Uncategorized

Wandering the streets of Cambridge in my lunch break, I walked past two men dressed as animals (the exact breed was unclear), playing panpipes and, in between tracks, eulogising about how we needed to get closer to nature.

I can think of no worse advocate for getting closer to nature than a man who plays the panpipes. Sorry, but if that’s getting closer to nature then give me a decent, unnatural violin any day, or a Fender Strat, or even a harmonica, dammit!

I’d rather be surrounded by synthetic, human-built artificiality than endure even a few minutes of what must be the most boring, insipid musical sound in the whole world.

Oh how ironic, though, that Messrs Fox and Badger were, as is customary for practitioners of the pipes of pan, accompanying their instrumental grotesquery with a pre-recorded backing track of soft-rock drums and Lloyd-Webber inspired synthesisers. And surely those animal costumes were also synthetic? (Unless they were completely unethical and had sewn together a whole load of real animals to create their bizarre, indistinguishable costumes. I suppose that would be one way of getting closer to nature.)

In my opinion, people who do such things are actually about as far from nature as we can possibly get; if God had meant us to play panpipes he wouldn’t have made them sound so bloody awful.

And at the end of the day there’s surely no more natural sound than scraping some horse hairs against cat-gut?

I’ve already mentioned that I occasionally (very occasionally – I mean, only when I’m in an office with nothing else to do) (every hour or so) put my name into Google to see how I’m doing in the James Lark ratings.

Very well, in case you’re interested – but last week I was astonished and perturbed to see that I was being beaten in the Google stakes by the greyhound called James Lark who I’ve already mentioned.

How many people, in all honesty, log on to the internet to read about a greyhound called James Lark? SURELY not more people than the number who log on to read about me?

I have wondered whether the greyhound might have been named after me, and decided that it’s pretty unlikely. But the other day I had a rather horrific thought: what if I was named after the greyhound?

It’s possible, isn’t it? Perhaps my parents won lots of money on the greyhound and – you know – had a baby to celebrate?

I’m really too afraid to ask them.

The most awful thing about this thought was that it occurred on stage during a slot in Jude Simpson’s Mouthful@Venue, and I voiced it in front of a bar full of people.

NB: My siblings may be worried to learn that there was a racing horse in the early 80s called Kevin Lark, and a casino in Las Vegas (where my parents went for a holiday in the autumn of 1985) called Judith 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.

With having babies now being a patriotic duty for women, and in light of the news that many women earning over £50,000 are single (according to the Evening Standard, who aren’t citable online, bastards that they are), are we going to see a change in the rape laws to legalise bands of horny men gang banging their way around St Katharine Docks? Juicy accountants, broadcasters and deputy policy commissioners, David – you know you want to.

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?

Ugly woman blames everyone else for her success.

Honestly – she’s wildly successful (more wildly than she deserves), but giving her an Emmy is just taking the piss. Let’s ignore for a moment the suggestion that Sex And The City is a comedy (possibly it was once; by the end it’s just Light Entertainment, but of course there’s no category for that and she’d never have beaten Allison Janney in the real drama stakes …). It’s just going to encourage her to do more acting, which is the last thing we want.

There’s a ray of hope, though: in her speech she said “This is great punctuation for the end of a long sentence … a glorious finish to a journey of a lifetime.” So maybe she’ll just stay put now and pop out a few Broderickettes.

So Tony Blair has stood up and said that global warming is having serious effects on the planet. Nice of him to notice – I think the rest of us got there a couple of years ago. Or is it just that Cherie has been buying houses in cities close to sea-level, and has made it clear that if they’re swept away in floods there’ll be no more sex for Tony?

I feel cooler already.

So called. People use it to show that actually they’re too clever to call something what everyone else calls it. People who use it come across either as arrogant twats, or as stupid twats. Either way can’t be good for them.

If it is so called, call it that. Then shut up.

The Friday Project, partly because of its general wit and charm (in the form of The Friday Thing), partly because London By London lends the impression that the capital is largely inhabited by attractive young women, and not even slightly in the hope that we’ll get a reciprocal link out of it.