Talk To Rex

But is it free cash? IS IT?

Because I used this machine and was disappointed to find that the cash I took out had been removed from my bank account nevertheless.

This reported on Radio Cambridgeshire earlier:

“American researchers claim that taking regular showers could cause brain damage.”

There was a bit of technobabble to explain why they think this, but really… Just how many things are we going to be stopped from doing in this age of enlightenment? Are we going to bring up children with warnings to only gently sponge themselves clean? (“DON’T stand under the running water. I know it’s fun, but do you want to end up like Grandad?”)

Don’t these researchers ahave anything better to do?

…I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake, but I’ve finally realised that’s what it is.

So apologies for the late warning, but there’s still time for you to join in with the fun if you haven’t already criticised me!

You may wish to contribute a criticism on behalf of a large group, such as those I have received from folk at St. Mark’s church (see previous notes) or at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Or perhaps you would like to make your criticism more personal – I’m thinking of the very specific criticisms I received at the hands of fellow actors on tuesday night for my inability to hold alcohol (mixed with regular ribbings about dubious markings which I shall not elaborate on); or the volley of hurtful comments that were made about my frankly disastrous attempt to make a pudding on wednesday evening.

The complete list of those who have made this a week to remember will be printed in the Daily Telegraph on monday, so hurry while you still have a chance to get into it! Feel free to leave comments below, or email me with further criticisms, or just come up to me in the street and give me a good kicking.

I can’t wait to see what’s coming next!

Being a choir director occasionally, very occasionally, fills me with despair. This is sometimes because the choir are unaccountably rubbish, or because I am unaccountably rubbish, or because God stops feeling real. But none of these things are the norm, I am glad to say, and they are but infrequent stumblings of fallible man in an imperfect world. That’s fine.

But one slightly more regular source of despair is complaints from the congregation about my choice of music. Oh, not complaints, sorry – “friendly advice”. Either the music’s not happy clappy enough, or it’s too happy clappy, or most often of all they “don’t know the tunes”.

As I have to explain to them, if they don’t know the tunes of some of the finest hymns written over the last 300 years, which I, a youthful 25-year-old am familiar with, then it’s hardly my fault. I’m constantly amazed by the blank looks a decent hymn will receive – perhaps I’m just choosing things that are not on Songs of Praise enough.

But you can’t do Bread of Heaven every week. And I always try to choose hymns which are a) of musical merit, b) conveying something meaningful and c) of relevance to the church calendar and the readings being used on any given sunday. It’s not the easiest of things to get right, but I like to feel I’ve done a conscientious job. So when I received a little more “friendly advice” today that I ought to make sure my hymns fit the church calendar, I nearly burst a blood vessel. That is what I have been doing. That, in fact, is possibly the reason why the congregation just occasionally have to face up to something a little bit obscure. But in the process they are getting exposed to some fine music, fine literature and most importantly to Sunday morning services that actually mean something.

But every time somebody knocks my carefully planned music list, I am tempted to pack the whole thing in and make them do All Things Bright and Beautiful, How Great Thou Art, Amazing Grace and – ooh, Shine Jesus Shine, every week. No more of this quality control. No more thought going into the meaning of the words and their relevance to the Gospel reading, the sermon or the liturgical year. Just the same old uninventive dreary familiar hymns, week in, week out. No care, no meaning, no life.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Methodist Church began.

Today I meandered through Regent’s Park listening to Gustav Holst’s The Perfect Fool and it gave the whole experience a rather wistful, haunting feel, as if I was in the final third of a low-budget arty film about something sad. The sky clouded over as I wandered and I felt as though my whole life had slipped away without my even noticing it. Perhaps it was just because earlier it had been sunny and I’d felt young and carefree.

Later still it rained on me heavily and I am now extremely damp.

In between the two events I met up with some actors and drank a lot. But there is nothing as sobering as the stopping service fom King’s Cross to Cambridge, especially when there is a replacement bus service from Royston.

The ideal meal to accompany that red sky at night.

1 large onion, chopped
750g minced beef
2 carrots, grated
200g chopped tomatoes
angel delight mix

Dry-fry the onion with the meat, add the carrots and tomatoes. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Makes up the angel delight mix as per the instructions on the packet.

Pour meat mixture into a heatproof dish and top with angel delight. Serve to your enemies.

It felt pretty good knowing that Jamie Callum was flyered for my show last week, even if I didn’t see him myself. It was extremely exciting to witness my co-star giving a flyer for the same show to Simon Callow, who thanked her in stentorian tones and told her he would certainly come “if I can possibly manage it”. But imagine how these moments of pleasure were dwarfed in the early hours of this morning when I performed at Magdalene Ball and Vanessa Feltz sat through my entire set.

In retrospect it seems unwise to have started by making some jokes about fat people. But whilst she is said to have received these in tight-lipped silence, the fact that she sat through the rest of it and didn’t lynch me at the end presumably means that she enjoyed what I was doing. Even the (now rather out of date) Michael Howard song.

Though I am slightly disappointed that she didn’t storm onto the stage and try and sort out my personal problems for the sake of entertaining the other people there. I imagine she could be a great heckler, she’s dealt with so many herself.

…that people still think the biggest problem with “old” Dr Who is that the sets were wobbly, when throughout the final episode of the new series of Dr Who all I could think when Daleks lined up to invade the earth was “if only one of them would wobble a bit they might look like real Daleks”.

Alas, none of them wobbled and they continued to look as unconvincing as Daleks from the 1990s computer game Dalek Attack as realised on an Amstrad CPC464.

Marianne Levy wonders if the whole episode was “a bit of a let down”. Well yes, it was. Not because it wasn’t exciting and so on, but the whole revelation about what “bad wolf” was, as an ending to a story arc, frankly rubbish and felt a little bit as though Russell T. Davies hadn’t really decided what he wanted it to be in the first place. The weirdo fans who write regular weblog entries about the series had much more exciting ideas.

It has also been accused of being a classic case of deus ex machina, something which I have already commented seems to be a bit of a Russell T hallmark. But in fact, the whole TARDIS magical powers element was based on a deus ex machina from a previous episode, which surely makes it a deus ex deus ex machina. (My Latin grammar may not be entirely correct, so perhaps we should call it a deus ex tardisinia or something.)

More worrying, surely, is the fact that David Tennant delivered his few lines in the same voice as Michael Palin’s cockney shop-owner in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. That would indeed make for an irritating characterisation of the Doctor. (“Nah, the Cybermen aren’t dead…they’re just pining for the fjords….”)

Anyway. It was jolly good fun, it just wasn’t as good as Tom Bell told me it was. He thought it was worth losing oxygen over, which is funny because as a rule Tom Bell is not easily pleased. He was certainly not pleased when he got locked out of my house last night.

No, I concur with Marianne. Oh, except she says that “the CGI was cool”, so obviously she wasn’t bothered by the lack of wobbling. I thought it looked kinda naff, personally.

On a completely different subject, has anyone else discovered the Hyperion Records home page? It allows you to download tracks from all of their CDs, so if you have a half-decent broadband connection you can sit at your computer listening to some of the finest recordings currently available to man.

Having just returned from Istanbul, I was somewhat shocked when I went to buy a sandwich today and wasn’t offered anything else at the same time, such as a snow globe of the Blue Mosque, or a tile depicting Ataturk pretending to be British.

This has come as quite a culture shock, although to be honest I can happily do without any more upsell from street corners, something the Turks seem to have perfected. It’s not so much the Amazon.com “you might also be interested in” style of upselling, but more the “you’re here, why not buy” style. I admire their inventiveness for doing it, but most of all I admire the fact that they manage to get away with it without becoming annoying. A quick brush off and they’re happy to move onto someone else – in fact, they were all quite lovely, with the exception of the rather grumpy flight attendants on the flight home (although to be fair they weren’t Turkish, as they belonged to the Airborne Sisterhood of the Orange).

And no, I didn’t buy a carpet. I’m not entirely certain what I’d do with one.

Yesterday was probably the most exciting day of my life to date.

The media conference I was on reached its climax with guest star Ann Widdecombe, who was completely bonkers but thoroughly entertaining and who I feel sure would be a perfect Prime Minister, if only anyone was brave enough to put her in that kind of position. At one point she declared “I’m not a world dictator, though maybe I’d like to be and the world would be a better place…”

On its own that would have been enough to make my day at least extremely memorable. But then in the evening I went to London to see Mary Poppins, which I watched with a big grin on my face and tears running down my cheeks. I haven’t been so insanely ecstatic for a very long time.

In many ways Ann Widdecombe and Mary Poppins are comparable for their inspiring qualities and their no-nonsense approach to life. But Ann Widdecombe didn’t fly over the audience, which I think on balance can only be a good thing.