Author: James Lark

Just to let you know that the latest film from Talk to Rex is now finished and up on the internet. Yes, we did finish it a lot quicker than our last one…

Go and have a butcher’s here.

Alastair Bennett and James Lark, presenters of the podcast 2 Victoria Street at Home, would like to issue an apology for their podcast of 1 April 2007 in which they claimed that their housemate, Chris Law, had died in a horrific yoga accident.

They had hoped that their references to Unitarians, washing up and Ambassador Property Management, as well as the fact that they had to stop every few minutes because they were laughing, would make it sufficiently clear that the podcast was an April Fool’s joke. They acknowledge, however, that their work was sufficiently convincing to cause distress to some listeners, in one instance on the morning of an extremely important exam.

Very sorry about that last bit especially.

They accept that the whole thing was, by all reasonable standards, inconceivably tasteless. Although that is what some listeners have come to expect from this particular podcast, they feel on this occasion that they betrayed the trust of their listeners.

In some respects, not unlike Orson Welles.

Chris Law himself was unaware of this broadcast and he wishes to make it clear that he has given his housemates a stern telling off. He also wishes make it clear that he is not dead – in fact, having just returned from a week of yoga, he has never felt so alive.

Alastair and James apologise for all distress caused by any of the above and promise to try to behave themselves in future. The podcast has been removed. In the tradition of Ofcom complaints, however, they have reissued said podcast preceded by this apology, in the hope of using their error to boost listener ratings.

Listen again.

You may have noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet on the self-promotion front for several months. The reason is that I’ve been working on an ambitious theatrical project which half of me thought would never see the light of day, and half of me thought would be done by somebody else first.

Nevertheless, it would appear that we’ve got a (very nice) venue, and to date nobody else has announced their intention to do the same – frankly quite obvious – idea. Though there have been rumblings about the possibility of such a thing happening, and following the tuk-tuk incident I’ve decided it’s time to make this idea public before somebody else claims they had it first.

Here it is then. It’s Tony Blair – the Musical. Somebody was bound to do it sooner or later, so I’ve taken it upon myself. Hope that’s okay.

The extremely pretty website has more information, including details of how you can support the production by buying a peerage. I’ve also just been interviewed about it on the Friday Cities website if you’re after more juicy details.

And more juicy details will be forthcoming here as and when I feel like plugging my show some more.

When we went to Bankok with Girton College Choir way back in 2001, Alastair and I were so thrilled by our experiences with the milk float/rickshaw crossbreed they call the “tuk-tuk” that we decided there and then that one day we would make a Michael Palin-style geographical odyssey called Bankok to Girton in a Tuk-Tuk.

You can imagine the kind of thing it would involve; the first episode would see us in Bankok, trying to persuade a tuk-tuk driver to part with his vehicle. Off we’d set up through Thailand, where my geography deserts me but I think it would involve India and there would of course be a hilarious episode where we broke down and had to take parts from a Bajaj auto rickshaw to make our tuk-tuk work again. Hopefully we’d also come across a tiny village where they’d think we were gods and decorate us with flowers. Finally we’d arrive back at our old college in a battered old hybrid tuk-tuk, dirty, hungry, desperately in need of sleep and just in time for evensong.

All naturally accompanied by the lively banter that I am led to believe at least three people are enjoying on a weekly basis here.

We couldn’t see why any television director would possibly refuse such an idea, except that they would probably say “why don’t we get Michael Palin to do it?” so we were waiting either for one of us to get famous or for Michael Palin to die.

This morning I was giving the Friday Project website a cursory browse and happened to notice this.

Yup. Some television producer has teamed up with a medical student and done our idea. Only they’ve made it less Palin and more Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by painting the tuk-tuk pink. (Though I think I might even have made that suggestion to Alastair in one of my drunker moments.)

This morning at 2 Victoria Street a tiny dream has died.

James Aylett was waxing lyrical down the phone to me yesterday about the qualities of his new Apple Mac, and I suggested he should maybe write to Rob Webb about it, since it seems he is now the human vessel for the Mac collective.

I suddenly thought about those messages I get on my PC saying “application has unexpectedly had to close, click here to send error report” (which happens about five times an hour, so I’d question the accuracy of their use of the word “unexpectedly”), and what I thought was, wouldn’t it be great if the error reports were sent directly to David Mitchell’s email account? If nothing else it would probably explain the lack of any kind of response.

The above picture always brings to mind one of the first times I met David Mitchell, because I recall he had injured his foot for real that time and was walking with a pronounced limp and possibly a stick as well. I don’t remember exactly what he’d done, except that it was something funny like shutting it in a door or falling down some stairs. I wonder if his future casting as a PC was pretty much inevitable from that moment onwards…

…but the evilometer doesn’t lie.

How evil are you?

…and back on the topic of The Arcade Fire, in the hope of being proved right again, I predict with confidence that the track entitled Intervention is the one we shall be hearing on endless adverts and TV trailers in about four months from now.

This morning I was woken by a siren and a repeated recorded announcement. Having been informed by the council that we live in a terrorist hotspot (and, it turns out, just down the road from a school caretaker who randomly posts letter bombs), and remembering the information on our evacuation zone map that mentions public address systems, I naturally assumed that it was armageddon: the terrorists were about to strike and my house was right in the middle of the danger zone. (This is what comes of living opposite a Unitarian church…)

As it turned out, it was a lorry reversing down my road.

But the slightly distressing thing is that when I thought it was a terrorist attack, my inclination was to turn over and go back to sleep. “Sod this,” I thought, “I can’t be bothered to evacuate my house this early. I might die, but at least I’ll die in my sleep.”

If that’s my attitude, does it mean the terrorists have won?

Until today, I thought that The Arcade Fire were an acquired taste which I had yet (if ever) to acquire. Their much acclaimed first album Funeral has never really done it for me.

But today I listened to their new album Neon Bible and realised that they are, without a doubt, the only band who could score a slightly retro acoustic guitar strummy song for full church organ and glockenspiel.

Then bring in strings and a choir without it sounding remotely like Mistletoe and Wine.

Oh, this album is going to be in my CD player for quite some time I think…

In the space of the last twelve hours I’ve had two messages telling me that I was right. Firstly about David Bowie – Marcia, one of the fine singers in my fine choir emailed me to say:

Your recommended David Bowie top ten list has been running on the wishlist of our radiotracker (monitoring something over 1000 radio stations) for exactly 4 weeks now and the only track that came in was Station to Station while 62 of his other tracks were recorded (several times each). The scientist in me likes statistics and proving things right or wrong.

And indeed the scientist in me likes being proved right.

Secondly, about Jason Donovan – John, a vet who has on several occasions been mistaken both for a young Tom Baker and for a tenor, wrote to say:

Jason Donovan is making a come back (as you rightly predicted). He is going to be a judge on “Any Dream will do” – the Technicolour dreamcoat version of “How do you solve a problem like Maria” – on our screens in the near future…

If anybody else wants to prove me right on any issue at all, I’m really enjoying this feeling of self-satisfied smugness so please go right ahead.