Author: James Lark

People browsing our website in the hope of finding Hermione porn will be excited to learn that yesterday I visited the set of the forthcoming Harry Potter film. Although I didn’t actually see any Hermione porn, I did see Hermione. (I also saw a baby with Ralph Fiennes’ head.)

In fact, watching a little scene between Hermione and Harry being filmed, it was apparent that Emma Watson (who plays the plucky Miss Granger) may be one of the main reasons why the film is taking so long to make. Sure, there are all those long meetings to discuss what Ralph Fiennes’ nostrils should look like and the hours of special effects work needed to give Daniel Radcliffe realistic gills, but when it comes to filming a scene the last thing you need on the set is a method actor – and Emma Watson is a mini-method actor in the making.

If there is a question to be asked, she will ask it. “What can I see when I’m standing here?” “How do I see that if I’m facing this way?” “But am I distracted by both feet or just the one that’s wiggling?” “Wouldn’t it work better if I came down the stairs?” “What exactly is the wizard formula I’m trying to learn?”……etc. Tis but a short step to “but what is my motivation for doing that?”

If people are hoping to see her do porn, they had better be prepared to give her a jolly good reason for it, or it aint gonna happen.

Daniel Radcliffe, on the other hand, asks no questions and just gets on with it. “Sit like this,” the director says, to which young Potter replies “yeah okay” and does it. This, I understand, is much closer to the approach used by Alan Rickman when he’s filming his scenes.

And sometimes, when her moods were so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring something in her ear that sounded like, “Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

Thus in Dickens’ Great Expectations does Miss Havisham breed the beautiful Estella to break men’s hearts. But that is just a story.

In real life, there is a Miss Havisham (though that may not be her name) who has bred hundreds of people and has murmured into their ears “Break James Lark’s heart and have no mercy.” Hundreds of them. Not sure why.

Jimmy Carr was on Top Gear last night, in conversation with Jeremy Clarkson.

A comedy partnership made in heaven, methinks.

Their show could be called The Two JCs (“Neither of us is John Cleese but we both think we’re Jesus Christ!”)

There was a scene in Neighbours last night where a girl called Carmella taunted that nice Irish one by pretending to be talking to a boyfriend on her telephone in front of him. The scene’s punchline was the revelation that she had actually only phoned the speaking clock.

What a stupid girl she must be. Everyone knows you don’t actually have to phone somebody to pretend to be talking to a boyfriend on your mobile. And having a long imaginary conversation with the speaking clock is one way to ensure that your phone bill rockets.

The incident took place in Daphne’s coffee shop, only it hasn’t been called that for a while, and I can’t help feeling that Des would be upset. (Des was Daphne‘s husband, before she copped it in a harrowing car crash. My little sister used to call him Desk.)

I don’t regularly watch the programme now that it isn’t the 1980s, but from what I can make out it seems to have recently embraced storylines involving incest, lesbianism and sex-obsessed Italian film stars. Funny to think that the most controversial thing it contained in the good old days was Kylie Minogue wearing dungarees…

When I was a Cub Scout, I attended a Christmas fancy dress party as a pirate. What fun it was, with my felt-tip stubble and inflatable parrot, waving my cardboard cutlass around and shouting “aaarrrr”.

But pirates are not merely fictional creations with wooden legs; for centuries they struck terror in the hearts of merchant seamen, looting and plundering villages and carrying out acts of unbelievable cruelty over widespread areas. What is more, piracy continues today, primarily in the South China Sea and along the African coast.

Clearly my so-called “fun” pirate costume was actually in the worst possible taste, and hugely disrespectful to those who have lost family members to pirates.

I would like to make a public apology for my costume and all the offence that it caused. But if that is insufficient (and I can imagine Michael Howard might be very quick to take up the pirate widow cause and chastise me further) then I offer myself for public humiliation, with photographs of my leering ten-year-old pirate face readily available to be splashed across the tabloids for days on end just so people can see what an insensitive bastard I am. I am fully prepared for this really horribly serious misdemeanour to be ridiculed and criticised in every possible manner, to be discussed in every forum, and to be jeered at by every living soul, so seriously serious was this dreadful, awful faux-pas of fancy dress.

“A heroic war cry to apparently peaceful ends is one of the greatest weapons a politician has.” – Mavic Chen, the power-crazed, insane and utterly evil Guardian of the Solar System in ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ (1965)

“History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” – George W. Bush (2003)

This lunchtime I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps. The Post Office seemed like a logical first point of call for such goods; one might almost have thought that stamps were the prime sales product of an establishment calling itself a Post Office.

Except that if you have visited a Post Office recently you might have noticed that they now sell a variety of other habadashery, ranging from tasteless glittery cards depicting the Queen Mother, cheap videos of films nobody likes such as Hudson Hawk and The Postman, those little snowstorm globes containing plastic scenes of the Houses of Parliament next to the Eifel Tower, and a myriad of Postman Pat merchandise.

And not, it appears, stamps.

“Could I have a book of first class stamps?” I asked the spotty kid at the counter.

“Sorry, we’ve run out,” he replied.

Run out? Of first class stamps? The Post Office?

“Very well, good Sir,” I hissed through my teeth, “I’ll have a book of second class stamps then.”

“We’ve run out of them as well,” the spotty kid responded.

I was forced to buy my stamps in Sainsbury’s, which is ironic really because I kicked up a bit of a fuss there a while ago because they’d run out of macaroons. Perhaps I should have tried the Post Office.

In 1642 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of this sceptered isle, banned all forms of theatrical production*. It is therefore thanks to him that we don’t have any nasty, corrupt theatre in this country any more.

So I would like to offer my commiserations to the brave Christian martyrs who burned their TV licences outside BBC Television Centre at the weekend in protest against the broadcast of Jerry Springer – the Opera. If only they had succeeded in getting it pulled from the schedules, they would have put an end to swearing in this country. Good on them, anyway, for voicing their anger at a show which has caused them so much offence even though none of them had even apparently seen it! Cromwell would have been proud of you.

And shame on the BBC for not realising that these religious zealots have a God-given right to censor art that is not suitable for everybody else.

* Actually, it seems that Cromwell liked musicals and occasionally made exceptions for them. Which suggests that he was a little bit gay. (He also occasionally wore a diaper.)

I don’t know which is worse, the Drifters singing O Holy Night, or Aled Jones singing O Holy Night in a duet with his younger treble self. They are both dreadful, but I think that now especially, in the aftermath of Strictly Come Dancing, we must face the possibility that Aled Jones may in fact be a better dancer than he is a singer.

Either way, I have a feeling that this festive season is not going to be good for my skin.

It seems to be trendy for bloggers of an ex-Cambridgey persuasion to make mention of the broadcast of John Finnemore’s play Tails You Lose on Radio 4 yesterday. So I shall join the fun and mention that I tuned in to listen on one of the computers in the office I’m working in. As a result I erroneously sent out a number of letters inviting candidates to come to interviews in May rather than January, and angered a woman who had come into the office to complain and thought we weren’t taking life seriously enough. But it was well worth it.

I will not try to describe quite what a good play it is, except to refer back to the last time it was mentioned on this website (Edinburgh 2003) when James Aylett commented that anyone who didn’t like it does not have a soul.

In this case, it is quite possible that one man who would not be particularly keen on the play is Paul Burrell, whose soul appears to be for sale on Ebay.

Later today I plan to go to a party at the house of Anthony Windram, a one-time comedy collaborator (in fact, we first appeared on stage together in an early Finnemore opus, the very fine 1999 Footlights panto Sherlock Holmes – about which undergraduates who weren’t even born in 1999 still talk in hushed and reverent tones). Anthony is one of the nicest people in the world; he also has a very amusing accent. So I am looking forward to seeing him very much indeed, especially as he has promised that if he can’t get hold of a recording of Wham’s “Last Christmas” he will sing it to me instead.

(If this happens it will presumably become “Lerst Chrerstmers”.)