Author: James Lark

– Edinburgh for pies, Australia for swimming. Not the other way round.

– Drink Singapore Sling in Raffles, not on the plane.

– Poseidon is a crappy film, but will scare the shit out of you on a turbulant flight.

Sorry, I’ve been very quiet on the internet recently. If you’re wondering why, the New York Times has all the answers.

I am very tired. But I think it’s been worth it – aside from impressing American reporters (and a few British ones too) I have seen the following memorable sights:

– Norman Pace picking his nose with my flyer.

– Jimmy Carr in a bright pink t-shirt, as if to say “look at me! I’m Jimmy Carr, in a bright pink t-shirt!” (the words “walking target” spring to mind).

– Sue Perkins. Who proved quite how wonderful she is when she recognised me from our brief radio interview, chatted to me about the agonies of being a solo Fringe performer, and offered me free tickets to her show. Which was bloody brilliant. (Lucy Porter’s was not.)

– The Dresden Dolls, very very close up in the Spiegeltent. They’re still fantastic.

– Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest; overlong, underwritten, completely lacking in wit and devoid of any of the qualities of the first film. One star.

Somebody came up to me in the Fringe performer’s area today and said “it’s James, isn’t it?”

I recalled being flyered by him about a week and a half ago and having a brief discussion about nipples, but I didn’t think I’d given him my name. “Yes,” I replied, rather uncertainly.

“I thought so,” he beamed. “I’m reading your book!”

“Really?” I said, astonished.

“Yes, I’m really enjoying it!” (He actually did say that.) “Our producer bought it because she hadn’t done Edinburgh before, and – well – I recognised you!”

I knew it was a good idea to fill the book with pictures of myself.

Oh, that I had more time to blog about my frolics at the Fringe. I might even be able to relate the story which led to me declaring “Pond, will you stop pimping Adam!”

Okay, it’s quite simple really, Pond was offering a random girl a large sum of money (in cash) to sleep with Adam Kay, who was so scared that he very convincingly made a sustained pretence at being gay.

It really has been incredibly hard work all round – yes! unbelievable, doing a one-man show for the entire Fringe is hard work…! But it seems to be going well and thanks to a timely review my audiences are on the up. And last night I sang probably the most unexpected improvised love song of my career.

If you haven’t seen the show, what happens is this: I take one audience member and, in character, go on a “speed date” with them, which climaxes with a love song made up on the spot based on what they have told me.

Sometimes people try to be funny and tell me things that aren’t strictly true. This usually makes my life difficult.

So when a woman got up on stage last night and told me what she did was artificial insemination, my heart sank and I thought “not another…”

Only, when I looked at her, she seemed to have an honest and quite serious face. She was a middle-aged woman with children in the audience and, after a little probing, gave me quite a detailed description of how to artificially inseminate a cow.

Turns out she was telling the truth after all.

So I sang her a love song about artificial insemination, in which I managed to rhyme the word “impinge” with “syringe”.

It was a good show.

According to today’s Herald, the reason that musical comedians are a perennial fixture at the Fringe is that “the hour-long format allows them time to indulge their latent rock-star ambitions.”

Yeah, alright.

I’ve now flyered two people who have responded, perplexed, “an Asian rock star?”

“No, no, an aging rock star,” I’ve hurriedly reassured them.

But I’m wondering how many other people I’ve flyered think that my show is based around a tasteless racial stereotype. Like Ed Weeks’ Spanish comedian but with songs.

What with the Independent’s Fringe diary, I’m worried that I might get a reputation for being a racist in the name of comedy.

At one point on the path I walk into Edinburgh on every day there is the painted motto “O CYCLING”. I think this is a rather lovely sentiment and it’s certainly what I’m thinking by the time I reach that part of the time-consuming trot.

I also saw something else on the same path, only this was walking BACK to my accommodation at a ridiculous hour this morning: one of my flyers, looking damp and sad and trodden into the ground.

My director left Edinburgh on Sunday, since when I have been flyering for my show all by myself – so I was heartened to see that, all by myself, I have handed out enough flyers for one of them to end up randomly trodden into a path about a mile and a half away from anywhere I’ve been giving them to people.

Oh, and I’m mentioned in the Independent’s Fringe diary today. Essentially for being a racist.

I’m sorry, you must have missed me.

I have of course been terribly busy. Here I am at the Edinburgh Fringe, where not only have I been publicising and performing a show far too frantically to blog, I’ve also been blogging for a different blog altogether.

I hope James Aylett doesn’t feel too snubbed by this. I wonder if he feels like he’s the BBC to my Des Lynam, rejected for the altogether glitzier but less charming surroundings of Sky Sports.

But I wouldn’t want to push that analogy too far, because it suggests that The Friday Project are not charming. Which they are. They have charm in buckets. Certainly a lot more the Sky Sports.

Anyway, I’m back here now, having finally found a few spare moments in my schedule – mainly because I was woken up hideously early to do an interview on BBC Radio Scotland and everybody else is still in bed.

Being at the Fringe, even for this short period (and the Fringe officially only starts today), I have been exposed to certain omissions and occasionally erratum in our book Fringe, and to save time if we’re ever asked to do a second edition I’ve decided to note down the main ones.

1. If you’re doing previews at all, you HAVE to comp them. Not just a couple of comps, lots and lots of comps – with the expectation of about a third of the people you have given them to turning up. It’s not optional if you actually want an audience – professional comedians do it, West End shows do it, you must do it.

2. In the first week of the Fringe it is possible to live entirely on free handouts on the Royal Mile. But not advisable.

3. South Bridge ought to be called the street of temptation; it is not only home to the brilliant and delicious Piemaker, but to Forbidden Planet and Poundstretcher. I find it almost impossible not to walk along South Bridge without ending up clutching a steak and pepper pie, a remote control Dalek and a completely useless pack of fifty lightbulbs (because they were like, really cheap!).

4. Walking all the way to the end of Princes Street to see a copy of your book in Waterstones is good for the ego but bad for the legs.

5. The anecdote about Simon Munnery’s prop bus (page 52) is, it turns out, almost entirely wrong. It wasn’t a prop bus, it was a Reliant Robin, which Munnery drove all the way to Edinburgh at 40 miles an hour only to find that he couldn’t use it. But this wasn’t because it hadn’t been fireproofed – it just wouldn’t fit through the doors of the venue. The way Munnery told it to me, it made an even better anecdote than our fictional one.

6. We need a Scottish edition of the book from which the second appendix, or at least the sentence “all Scottish people appear to be genuinely ugly”, is removed. I say this because, nearing the end of my interview on BBC Radio Scotland, one of the presenters suddenly said, “I notice that you say here ‘all Scottish people appear to be irredeemably ugly’ – what do you have to say about this to all our Scottish listeners?” I stuttered “well…I don’t think we used the word irredeemably…” before being forced into making a formal apology to the whole of Scotland on national radio. A few moments later I chirped “can I plug my show?” to which both presenters smugly replied in unison “no!” … and there ended the interview.

I’ve had an email from Sarah Bee complaining that I didn’t mention that she rescued my nipple from the peg that Adam Kay’s friend put on it. No doubt if she hadn’t, somebody on the tube would have done, but let it never be said that I am an ingrate. Even though she has said it already.

She also talked about blogging and described it as “hard” because of “all that solipsism” and the depressing nature of blogging about politics. I was forced to take a step back and analyse my feelings about blogging, and I decided: no, actually I don’t find it hard. In fact, back in the day when my life consisted of processing applications for government funding in a Blairite quango, blogging was the one thing that made it worthwhile. Using time that I was being paid for, and no doubt breaking the official secrets act on several occasions (not that I’ve ever read the official secrets act), my blog was the perfect arena to mouth off about some of the ridiculous things that were getting government funding. That little bit of subversion kept me alive.

But it wasn’t just subversive; in those days, I could virtually float out of my office-bound body and hover in an internety space of musings about driving a pink Uncertainty Division minibus, dancing in the fields like Julie Andrews, and being Angela Tilby on “Thought for the Dairy“. But a few highlights which spring to mind.

But maybe my attitude is just the complete opposite of Bee’s. For while she says that she once blogged about bees and describes it as a “nadir”, my experience of blogging about bees is that it is anything but a nadir.

Ah…but that was back in the days when I was forced to do menial labour for which I was underpaid and overqualified, just so that I could scrape enough to live the dream. Now that I’m actually living the dream, has my blog become just a series of self-agrandising discussions of my nipple and plugs for the many and varied performances and publications I’m involved in?

Sigh. Innocence truly is dead.

Which reminds me, you can buy my CD right now, right here. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned quite how beautiful it is. And at an insanely low price, too! Could you get a new Busted album for £6.99? I doubt it. So hurry along and buy it now before I petition my publishers to put the price up.

In this photograph a sweaty James Lark points with pride to the cover of The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget in the aftermath of a sell-out performance.

I’m sorry, the sniffer bees were exciting, but that is better.

This seems like a good policy for any pub or bar wishing to avoid hanky panky: