Author: James Lark

People have muttered things like “the problems are with the 45-minute format” or “two-parters just don’t work”…

Well bollocks to that. The problems are with the storylines, or lack of them. The two-parter in question had barely enough story for one episode and that was pretty insubstantial – I’m sorry, after a lovely alien threat being set up (yes, lovely, they crashed a spaceship into Big Ben and everything) it’s a bloody disappointment that the Doctor wins the day simply by launching a missile at them! (Yes, a bloody disappointment.) It’s sloppy writing, just like the “anti-plastic” used to defeat the plastic aliens in the first episode. What, has Russell T Davies been taking lessons in deus ex machina from J K Rowling or something?

I enjoyed it. But it was also pretty shite. Dr Who was always – always – at its best when the writing was top notch. And no amount of flashy special effects and fart jokes can change that. Even Penelope Wilton can’t change that, wonderful though she is.

Come on, sort it out. What’s the script editor getting paid for, for God’s sake?

And the aliens still look rubber and shite after all these years.

It’s all very well being able to vote for a Parliamentary MP, but let’s face it we all know it’s a rubbish system. We want to be able to vote for a Prime Minister. And I would go a step further: I would like to be able to vote for the Prime Minister’s wife as well. I think I would vote for Gordon Brown with Michael Howard’s wife (who, unlike her husband, is quite young and attractive).

I note from the weblog of Marianne Levy that she has been to see the West End version of Mary Poppins. All I can say is that I am very jealous, because when I was last in London looking for a show to see it had sold out (it being a spontaneous spur-of-the-moment type visit) and the rest of London being full of depressing Wagner and Schiller I found myself purchasing tickets for Mel Brooks’ much-lauded winner of three Oliver awards (including best new musical, no less), The Producers. And my God, did I find myself regretting it.

Because in spite of the good reviews, the awards and the personal recommendations it has received, it is an awful show. The songs are badly written and nobody has been brave enough to make cuts to the overlong and poorly-structured script, but most surprisingly of all it just isn’t funny, with the exception of one sequence which is almost identical to its appearance in the 1968 film of the same name.

The sequence in question is the justly famous “Springtime for Hitler”, a superb parody of a tasteless, dreadful musical – the ultimate send-up of a Broadway flop. As a piece of satire on bad theatre, however, its effectiveness is much diminished by the fact that it now forms the climax of an equally tasteless, dreadful musical. Whereas the deliberately corny showtunes and outrageous bad taste in “Springtime for Hitler” are a glorious pastiche, in the rest of the show they are just – well, rubbish tunes and bad taste. Perhaps the whole thing is just meant to be a big joke, but if that’s the case then it is a joke which wears thin very quickly.

And if it is a joke (I have my doubts), it stands out in a show which doesn’t strain itself to tell genuine jokes when it can get a cut-price laugh from a social stereotype instead. So we get the sledgehammer humour of old, randy ladies, mincing queens, Swedish blondes and sieg-heiling neo-Nazis. None of which, contrary to what Mel Brooks clearly believes, are inherently funny. A man in a dress – how droll! A Bavarian giving a Nazi salute – hilarious! And a burly, unattractive lesbian – comic gold indeed. It is comedy with all the subtlety and wit of a man shouting “bum” (a subtlety which is incidentally more than matched by Lee Evans and every single other member of the gurning, pratfalling, attention-seeking cast).

How depressing, then, that this show has not only been hailed from many quarters as an artistic success, but that audiences have been loving it. The show itself pokes fun at such undiscerning crowds, with “Springtime for Hitler” being received rapturously by critics and audiences alike – never has life imitating art seemed so tragically ironic. At least it demonstrates a certain accuracy in this particular piece of satire, because for the most part it is far from clear who the show is lampooning. Who exactly are the gay stereotypes targeting – people in the theatre? Camp people in general? Or is it that audiences still think homosexuals are pretty laughable? After all, laughing at them is a way of making them seem less threatening – it’s the same principle as making jokes about Nazis.

Though it isn’t clear to me exactly why the Nazi character is funny, either. It isn’t as if he’s given anything funny to do or say. Are we just meant to be tickled by the fact that he’s a German? (The Swedish secretary is certainly nothing more than a crude joke at the expense of foreigners: they have unpronounceable names and speak with funny accents, my word what a side-splitting observation.) Or do people genuinely still consider stereotypical Nazi characters to be the cutting edge of humour? Haven’t we moved on from 1945?
It would be different if, instead of a neo-Nazi with a Hitler musical, the character was a Middle-Eastern terrorist with a musical about 9/11. But that would be a show with considerably less mainstream appeal. Because in spite of its celebrated vulgarity, the middle-class masses are flocking to see The Producers and loving it – it’s as subversive as Last of the Summer Wine. Under the smokescreen of a naughty grin The Producers says it is okay for people to laugh their heads of at old ladies, Germans and other assorted foreigners, blondes and queers. And the sophisticated 21st century theatregoing crowds don’t need to be asked twice.

I suspect Mary Poppins is actually a far better social satire, for reasons already explained, and not for the first time in my life I find myself wishing that I was Marianne Levy.

Because of having to perform in my show (as promoted by BowieNet) I have spent the last week in London, enjoying the sights and smells of the city. This was generally an enjoyable and enlightening experience and I saw some lovely things. The nice clean front of St. Paul’s Cathedral has now been revealed and it is looking fabulous.

Unfortunately the entry fee is something like £7, a ridiculous amount to pay to pop into a house of God, so I was forced to bluff my way in. Successfully, I should add – if you ever want to get in for free, just tell the stewards that you are there to see Canon Martin Warner and you’ll be waved through.

I found myself unjustifiably amused by a restaurant with the following name:

I’m not sure why the fact that top of Mr Jerk’s menu is “brown stew fish” makes seem even funnier, but it does.

And I saw a man on the underground wearing a pair of glasses that were actually, if you look closely, some kind of radio receiver:

Methinks he must be a spy – because only a spy would have the technology to receive radio transmissions on the London underground. You’d have thought he might put some glass into the glasses frames, though, to draw attention away from his secret agent status.

I also met up with some interesting and diverting people whilst in the capital. For the first time in a while I saw the UD’s very own Philip Stott and his very wonderful girlfriend Delyth Jones. Here they are on the Docklands Light Railway shortly after seeing my show. Perhaps you can try to guess from their faces what they thought of it.

It is also worth pointing out that Phil has stuck my picture up on his wall.

I now appear to be competing with Michael Caine to see who has the most thespy dark brooding look. I reckon I’ve got the edge…

Much of my time was spent with my co-star, Fran Lebens. Here she is being my personal secretary.

Fran sometimes works in a café called the Wet Fish, where she introduced me to a regular customer called Archie. He was Scottish. This is a blurry photograph of him:

We had an evening of drinks to celebrate his birthday and he seemed like a very unassuming, quiet fellow. Fran told me that he was a poet. Then a little way through the evening, in the flickering candlelight, Archie quietly recited a few of his poems – which, it turned out, were quite, quite wonderful. Full of savage wit and feeling, but beautiful, really beautiful. This is one of them:

The Undead

Along a long and rutted road,
built when roads began,
came a shattered host of hopes and bones,
another inch in mileage stones,
erected by the dead for the dying,
who say they’re alive,
I say they’re lying,
along a long and rutted road…

Who’d have thought that you could suddenly find yourself listening to such a gem in a tiny café in Hampstead? And they way Archie read them made the words come to life in the most incredible way – a table of people held their breath and leaned forward to catch every nuance of his delivery. It was like listening to a Dylan Thomas reading his own poetry. Except the accent was different.

And of course, people have heard of Dylan Thomas, whereas nobody has heard of Archie Colquhoun. Which I think is a crying shame – he certainly deserves to have his poetry known, and they probably ought to be preserved in an audio format if the world isn’t going to lose something rather special.

The most exciting thing has happened. By virtue of having slightly copied an iconic David Bowie album cover for my show, I have gained a mention on the news page of the official David Bowie website, BowieNet.

I feel as though I’ve done something terrible audacious; I’ve dressed up as the Dame and somehow been welcomed into his family as a result.

I also feel like my career might have just peaked.

Last night I went to Cambridge’s premiere night-spot Life to discover that a large group of people had arrived in fancy dress. There didn’t seem to be any particular theme to their costumes, except that they all appeared to vaguely resemble circus freaks.

The normally dressed clientelle politely ignored the fancy dressers, assuming that it must have been some kind of stag night. But then somebody pointed out to me that the ridiculous false nose being worn by a man in a red cape was in fact his real nose.

It dawned on me that they might actually have been circus freaks.

Given that there are no circuses in town at the moment, I can only deduce that they probably weren’t, but it seems likely that they are the kind of people who might have been circus freaks in the glorious heyday of circus freakery. Since circus freaks are now considered more or less un-PC, these people have possibly found themselves pretty much out of a job – but the only way they can go out to a nightclub without attracting lots of attention is to dress up in the pretence of being out on a stag night.

Or perhaps they just like dressing up. I went round to see James Aylett on Saturday and he was dressed as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and nobody thinks the worse of him for that.

I was working on Radio Cambridgeshire’s Sunday Breakfast show this morning, and naturally the place was bristling with Pope-mania. We had special programmes on the Pope, local people talking about the Pope and occasional phone calls from listeners who wanted to add some balance to the programme by alluding to the Pope’s culpability for the spread of HIV in developing countries due to his attitude towards contraception (unfortunately I was not allowed to put any of these views on the air).

At one point we decided it would be exciting to do a live report from the Catholic church down the road, so I was given a huge metal-framed OB radio backpack which was probably donated to Radio Cambs in the 1970s. Thus laden, I set out along the road, to the visible amusement of anybody who happened to be passing. Catching my reflection in a shop window, I could see exactly why – put succinctly, I look like a Ghostbuster.

The photograph scarcely does justice to quite how foolish I looked. But I bravely carried on with my best Egon Spengler serious expression, and arrived at the Catholic church to deliver the following piece of stunning journalism:

Presenter: We’re going to go live to James now, who is at the Catholic church on Hill’s Road…are you there, James? Ah, I’ve lost him…

James: …hiss…crackle…Hello?

Presenter: Ah, there you are.

James: Yes, I’m just outside the …hiss…crackle…hiss… on Hill’s…

Presenter: What’s the situation there at the moment?

James: …hiss hiss hiss …just coming out of mass and…

Presenter: You’re breaking up, James.

James: …hiss… people…hiss crackle crackle…

Presenter: I think we’re going to have to leave you there, let’s move on and look at our website of the week.

For a glorious minute or so it was just like being on BBC News 24.

Also in the crazy world of religion, the Telegraph reports that famously gay consecrated Bishop Gene Robinson has declared that Jesus might also have been gay – his reasoning is that Jesus “spent much of his time with men”. By the same logic we could deduce that George Best, Captain Robert Scott, Robin Hood and indeed Pope John Paul II were also gay.

As if to prove that they can more than equal the liberals in their share of mentally deranged clergy, the conservative Anglicans have responded by saying that Gene Robinson should be “struck down by a bolt of lightning”.

It’s enough to turn a man Catholic…

You’re probably wondering what’s been so important that I haven’t even written about what I thought of the first in the new series of Doctor Who. Well, I’ve been busy. Mainly because of a show that I’m in called The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget (do come along). So I was in London for most of last week rehearsing that, besides fitting in meetings about a feature film that I’m writing and a musical I’m MDing. In my spare time I also managed to pop out to the West End and see The Producers, which I hated.

I’m now back in Cambridge enjoying the sun, though I seem unable to get out of bed at a reasonable time. I think Easter has taken it out of me a bit. Last weekend was horribly frantic, what with church services to do the music for, radio shows to produce and weddings to go to. And I managed to lose my housemate’s sleeping bag on a train from Bexley to Charing Cross, which didn’t help matters.

Due to some of the above I didn’t actually see last week’s Dr Who when it was broadcast, but thanks to BBC3 I managed to catch it a little later on. And what I thought was: generally stylish and exciting, Eccleston good, but it was all so full of breathless rushing around that there wasn’t time for any of the thoughtful characterisation or story development that Dr Who manages at its best. And the narrative itself was extremely sloppy – the Doctor defeated the Autons using “anti-plastic”, which is rather like using “anti-Dalek” – i.e. a cop out. I had started to worry that Russell T. Davies, expert though he is at writing about gay Manchunians (albeit ones I don’t think I would particularly want to spend any time with) might not have what it takes to write well-constructed portions of drama.

My fears have been allayed. Exterminated, even. The episode just broadcast, “The End of the World”, was the finest piece of TV drama I have seen since Stephen Poliakoff’s wonderful The Lost Prince. From start to finish it was magnificent; witty and inventive, hugely tense and exciting, and containing some extremely moving moments – a beautifully played scene in which it was implied that something terrible had happened to the Doctor’s people sent shivers down my spine. Perhaps what is most satisfying is that Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor gets better and better all the time, a wonderfully complex portrayal. (What a shame we’re losing him after this series…)

This was genuinely Dr Who at its best. All in all things look more than promising for the rest of the series – and its future.

One gripe: the title sequence looks like it was produced on Windows Media Player. And the theme tune is missing the middle eight.

I am now getting a childish thrill from the fact that Doctor Who is everywhere at the moment – it’s like it used to be when it was on TV in my youth, when everyone at school would be excited by last night’s cliffhanger. Now everyone is discussing the series again – every magazine is covering it in some way (even Attitude, for crying out loud…) and everyone in the media has something to say about it, from children’s BBC presenters to regional radio DJs and newsreaders.

I’m not one of these fans who is getting all nervy about whether it’s going to be any good. It can’t be any worse than the 1996 TV Movie, after all. And Project: WHO? on BBC Radio 2 yesterday evening made for largely encouraging listening: from what one can tell, the new series is witty, exciting, inventive and well-produced, with fine scripts, fine actors and a clear vision of what it wants to be.

I only had one quibble with what the Executive Producer said – he explained that he insisted that all stories had to have implications on the human race in some way – stories are not allowed to focus on entirely alien cultures, otherwise they won’t have any relevance to a 21st century audience.

With all due respect, Mr T. Davies, bollocks. Do I need to be a Victorian to see the relevance of Nicholas Nickleby? Do I need to be a talking beaver to feel involved in the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Is it impossible to relate to the beautifully constructed worlds of Iain M. Banks, having as they do no implications for the human race?

By preventing writers from creating entirely new worlds devoid of human interference, I fear Russell T. Davies is stifling the potential for creativity in approaching ways of making stories “relevant” to human beings. The first ever Dalek story couldn’t have been further away from the human race in terms of location – but it seemed to strike a chord with people, possibly because the idea of a race being forced to retreat into shells as the result of a nuclear war wasn’t all that remote to those viewers. Modern viewers are surely not too stupid to find similar parallels in these days of WMD, even without the human race popping up to make things “relevant”.

More alien planets, please. If I want human beings I’ll watch Newsnight.

Well…

…fom the BBC website. Just thought it was brilliant that the Doctors now fit on a 3×3 grid. Somebody ought to make a Dr Who rubik’s cube.