Author: James Lark

Having got Deon Vonniget out of the way and dealt with the whole tedious process of Edinburgh applications (for the time being, at least), I find I have an awful lot more free time than I’ve been used to. I mean, whole hours in a row, without rehearsals to go to, shows to perform or Christmas presents to buy.

Any social life that I had before my lengthy flirtation with the stage has gone, so it’s either internet chatrooms or sitting down and getting some writing done.

So I’ve spent the last week doing a complete redraft of an Elizabethan action romp I set down with Jon Croker a while back and haven’t touched for over half a year. It’s structurally pretty much okay, but it has been a real joy to go through it making sure every line of dialogue sparkles like a pair of ruby slippers – essentially doing what fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would refer to as a “Joss Whedon” on it. I now have a weighty-looking script sitting on my floor looking very happy but in need of some cutting – a job which I feel can wait for a while.

Now I’ve turned my mind to various half-formed or even half-written ideas I’ve had knocking around for ages. Except that having decided what the most promising ideas are, I find myself utterly unable to decide between them. There’s the option of reworking Deon Vonniget as a radio show – not my idea, in fact, somebody else’s, but it’s a good one as it would adapt well and given that we’re taking the show to Edinburgh it might even be possible to sell to somebody.

Or there’s my long-term plan to write a biopic of – oh, it’s such a good idea I’m not even going to mention the person in question in case somebody thieves it, but suffice it to say that it would need researching, and I’m just not sure I can be bothered.

I could finish off the novel I started writing three years ago but got bogged down with so ended up writing a different one instead. And frankly one unpublished novel feels like enough when there are plenty of people out there reading it and liking it but never quite saying “I’ll publish this”. Would that the unfinished novel was based on a more commercial idea – but it’s not. Maybe I should just knock out a Mills and Boon.

Except that I kind of half want to write a musical called “Oh! what a lovely war against terrorism” – certainly I think that if I could make it work audiences wouldn’t be too much of a problem…

I don’t know. I shall walk into town to buy some envelopes and see if I feel inspired. In the mean time, any advice would be gratefully received, especially if you’re a publisher who desperately wants to publish my novel. The finished one.

Today I came close to my first waver.

As I mentioned, my housemate Tim has joined me in my Lenten abstinence from fermented grape and seed. He spent the day planning a dinner party for five friends and bottles of fine wine were purchased – I raised eyebrows but he assurred me that he would be sticking to the fizzy grape juice.

I had enough problems of my own to worry about in any case, having been struck down with some horrendous disease which has kept me in bed for most of the day.

But I struggled out of the house in the evening to meet a friend called Mark who I’ve known since primary school and who has recently started training for the priesthood at Wescott House. He cooked me supper so that we could catch up, not having seen each other for several years. Straight off he offered me a glass of wine (he’ll make a good priest) but I explained my situation and he joined me in drinking orange juice for the evening (he’ll make a good priest).

On my way home I decided to phone Jamie Hawkey, another trainee priest who has been a mentor to me in my tribulations these last few years, mainly to complain about how horrendously unfair it was that I had given up alcohol only to be rewarded with a stinking cold.

He told me that the medieval rules were very clear that in cases of illness the fast didn’t apply, and ordered me to “stop being a literal protestant and have a double brandy.”

We don’t have any brandy at home. But this evening we had bottles of fine wine, and when I arrived home it was clear that Tim had been enjoying their content. I imperiously told him he’d probably earned himself a good few days in purgatory, and with a great air of superiority I added that if I were to have a glass of wine I would be exempt from purgatory because I was ill and the fast didn’t apply.

Tim thrust a glass of wine into my hand and told me to have some as it would make him feel better about being pissed in spite of his evident lack of illness (though from the sounds of things he’ll have a pretty good excuse to drink tomorrow morning).

I sat considering the glass of wine in front of me for a good ten minutes. I had been told by a trainee priest that I was exempt from the rules of Lent. On the other hand, was I about to use this as frankly an excuse for breaking my Lenten observance? In any case, it was not a double brandy, and although I am told a glass of red wine is good for you I don’t think it has the same cold-curing properties as a double brandy.

But then, was I just being a literal protestant, bound by some superstitious adherence to meaningless rules when I had clearly proved I could go a seven-day period without being tempted to have a single drink?

Or was I using similarly meaningless rules (medieval, apparently) as a get-out clause?

But I felt no compulsion to drink the wine. It was just there, in my hand, and hey, maybe it would do me a bit of good.

And the thought of having a glass of wine was a really nice one.

I had therefore just about decided that it was okay to drink the wine, when I realised that the fact that I wanted to drink it (compulsion or not) was probably a sign that I shouldn’t. Because if, as I said, I’d gone seven days without being tempted to have a drink, what was I proving if I had one the minute I was tempted?

I put the wine down and had a hot lemon and honey instead.

Either somebody at BBC online is having a laugh, or they were up very late last night.

For those of us who like to ogle pictures of celebrities, they’ve kindly given us last night’s Oscars ceremony in pictures.

But what’s this? “Juicy J, DJ Paul and Project Pat of Three 6 Mafia gave an energetic performance of It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp, from the film Hustle and Flow”:

Wow, just look at those bad gangsta dudes – I’m guessing the lines “North Memphis where I’m from, I’m 7th Street bound / Where niggaz all the time end up lost and never found” is autobiographical for at least one of them.

Ah, maybe this explains it: “Nick Park and Steve Box gave their Oscar statuettes matching bow ties when they accepted the awards for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”:

Yup. Either archetypal Brit Nick Park has gone for a radical change of style, or there’s been some sort of mix-up here.

But there’s no mix-up that can account for this the following: “Wallace and Gromit could not make it to the ceremony themselves – but animation company Aardman sent a photo of the pair celebrating their third Oscar.”

Ah, yes, there he is look – our favourite plasticine hero celebrating his forth Oscar, replete with the distinctive Aardman grin. I hear he’s thinking of breaking into more serious arthouse films now that he’s made his mark in the world of animation…

Still off the booze and holding up well. In fact I’ve hardly missed it at all, which surprises me since I’ve been to two parties, one formal dinner and spent an evening in a pub gigging with a blues band. With the last of these in particular a few pints is usually a prerequisite for me to create an authentic blues/jazz/rock/folk hybrid sound with my classically-trained fiddling, but I found there was enough atmosphere to get into the right mood even without dehydrating my brain. I started off drinking J2O, but our keyboard player pointed out that the preservative they use reacts with the citrus elements to create benzine, so a bottle of J2O is in fact as bad as a whole packet of cigarettes. (Okay, no statistical basis for the last sweeping statement. Probably more like 0.02% of a cigarette.) So because rough and ready country pubs pour scorn on the very notion of alcohol-free lager I stuck to coke.

Actually, nowhere seems to sell alcohol-free lager, except for the Traveller’s Rest on the Huntingdon Road, which is quite a distance to go for the sake of something so conceptually repugnant, so it’s been pretty much coke all the way. I was pleased to get the chance to see a few Footlights alumnis in Cambridge on saturday evening before they went off to see the spring review which I have failed miserably to get to, and Kevin Baker bought me a coke. He was genuinely worried by his failure to obtain a slice of lemon, since I had specified “a little ice perhaps and lemon would be nice”; and although I brushed it off with a “not at all, I didn’t really want the slice of lemon anyway” it was amazing how something so little had, in my alcohol-denied existence, taken on such importance in my head.

Kevin also ordered a steak and guinness pie, which I believe he enjoyed very much, and which led to a discussion of whether morally I would be allowed to eat a pie which contained guinness. What would the alcohol content be after cooking, I wonder? More than 0.02%?

Definitely a grey area, and probably left well alone.

James Casey, who had the lasagne, told me that rather than giving something up for Lent he’s taken a more positive approach and has taken up reading things he feels he ought to have read – he’s currently reading Mere Chrisitanity by C. S. Lewis, which would certainly be high on my list of things to read during a period of spiritual contemplation. And I can’t help feeling he’s got a better deal than me.

Yet, possibly a hangover from an education in a Catholic primary school full of stern teachers who hated me, I think I subconsciously feel there ought to be an element of suffering in Lent. So if I were to take up reading something in this penitential season it would have to be Dan Brown books, just to ensure I didn’t get any pleasure out of the experience.

I also had a small debate with James about the legality (in my current situation) of drinking communion wine, which contains considerably more that 0.02% alcohol. It led to a discussion of transubstantiation, something I wish I’d been better prepared for, and I’m not sure how relevant the conclusion was to my current situation, as I’m pretty sure we agreed that it didn’t constitute a physical change into actual non-alcoholic blood (which would be okay for me to drink). I think that given the concept of the Eucharist plays quite a significant part in this bit of the church year I’m alright to partake of it. James also pointed out that it’s not an issue on sundays, because officially they’re not part of Lent.

Not that I’m taking the easy way out and allowing myself to get trolleyed on feast days. Even when I found myself at a cross-dressing party last night with members of my old choir, I wasn’t tempted by the lure of the demon seed. Well, okay, I was tempted. It was a thoroughly hideous occasion and there were people wearing thongs who should never have done so, or at least should have kept it to themselves.

But I didn’t drink. I calmly made myself a “mocktail”. This I found to be a therapeutically creative process and not unrewarding – the selection of juices being rather limited I opted to include in my ingredients the contents of the larder, so my creation was ultimately a mixture of apple, pineapple and coconut juice with soda water, a squeezed lemon and a splash of lemonade, shaken up with cinnamon and a camomile teabag.

The result was drinkable and even quite exciting. It wasn’t nice, but I’m pretty sure that the addition of vodka would not have helped at all. Maybe a slice of lemon…

Only one tuesday left to go and see it.

So I’ve given up alcohol for Lent.

Actually I don’t see this being all that difficult and I’m looking forward to feeling fresh and healthy and waking up at 6am every day for a swim in the river.

Though I did go up to Formal Hall at Girton College last night and found myself thinking along the lines of “how on earth am I to enjoy this three course meal in the company of friends without a few glasses of wine???” I blame Cambridge University for implanting in me the attitude that it is impossible to have a good meal without a bottle of cheap red to accompany it.

Turns out it’s possible to have a very nice meal with just water. I was there with a friend who is a teacher, a friend who had to be up to do PhD work in the morning, and a friend who is also spending a self-imposed forty day period in abstinence, so we had a pleasant alcohol-free meal and said more or less as many outrageous things as we might have done were we getting drunk.

That bit was quite unexpected, actually. Turns out I’ve been using alcohol as an excuse all this time when really it’s my personality that’s at fault.

There was a moment of longing when the port and whisky came out after the meal, but I resisted temptation and stuck to the coffee (which was horrible). We then went to a pub and, feeling a slight craving for an evening beer we decided to try the alcohol-free lager.

At first I thought this was sort of cheating. But it was pointed out to me that it’s just the same as it would be for a vegetarian to eat a Linda McCartney sausage.

Except, surprisingly, rather less disgusting. In fact it was rather good stuff that you might almost mistake for real lager (Holsten alcohol-free, if you’re interested in trying it, which promises to contain 100% taste). Curious to see how they achieved this, we read the label to discover – and this amazed me – they brew the beer in the usual way and then remove the alcohol.

When this was discovered, and indeed the fact that it actually had an alcohol content of 0.02%, there was some backtracking on the morality of our drinking it. It was pointed out that this is not the same as vegetarian sausages – because few vegetarians would be pleased to discover that their sausages had been made in the same way as normal sausages and had then had the meat removed, especially if they still contained 0.02% pig.

But, I countered, there is considerably less slaughtering of animals involved in the brewing of beer, making that comparison irrelevant. I also pointed out that to have the equivalent of a single pint of average normal lager, say Stella or Heineken at 5.2%, it would be necessary to drink 260 bottles of alcohol-free Holsten.

I feel it should be possible to stay well within this level across the whole period of Lent.

My good friend and fellow sufferer in the human circus Alastair has been unjustly abused by the driver of a Ford Mondeo. You can read about the incident here.

Interestingly, the road on which this occurred is not all that far from the scene of an event which prompted this letter.

And these are but two examples of things which happen on a daily basis. No, I don’t mean on a nationwide level, or even within Cambridge on a daily basis – I mean to me on a daily basis.

I don’t claim to be a perfect cyclist. I make errors of judgement occasionally and do things which could be considered potentially dangerous through carelessness or sheer stupidity. I cycle every day, one has a tendency to get blasé about daily routines and make mistakes. Occasionally.

On these occasions car drivers are rarely forgiving, but as they pass me miming obscenities through the windscreen I am inclined to see their point of view, since I am a car driver myself and know how annoying it is to almost kill some tit messing about in the middle of the road.

But these instances are far outweighed by the times that car drivers decide to harrass me for the simple error of being a cyclist. Because careful cyclists do very slightly cause impatient drivers to have to slow down and possibly even watch the road in front of them, and so many drivers think they are above this.

People who have bothered to read the highway code (I suspect many car drivers are excluded from this category) will know that the car horn is not there to be used to “torment and disorientate roadusers without a big metal shell protecting them from the killing machines passing them at fifty miles an hour”. In fact the car horn is there simply to “warn other roadusers of your presence”. I scarcely think that Alastair needed warning of the presence of the Ford Mondeo when it was driving next to him with the driver glaring at him. And I would like it to be known that when a driver has decided to drive so close to your bike that their car is actually touching you, you don’t need warning of their presence either. You already know they’re there.

If I was in a position of power in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary (very unlikely, for I have a brain, a sense of humour and I care about social justice) I would encourage police officers to be less persistent in arresting and fining students cycling along deserted country roads at two in the morning without lights, and to deliver a few on-the-spot fines to drivers misusing their car horns. Because being beeped at by a car passing you at high speed when you’re not expecting it is just as likely to cause an accident as anything else. I’m a good cyclist and it makes me wobble; I’ve seen cyclists who wobble at the slightest gust of wind, and I imagine they’re far more prone to beeping than I am because they’re usually very slow and indecisive.

And therein lies the rub. For there are some cyclists who are so slow and indecisive, and whose grasp of basic manoeuvres is so hazy, that they constitute an actual danger and probably deserve to be beeped at. I was cycling along Grange Road earlier today and got stuck behind a very very slow cyclist, who gradually ground to a halt then stopped, waited until I was finally going round her then suddenly turned right. As she narrowly avoided twatting me I was tempted to yell “signal, move into the centre of the road and look behind you, cretin!!!” but she was in such a different reality that I imagine she wouldn’t have heard what I was saying and I might as well have shouted “beep beep!”

And so the solution seems clear to me. Well, the most obvious solution is to make cyclists take a driving test, and I’ve no idea why this perfectly sane idea has not even been suggested in Parliament. But a more instant and gratifying solution would be to take car horns away from car drivers – they don’t know how to use them and people are always aware of their presence, especially when they’re driving like idiots – and give them bells instead, which make a friendly “tring tring” sound that’s unlikely to knock a cyclist off their bike. Cyclists, on the other hand, would get the car horns, with which they would be allowed to alert car drivers to their presence (particularly the twatty ones with no respect for other roadusers) and also alert twatty cyclists to the fact that they ought to stop cycling for the safety of everyone concerned.

These are sensible suggestions which would save lives. It is distressing, then, that the only recent development in transport laws is the adoption of a European idea that car seats should be compulsory up to the age of eleven. This is clearly a ludicrous idea. For a start, age is no measure of whether people need car seats; if there are to be laws about it they should be calculated by size. And spare a thought for the poor eleven-year-olds; I’d have felt pretty bloody stupid using a car seat at that age. Especially when I wasn’t in a car.

I just recieved the following email from Delyth Jones, the director of my show:

i had the WORST nightmare last night. You did the show (at John Barton’s flat – it was bigger in the dream) and Greg Doran and JB and all the great and good of British Theatre came to see it. But you decided to be all experimental and totally change the show. It included a rendition of Kylie’s Spinning Around and a boy called Ed Maxwell (?) as your sidekick. I was sat in the front row and cried and had to leave as my career was ruined.
I hope this will not ever happen.

Well – that’s me told.

(By the way, does anybody know an Ed Maxwell? I’m pretty sure I’ve never performed with one. If you are him, perhaps you’d like to step forward. I’m wondering if it could be this person, but it seems unlikely that I’d do a one-man comedy show with a geographer as a sidekick.)

One thing that has occurred to me often since my recently renewed interest in my local cinema is the fact that the construction of film trailers has, in its own way, become as much of an art as the making of the films themselves. To the extent that the average quality of film trailers is currently much higher than that of films.

In other words, the vast majority of trailers are better than the films they are advertising. And if that idea sounds a little far-fetched, think about how many times you’ve come out of a cinema thinking “hmmm…it wasn’t as good as it looked in the trailer…”

This applies particularly to big budget Hollywood fare, largely because you get to see all the exciting explosions without having to sit through the badly-written talky bits. A particularly notable example would be Godzilla, which constructed its four different trailers essentially as short films, beautifully tense and full of character but without the excesses (which is a polite way of saying crapness) of the film itself. I’d say the trailers for the Lord of the Rings films are also far more watchable than the films, because they’re shorter (and it turns out the Howard Shore actually did just about write enough music to cover a two minute trailer without getting unbearable, so well done him).

Same goes for the current relentlessly reworked American teen/spoof/gross-out comedies – the advantage of a trailer is that you can show all the funny bits in quick succession and people are left thinking it’s going to be the funniest film ever, whereas in fact it’s just all the jokes you’ve already seen spun out by a couple of hours. Barry Norman often used the example of The Nutty Professor to demonstrate his point, having laughed his socks off during a ten-minute preview and been utterly appalled when he finally saw the whole film. (I would point out that if you see a trailer for a comedy of this nature which is not funny, it bodes very badly for the film indeed. If you happen to glimpse the trailer for Date Movie you’ll see what I mean.)

A less mainstream example that springs to mind is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the film might have been pleasant enough viewing with occasionally inspired moments, but those of us who have been listening repeatedly to the original radio series since the womb were all uncomfortably aware of what the film was missing. The trailer, however, was done as a Guide entry on film trailers which managed to send up the Hollywood format beautifully – and stood out as two minutes of material that was actually worthy of Douglas Adams. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about movie trailers,” Stephen Fry announces, taking us through the opening stages of a trailer (“often this section is preceded by the words ‘in a world’…”) all the way through to “lastly there is a final montage, often accompanied by rock music that is simply designed to blow away whatever synapses you have left in your brain.” When I first saw it I almost wept with excitement over a film that turned out not to be in the least bit worthy of any tears.

Oh, and speaking of Stephen Fry, there’s the trailer for Gosford Park, which is actually a trailer for a completely different film in which the short bit featuring Fry’s detective has been expanded to make him the main character; as such it makes the film come across as a raucously funny British slapstick romp. I remember a cinema full of people virtually applauding it when it came out. I also remember being a bit disappointed by a film which, though full of magical moments and beautiful ensemble acting, is altogether less hilarious (and also less consistent) than the trailer suggested it would be.

Oh, I could go on… The Passion of the Christ, because in the space of the trailer the violence is genuinely horrific and not just ridiculous. Possibly even Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-rabbit, again because it contains all the best jokes from the film but mainly because it has Tom Baker’s voice on it.

It’s almost de rigeur for DVDs of films to come with the trailers these days. How long before we get compilation DVDs of just trailers? Could that be the modern equivalent of those old compilation films in the It’s a Carry On vein? Perhaps directors will even start making trailers without films to accompany them, in much the same way as when Jorge Luis Borges had an idea for a novel he’d just write a review of it to save himself the effort of writing the novel itself.

Since I’m on the subject of films, I’ve also started making a list of films I shall never see on principle. They currently stand at the following five:

The Da Vinci Code (and I’ll be starting a club for people who wish to join me in feeling superior)
The Wicker Man remake (no Christopher Lee in a dress? not interested)
The Ladykillers remake (I love the Coen brothers dearly, but what were they thinking???)
The Pink Panther remake (it’s not like the original is a great film to begin with – but Steve Martin as a Peter Sellers for the 21st century? perleeese…)
Matrix Revolutions (as it is I’m pissed off that I wasted three hours of my life watching the first sequel)

I know that’s not a long list, but like the Pope’s list of forbidden works, I think it’s essentially a pretty negative thing to have films that one won’t see on principle. That said, life’s too short to waste on rubbish, and I feel my choices pretty much justify themselves. If you have any suggestions for further films I should avoid, I will certainly consider them.

Why is it that when you watch a short film there’s a pretty good chance it will have plinky minimalist xylophone music running through it?

You know – it can’t quite decide whether it’s comic or tense, so just sort of picks its way along going “plink – plinky plink plink – plink plink” with a slightly artificial sound and a lot of reverb.

Perhaps there’s just a lot of royalty-free minimalist xylophone music out there. Perhaps half the people composing for films secretly wish they were Philip Glass. Perhaps it’s meant to be alienating. Either way, I wonder if it is one of the key reasons why short films are not taken more seriously.

Apart from anything else it means they all feel exactly the same. You hear the plinky xylophone music begin and think, “ah, it’s an arty short film” – and unless you’re very patient, you turn it off.

I love short films, and even I sometimes turn them off when the plinky xylophone music begins.

If I were to add to the millions of websites giving advice about “making your short” (which I have no intention of doing), my first point would be “don’t use plinky minimalist xylophone music, you might ruin an otherwise excellent piece of film”.

That said, if I were giving advice to Hollywood film makers I’d have similar things to say about Howard Shore and James Horner, but I don’t suppose anybody would take any notice of me.