Author: James Lark

For reasons of immodesty, I ought to mention that The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget has been rather flatteringly reviewed on the Rogues and Vagabonds website – you can read the review here.

Fellow performers will see at once that it is emminently quotable, with gems such as “panache and charm that can veer uncomfortably on the side of manic paranoia and pathological ineptitude”, or the simple and straightforward “Lark is engaging from beginning to end”. But my favourite bit is this:

“Lark’s easy manner enchanted the female members of the audience and left us males gobsmacked at his nerve and unbelievable success with women.”

Evidently, I had a good valentine’s day after all.

I had a long and heated argument with Phil Stott this evening about Pink Floyd, which somehow ended in him telling an anecdote that finished with the sentence “so at some point in his life, Mick Hucknall has woken up with a big poo on his chest!”

Phil then tried to light the wrong end of a cigarette, which was both demeaning for him and undermined his whole argument about Pink Floyd being dull. Should think so too.

I’ve just discovered that if you play John Lennon’s hatefully dull Imagine at high speed, it becomes a comic song with infinitely more entertainment value. Maybe that’s what he intended all along?

He’s going to get teased at school.

I had a horrendous dream that we were doing Impromime and Andrew Ormerod suddenly decided during the get-in that he wanted a random housemate of his called John to have a go at being the dame. (John had black-rimmed glasses and blond floppy hair and I do not think he exists in real life. Do correct me if I’m wrong.)

John had a big, camp personality so I could see why Andrew wanted to try him out as the dame, though I was infuriated because it was my turn. In any case, once John got on stage he became all shy and reserved and didn’t speak nearly loud enough to be heard. I kept shouting “louder!” at him, but Andrew Pontzen thought I meant him so he kept turning up the volume on the piano, which obviously made the situation worse.

Finally I made John stop and, to show I wasn’t the only creative director with ideas for new dames, I asked Sylvester McCoy if he wanted to have a go at being the dame.

Sylvester McCoy was incredibly funny and we laughed and laughed and laughed, but unfortunately we felt that he wasn’t really playing by the rules of narrative so we promised him a chance to work on it in rehearsals and I got to be the dame after all.

It all felt so real…

Red faces in the Lark household last night. I had a friend round and we watched a very fine film called Mysterious Skin – highly recommended, by the way. My housemate had left me us to our dinner and DVD, but happened to arrive home just in the middle of the film’s (one) particularly graphic and nasty anal rape scene. So it looked as though we were huddled in the dark watching violent gay porn.

I was reminded of how whenever I used to try and watch a James Bond film in my teens, one of my parents would inevitably burst in just when Bond was getting it on with somebody.

Of course, James Bond never anally raped anybody (except perhaps in the Timothy Dalton ones, which I still haven’t seen). But the embarrassment factor was similar.

Valentine’s day is coming up, and if you’re anything like me you’ll have come to dread this annual attack on the self-esteem of all romance-deprived singletons.

However, I feel I must point out that this year there is no need at all to feel lonely on Valentine’s day, because I am doing a show at 7.30 to which anyone and everyone is warmly invited. Just think – instead of sitting on your own you now have the opportunity to spend the evening with me, in a non-sexual but still very intimate performer-audience relationship.

If that doesn’t sound good enough I’ll try and hitch you up with one of my friends after the show.

Not that couples are excluded – a more romantic evening I could not imagine, at least outside Italy. A couple of my friends, who have been together for probably five years or more, have decided to forgoe an expensive evening of champagne and sweet nothings and spend it at the Canal Cafe Theatre instead. Let that be a lesson to you all.

If you can’t come you could at least send me flowers.

Britney Spears has been criticised after paparazzi caught her “driving with her baby on her lap”.

Close inspection of the photograph, however, reveals that the criticisms are unfounded. Look at Britney – she’s relaxing back into the headrest, her eyes aren’t even on the road. It’s clear that she isn’t the person driving the car at all – the baby is.

Yes, the baby has oddly muscular arms. But if his arms are that well-developed, there’s no reason why his brain shouldn’t be as well – you can see the concentration on his face as he motors along. Who’s to say that he hasn’t already passed his driving test?

On the other hand, if he hasn’t passed his driving test and Britney is lying about having been “driving with a baby to escape the paparazzi” just to cover up for her son, then that is wrong. Very wrong.

Tom Bell rightly points out on his website that this is hilarious.

Actually, it’s so hilarious I was, for several minutes, convinced that Tom Bell had made it himself. This page, for instance, has all the hallmarks of a Bellish piece of whimsy.

The only reason I am now persuaded it’s genuine is the detailed knowledge it displays of Recessive Pieds. Surely even Tom would not be so obsessive in his lampooning of fading celebrities.

Surely…

But really – “Athlete, Strongman and Prize Winning Buderigar Breeder”… How can absurdist comedians hope to compete with real life?

Obviously there’s nothing funny about the riots in Afghanistan caused by an unwise piece of media satire.

But when I see a headline like Four Killed in Cartoon Protests, all I can think of is people hitting each other on the head with gigantic hammers while giant lumps appear on their heads and birds fly around tweeting, or dashing into doors which have been shut in their faces, or blowing each other up with ball-shaped bombs marked “bomb” which do little more than blacken their faces…

I hope Jessica Rabbit’s alright.