Author: James Lark

Andrew Pontzen

Following his experiences onstage in Edinburgh 2004, and realising quite how useless a degree from Cambridge really is, Andrew Pontzen increasingly found himself taking on menial roles in cheap comedy shows, at best playing the rear ends of animals, at worst allowing himself and his 1994 Song for Christmas to be viciously mocked on stage. For many years, uneducated fringe audiences in seedy bars laughed long and hard at Pontzen’s worthy musical efforts. Pontzen bore it all with his customary cheerful optimism, but the strain of being laughed at on a daily basis and his habit of sleeping in a prison cell began to take their toll.

One man, however, was not laughing.

Baz Luhrmann, desperately looking for ideas for new films, found himself watching James Lark’s Musical Chums in a cabaret bar following a performance by Irish singer Camille, who he hoped to cast in a planned (and later aborted) musical about the Irish potato famine. When he watched Pontzen perform his Song for Christmas, he saw past Lark’s snide remarks and cheap one-liners, realising that the song was just what he needed for his new cinematic venture.

Pontzen was rocketed to fame in Luhrmann’s hugely successful yuletide wartime adventure, Song 4 Xmas, in which a humble musician called Porfiroio Colon (Pontzen) goes to the warzone that is Bethlehem and, armed only with his music, brings peace to the Holy Land.

Pontzen went on to feature in a series of increasingly shoddy sequels (Song 4 Easter and Song 4 Pancake Day), wrote several unsuccessful musicals and following a messy divorce from Irish singer Camille he went back to sleeping in a prison cell and designing publicity for Annie Castledine.

Philip Stott

Shortly after his landmark performance in An Extremely Memorable Emergency, Stott started training to become a lawyer. He soon discovered that things were not going to be easy for him. The network of Freemasons running through the lawyering business had obtained photographic evidence of Stott mocking their ceremonies in a Scottish Masonic lodge using inflatable Daleks and thespy facial expressions; whatever he did, wherever he went, Stott found that his work was being thwarted. Although he was never able to pin it on the Masons, and although the people around him were superficially friendly and supportive, he knew that he was trapped in a hopeless situation.

Things were to get even worse. Arriving home from a difficult session of lawyering one evening, Stott discovered that his wife had been brutally murdered by a one-armed man. Yet when he reported the crime, the system of law that he had devoted his life to turned against him: he found himself accused of murder, tried and found guilty, and sentenced to death under new immigration laws established by Michael Howard’s Tory government (Howard himself suspected to be a leading Freemason).

But on his way to the gallows, the horse and cart transporting Stott was overturned by a steam roller from an Ealing Comedy. Joining forces with Stanley Holloway and Joan Simms, and directed by John Gordillo, Stott went in pursuit of the one-armed man for over 150 episodes, finally using his law connections to cleverly narrow down the potential suspects to two criminals, One Armed Jack and One Armed Harry. In a final twist, it turned out that the murderer had been hired by Dave Gorman, collecting material for his new show Dave Gorman’s Para-assassin Adventure, in which Gorman attempted to pin as many murders as possible on people with physical disabilities.

Stott’s harrowing experience was later made into the fourth Indiana Jones film.

Yesterday evening’s broadcast of the first in a new series of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy has brightened up my life no end, and was a radio triumph to make up for a thousand shoddily scripted episodes of The Archers. Well done to everyone involved. I doubt any of them are reading this, but well done anyway.

Particular plaudits to Andy Taylor for his portrayal of Zem the Mattress, one of the most truly delightful things I have ever heard.

On the down side, I am missing Andrew Pontzen. Would anybody like to join a club for people who miss Andrew Pontzen? We could talk about our favourite Pontzen incidents (drunk Pontzen playing keyboard in somebody else’s show, or his lecture on black holes), we could swap Pontzen concepts (“pig tree” – I mean, how brilliant is that?), we could quote him incessantly (“every song needs a minor section”).

Anybody interested?

Foam guitar?

I know all about those.

I have discovered details about a greyhound called James Lark.

I don’t know much about greyhounds, but it looks to me like he’s jolly fast.

Though he hasn’t done a race since August 2002.

I wonder if he is dead.

Somebody just passed a phone call through to me from a man called Trevor. Having some chewing gum in my mouth my teeth somehow got in the way of my words and I greeted him “hello, Treasure”.

I think he felt it was inappropriately familiar given the brevity of our acquaintance.

Sunday was the most exciting day I have had in a long time, and I didn’t even listen to the morning service on radio 4. No, what I did was I coxed a boat in a race on the Cam and our time was 5 minutes and 39 seconds which is really jolly good indeed. It was sunny and jolly and jolly sunny and we were on the river being jolly fast and there is little that is as jolly and exciting as that.

But most exciting of all, one member of the crew, a fine specimen of the human race named Tim Harling, bought me my very own baseball cap.

Admittedly, his reasons for doing so were entirely selfish. In the past I have been forced to borrow his cap to hold on my coxing microphone, which has resulted in his head getting sunburned. He therefore saw little option but to buy me my own. Nevertheless, I was touched by his action, particularly by the fact that he sought out what he felt to be an especially appropriate cap bearing the legend “Kinky Tom’s Bike Shack”.

Since then I have been rather curious as to the exact nature, and indeed whereabouts, of the named Bike Shack. Who, I wonder, is the eponymous Kinky Tom?

A quick search on Google only throws up one Kinky Tom, on a message board on the Swindon Town Football Club website. He explains that he acquired this nickname because his name is Tom and he owns a T-shirt with the Kinky Tom’s Bike Shack motif on it.

It is exciting to know that such a T-shirt exists, of course, and I shall spend the rest of the day on Ebay trying to get hold of one. But it is sad that I haven’t managed to find the original Kinky Tom. Alas, the only other thing Google throws up if you type in “Kinky Tom’s Bike Shack” is a strange mixture of amateur pornographic writings including kinky characters called Tom and unusual sexual exploits on bikes and in shacks.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some entertaining reads amongst them, but it’s still a disappointment.

Has anybody else noticed quite how much Tony Blair has changed recently? Obviously people have been saying for ages how much older he looks, and that’s frankly inevitable when you’re a) Prime Minister and b) getting older. But over the last few weeks the change in his appearance has been rather more alarming – looking at him on the news, or in the newspapers, it is very clear that his face has actually got bigger. And his hair is dropping off faster than ever, as if it can’t cope with this new, Prescott-style big face.

It is worth noting that a similar change occurred to Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s jolly little remake of The Fly.

I can’t help wondering if Tony Blair has been involved in some sort of horrific genetic experiment in which his DNA has been accidentally spliced with that of Edward Heath.

Compline at Girton College Chapel last night featured Rutter’s really rather revolting choral work The Lord Bless You and Keep You. It was my idea – I thought it would be funny.

And it was funny. It was jolly jolly funny. Even the Chaplain was chuckling to himself, and so overcome with the humour of the situation were certain members of the choir that the final chord was singularly lacking a bass note.

Some fifteen hours later and the bloody thing is still going round and round in my head. It has ceased to be funny.

The odd thing is, it keeps turning into A Whiter Shade of Pale.

I think what I just ate could be described as: “a tiny muffin incorporating two rolled up bits of bacon and filled with cream cheese”.

What on EARTH possessed the freelance catering company employed to feed bored Civil Servants to create such an ABOMINATION????

Was the catering company bored? Or did they think the Civil Servants would be bored? Obviously not bored enough, as they didn’t touch the things. Which is why I’ve just had one.

I feel like I’ve been abused by a muffin.