live.

Most recently those occasions have been recordings for Radio 4, and I’ve found myself in the audience thanks to kind invitations from the show’s longtime producer, Steve Doherty.

My work as an editor and a writer on the radio section of Radio Times has involved me in friendly dealings with Steve - through his Giddy Goat Productions he’s behind numerous other programmes on Radio 4 - and I knew that he had produced Meet David Sedaris going all the way back to 2010, which was when the American humorist’s show became a Radio 4 fixture (the latest series is the tenth). But until I had a long conversation with Steve earlier this week, I did not realise that the roots of their relationship had been put down much longer ago than that.

The story of how it all happened is not just a delight. It’s a lesson in what doing things in person can achieve.

As a former Arts Editor of the Independent on Sunday, I can - in a somewhat oblique way - take pride in the origins of the Doherty-Sedaris partnership because it was as a result of the enterprise of one of my predecessors that Sedaris first came to Steve’s attention. It was 1996, and Steve was working as a trainee producer in BBC radio’s Light Entertainment department (long since gone).

“I was reading the Indy on Sunday of blessed memory one weekend and the arts pages had run one of David’s stories,” Steve recalled. “It was from his first ever collection, published by Little, Brown. What caught my eye was the photo of him — this little man holding a cabbage that had been cut in half. I wish I could remember what story it was, but it was really funny, and as producers you're always looking for your next project. Jonathan James Moore was the head of comedy and I told him about it. Next I wrote a letter to Little, Brown — email hadn't really got going at that point — to ask if David might ever do anything on radio, not knowing that he'd been on NPR going back to 1992. I was being quite naive. I'd no idea if he was famous or anything."

Six weeks later, Steve heard back — not just a letter from Sedaris but a cassette as well. "I listened, took it to Jonathan, and he agreed — this guy is brilliant". Radio 4 had a new controller in James Boyle, and he signed off on giving Sedaris his network debut.

What happened next could offer no clearer indication of how different an age it was then compared with now — not least in budgetary terms — because soon Steve was boarding a plane to New York to record Sedaris, with instructions from Jonathan to stay at the Algonquin, the hotel famed for Dorothy Parker and her Round Table. "Jonathan was a New York-o-phile," Steve said. "You could never justify a trip like that these days. There wouldn't be the money. And anyway it would all be done on email."

A room at the Algonquin was where Steve taped Sedaris for the first time — for Sedaris fans, the comedy equivalent of an unknown Elvis Presley walking into the Sun Studio in Memphis or the Beatles recording My Bonnie in Hamburg. "I blocked up the air-conditioning vents with towels, got my DAT machine running (Digital Audio Tape), and David sat on the bed and read."

The reading — from Sedaris's Santaland Diaries — ran for 10 minutes and aired between Christmas and New Year 1996. That broadcast is lost, but a 15-minute version, which went out the following year, survives. By now Boyle's enthusiasms had led to a series called Talk of New York — a roughly Stateside equivalent of Loose Ends, recorded on West 45th Street in a private members club — on which Steve worked as a producer and Sedaris had a regular spot. A friendship was forged over strolls around New York. "To me David was this exotic figure. I mean — I'm from Coventry. But I guess to David that too was something exotic."

Steve liked to record Sedaris on location. "He had a story set in a ballpark so we found one and recorded it there. Another time we tried to record in Chinatown, but the place we were in wasn't keen on having recording devices around the place. We were invited to leave."

Through the first decade of the 2000s there was a Sedaris/Radio 4 hiatus. Steve went to work in TV. Sedaris was touring relentlessly, and moving to France. But they kept in touch, and David remained interested in appearing on Radio 4 again. When the network launched an American season in 2010, Steve suggested him to the network's then Editor of Comedy, Caroline Raphael. Sedaris was back, and he's been there ever since.

In the nearly 30 years they've known each other, Steve, who is now 55, and David, who is 68, have visited each other at their homes, so Steve has got to know Sedaris's partner Hugh and David has got to know Steve's family. The geographical distance between them has grown shorter — David and Hugh live in West Sussex for part of the year, Steve lives in Llandudno. They manage to balance the professional relationship and the personal one.

What's the key to the friendship? "I don't really know," says Steve. "Why d'you get on with anybody? I mean — he's a nice bloke, I'm a nice bloke! And to me David is an inherently interesting person. It's impossible for him to be boring."

Nobody who's discovered David Sedaris could possibly disagree.

The photograph above — taken by Steve's daughter — shows Sedaris recording his latest series at the Shaw Theatre in Euston, London, in January, as Steve looks on.

The first episode in the series — The Hem of His Garment, about the time Sedaris found himself among a delegation of comedians visiting the Pope — is brilliant and is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029hmd