Uncategorized

The 100 Greatest Cartoons my arse. The greatest cartoon of all time, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, doesn’t even feature. Oh yeah, I’m sure it was just squeezed out by Gay Duck, that superbly animated classic.

Dear Car Drivers,

I wish to point out that although my vehicle has only two wheels and is considerably cheaper to run, lighter, more environmentally friendly and healthier than yours, I still have a legal right to pull out and turn right at junctions.

In the event that there is a car driver behind me as I approach such a junction, I will usually signal to indicate my intentions, then pull out to turn right.

It may be that I this means I have to pull out in front of you, not slowing down or stopping and letting you pass, but actually making the right turn in front of your very vehicle so that you have to slow down slightly and witness my manoeuvre. Yes, almost as if I were another CAR! You may find this tedious, unfair, perhaps even demeaning, but I would point out that it is still something that I have every legal right to do as a road-user.

I am very sorry if my reckless right-turning might have added a few seconds to journeys you have made in the past. I apologise if you feel that it is nonsensical to make concessions to us “two-wheelers”. I know that if you decided to ignore me and just carry on driving regardless, the likelihood is that I would suffer considerably more damage than you.

But from a legal and moral point of view, you would still have been WRONG.

You may choose to beep your horn as I pull out, to vent your righteous rage at my cheek at presuming to be a proper vehicle.

But you are still WRONG.

I wonder if you might consider showing a little more patience to poor, slow cyclists such as myself, silly though it may seem to you that we occasionally wish to take routes that include right-turns.

In the meantime, I wonder if you might also stop being such FUCKING TWATS.

Yours faithfully,

James Lark

“An exorcism isn’t an appropriate subject for television”, or similar words, from Ann Widdecombe, on the subject of last night’s TV offal. I have this image of an office, deep in Whitehall, staffed by spotty interns who watch TV all day with a big list of appropriate subjects. Whenever something not on the list comes up, they write it up and send it to any MP who hasn’t done much recently, so they can make unnecessary remarks about it.

Every so often they make a mistake and give one to Boris Johnson, who laughs in their puffy faces before nicking their bagels and sauntering off down the corridor whistling the theme tune to Joe 90.

• “We must put safety before liberty” – Tony Blair, paraphrased by The Telegraph, 24/02/2005
• “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” – Benjamin Franklin
• “Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.” – Harry Emerson Fosdick
• “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.” – Edmund Burke

I’m going to have to stop thinking of Beard Clarke as a pitbull, and cast him as something with more nibbly teeth. Like a fascist hamster.

• “There is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack.” – Tony Blair, writing in The Telegraph, 24/02/2005

No greater civil liberty? No greater civil liberty? Not freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom to vote and think and dress and work as I please? No, clearly not. The freedom to not be blown up by terrorists is far more important – let’s ignore the fact that far fewer people are the victims of terrorist attacks than of incompetent government bundling of health, social security, transport or education. Unless New Labour is planning to offer vocational training in terrorism it’s difficult to see how Al Qaeda could ever pose a greater threat to most people than, say, MRSA. Or a seven day house arrest without judicial review. Or Ruth Kelly.

To be completely fair, Cicero disagrees with me. “Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law”, he boldly states. I can hear him now, calling down the years: “Let none listen to Aylett, lest he end up listening to himself!”. But then he was a wuss who would go and sulk every time he lost a case he was trying; and let us not forget that it was also Cicero who said “When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff”, something that a couple of millenia later has become enshrined as the way to get elected in America. Speaking of which:

• “This young century will be liberty’s century.” – George W. Bush
• “It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.” – Dick Cheney

(Cheney subsequently making it his life’s work to ensure that no American ever again takes liberty for granted.)

And in case you were thinking that judicial review of cases which (for reasons that have never been explained) cannot be prosecuted will make us all happy, free, safe bunnies:

• “Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.” – Edmund Burke

It’s a growing problem on the streets of Cambridge. I don’t mind people thrusting the Big Issue in my face every 200 yards, and I’ll quite happily buy it from people who are using inventive ways of selling their product – the people who charm you into buying one, or who include a juggling dog as part of their act, or who persuade you to part with your money under the pretence of selling the Radio Times. Quite happy with all of those. (Well, I’d actually be mightily pissed off with anyone who did the last of them to me, but I would also feel a kind of grudging respect for them.)

But what’s bothering me is the people who stand making sarcastic comments to passers by, along the lines of “don’t all push at once” but repeated with dripping irony and loaded with hatred of humankind for its failure to line up and obediently buy a load of Big Issues. I don’t imagine it’s easy standing in the cold selling a flimsy magazine, but to chastise people for failing to line up and buy it is frankly quite offensive. God knows, in Cambridge the chances are that half of them have already bought one just around the corner anyway.

You couldn’t sell anything else like that – “please, Madam, before you walk away from that dress, consider that it at least looks better than the hideous clothes you’re wearing” … “oh, not going to buy that book after all, Sir? Is the writing too small or something?” … “I’d recommend this washing product, because you smell.”

And anyway, there are so many other options. There is a very charming man outside Great St Mary’s who threatens to puncture my tyres whenever I lock up my bike without buying a Big Issue from him – that’s the kind of creative approach to salesmanship I’d like to see more of. And I’ve never dared to say no to him.

In case anybody thinks that I am the kind of person who watches Eastenders, I should point out that I am not the kind of person who watches Eastenders. But last Friday I was polishing my shoes and twas rumoured that there was going to be a hugely exciting hour-long special edition in which “Dirty” Den Watts would get murdered, so I put on the TV and waited to be dazzled.

You don’t have to watch Eastenders to know that “Dirty” Den (played by “Dirty” Leslie Grantham, best known for his role as Kiston in the Dr Who story “Resurrection of the Daleks”) was first killed in 1989. Perhaps one of the reasons he was brought back to life is because the original death was to put it lightly a non-event – the scene, oft replayed on programmes like The Top 3000 Most Thrilling Soap Moments in the World! goes something like this: Den walks along canal, man holding daffodils shoots him, *plop*. So hurrah! when we discovered that he had actually cheated death, swum to safety, had possibly been wearing a bullet-proof vest and at any rate was free to return to Albert Square in 2003 to aid Eastenders’ failing ratings and use the BBC’s dressing rooms for unconventional purposes.

On Friday night he was killed a further two times by being clubbed around the head with a doorstep. In a lovingly crafted tribute to his first death, this was also filmed in such a way as to make it utterly undramatic; heavy though the doorstep looked, it left very little damage – not even a spot of blood. We witnessed Den’s body lying in at least three seperate positions (a deliberately surreal piece of symbology, I am sure), then we saw him leap up unexpectedly, having already been confirmed as dead and pulseless. What is he – a Terminator?

(Well, no – but as people who have seen Grantham’s outing on Dr Who will know, he is one of Davros’ robot duplicates, which explains why nobody can kill him.)

I understand that the special episode was to celebrate the programme’s 20th anniversary, but I can’t quite understand what was being celebrated – shoddy scripting, hammy acting, or just plain improbable storytelling?

It wasn’t much of a celebration, anyway. They should have done another one like that episode that was in 3D and had Albert Square invaded by the evil Rani’s menagerie of monsters in three different time zones. I’d watch it if it was like that every week.

Who’s Cruz?
At school he will lose:
For his name, they’ll treat him like a churl.

And now I muse
Perhaps out of Loos
Cruz might have turned out a real girl.

[Yeah, yeah, you don’t pronounce “Cruz” like that. But you try rhyming it with anything that isn’t Spanish.]

Hotmail have recently clamped down on security, so every so often I now get stopped from sending an email and told

To continue, type in the following characters:

I am very pleased that interlopers are being prevented from sending automatic random emails using my account, but could somebody tell me how the hell I’m supposed to carry on using it when the only letters I can usually identify appear to be Japanese ones?

I happened to catch a little bit of children’s TV classic Grange Hill yesterday. I was rather shocked to discover that since I last saw it, it has become a) crap and b) Liverpudlian.

The latter seems particularly absurd, since for the last twenty-five years Grange Hill has appeared to be in London and its pupils have all clearly been Southerners.

Perhaps the school’s new Scousers-only intake policy accounts for the fact that it is so underpopulated at present (there are only three people in the sixth form, according the official website). But it is hard to see how Scousers are supposed to benefit from a head of IT who delivers his lines like Tony Blair and is almost as unrealistic.

Something exciting has happened to the front page of the Uncertainty Division website and I think it’s fair to assume that James Aylett has been getting all photoshoppy.

James has clearly decided to combine photographs which he feels illustrate exactly how uncertain the outcome of our improvised narratives can be. As a montage I would say that it does this very effectively, but it has the unfortunate side-effect of prominently displaying a particularly unflattering photograph of myself, tea-towel on my head and Ali Glennon in my mouth.

Visitors to our website may be surprised to learn that I am actually not unattractive to look at – indeed, in the last fortnight alone I have had not one but two text messages from people I didn’t know telling me they thought I was “cute”/”fit”. (Anyone wishing to know the outcome of said text messages can email me privately.) (And does anybody know who has been making free with my phone number?)

But glancing through the photographs from last year’s show, it is evident that none of them were taken to showcase my looks. Perhaps I did too many comedy facial expressions, because generally I look much more like a character actor (specialising in Dickensian grotesques) than a young male lead.

Then again, nobody comes off particularly well in those photos. The pictures of Phil Stott are a veritable collage of different ways to gurn; for a man of great bearded gravitas, Andrew Ormerod comes out of many of his photos looking extremely silly; and in one picture, Ali Glennon doesn’t have any eyes.

In fact, the only person who comes out mostly unscathed is James Aylett himself. History, as they say, is written by the winners. Or in the 21st century, by the people who run the websites.