Author: James Lark

I dreamt that there was a national referendum to decide whether Hazel Blears should become Deputy PM. I was voting in a tiny cafe in London, where I sat drinking coffee and deliberating over my decision whilst being joined by a succession of people I knew but was trying to avoid because they all wanted to sleep with me. But I remained calm and witty, and remember saying to everyone I met “I don’t want to vote for Hazel Blears, but who else is there??”

When I finally came to vote, the cafe owner was clearing away the voting slips and said I couldn’t – but I’d been waiting there all day so pushed for my right to get my vote in. At which point I woke up so will never know what happened next.

I’ll say one thing for the last train back to Cambridge on a Sunday evening via Hertford North, Hoxton and Cornwall…

…you sure as hell get a lot of essays marked.

So the man paid for sex. Yes, a lot of us find that morally dubious, but a high moral standing has never been a necessary qualification for any chief executive of BP.

And yes, he lied under oath. But then, Clinton proved that you can be the most powerful leader in the world and get away with that.

So when Lord Browne is described as “disgraced”, the word is essentially being used in its traditional meaning, viz. “homosexual”.

To some extent it’s a self-imposed disgrace – he’s the one who resigned, when he could have done a George Michael-style chat with Richard and Judy and got it all out into the open. But I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet that if it had been a classy call girl rather than a rent boy exposing him, he’d probably still have his job.

Sigh. Browne may not be doing two years’ hard labour, but a lot of things haven’t changed since Oscar Wilde’s day. Elton John aside, everyone hates gays.

A couple of nights ago I was trying to get to sleep when I realised that I couldn’t remember how old I am. The only way I could find out was to calculate it from my date of birth, and even then I wasn’t entirely convinced by my maths – and indeed remained uncertain of my age for the next two days, until a friend told me the answer.

Old age surely begins this way…

Last night I dreamt that I went to see Don Giovanni, full of excitement at going to a favourite opera I have never seen staged.

But it started with recititive and I thought “that’s odd, they’ve decided to cut the overture” – then as it went on I discovered that it was in fact Handel’s Don Giovanni and it was all recititive.

I’m guessing this might be the kind of nightmare that only makes sense if you’re familiar with Handel’s operas…

Since we’re on the topic, a couple of nights ago I dreamt that I persuaded everyone to get become a Priest online in time for Jamie Hawkey‘s ordination in June. When it came to the ordination all of his friends were in the congregation wearing dog collars and birettas and basically upstaging him. He was furious.

I’m still half tempted to do it, and having made a few enquiries I find that other people are quite up for it and at least one of them had already had the same idea.

This looks like a good place to start.

So next week’s Radio Times, in all newsagents now, features a big picture of the mutant Dalek that will, apparently, be the cliffhanger ending to Saturday’s episode. A pithy headline also makes it quite clear what the nature of the mutant is.

Can anybody see why it might not be such a surprising cliffhanger moment any more?

Russell T. Davies (who judging by last week’s offering can write a beautiful 45-minute episode after all, just not very often) explains the cover thus: “It isn’t revealed until the end of the episode, and we don’t want to give away too much. But we love a Radio Times cover – how could we not?”

To which the answer is, “by being a bit less of a media whore and trying to salvage the occasion surprise for the spoiler-obsessed youth of 2007”.

Oft-maligned producer of 80s Doctor Who John Nathan Turner was offered a Radio Times cover featuring the Cybermen when he unexpectedly brought them back at the end of the first episode of “Earthshock”. It is very much to his credit that he turned it down, sacrificing a significant amount of publicity for a shock revelation that (perhaps for the last time ever in the show’s history) genuinely took everyone by surprise.

Mind you, restraint has not exactly been the watchword for Russell T. Davies. One fears that “how could we not?” is pretty much the attitude behind his every decision. cf Torchwood: “But we love an unexplained, meaningless, badly-realised computer generated pterodactyl – how could we not?”

This is a disastrous party political broadcast.

It shows lots of different people voicing their worries, linked together by a taxi driver explaining what she’d say to Tony and Gordon if they were in the back of her cab. Finally we see that Tony and Gordon are indeed in the back of her cab, looking somewhat embarrassed to be sitting there driving inexplicably through suburban London listening to somebody moaning, but they’re not so embarrassed that they actually answer any of her questions.

Perhaps they’re both worrying that it wasn’t such a good idea to pull their ties out from under their seatbelts in that wanky way.

Tony leaves Gordon to pay the £5 taxi fare (out of our taxes?) and he says “keep the change” – which must either be an absurdly generous tip (out of our taxes?) or is a mean-spirited joke as he hands over a fiver.

Oh, but Tony does reassure us that he wants to hear our views, so get online now and start asking the questions as you’ll almost certainly be invited to Westminster.

David Cameron’s party political broadcast is a bit twee, but he comes out of it a lot better because he actually talks to people. And he gets my vote because he tells off a schoolgirl for being naughty and gives a BNP voter a bit of a bollocking.

Dear actors,

Royal Mail now have a system of pricing in which large envelopes (a category which includes A4 size) require a special stamp costing 44p to post.

Actually this is not a very new system any more and it was widely reported and publicised at the time of the change, way back in 2006.

If you post an A4 envelope containing your headshot and CV to me with an ordinary first class stamp on it you will save yourself 12p. Ooh yes, a whole 12p, you crafty thing. You will, however, cost me £1.16 to retrieve your envelope (which I will do, in the vain hope that it is a large sponsorship cheque from a business).

I particularly resent this happening now that auditions for the show in question have already been held.

If you have not had any work recently, could I suggest you start a) using the correct stamp and b) sending your CV to people within, say, a month of the audition notice being put up.

Best regards,

James

Dear bus drivers,

When you overtake a cyclist only to swerve into a bus stop just a few metres ahead, it’s a little bit like if you were walking along a pavement and a fat person jogged past you then stood in your way. Except that if you walked into the fat person it wouldn’t take your teeth out.

Kindly stop it you morons.

Best regards,

James Lark