Talk To Rex

Former Labour MP Lord Janner, who is a high profile member of Britain’s Jewish community, branded Harry’s action’s “stupid and evil”.

Stupid I might agree with (no, actually, I wouldn’t: it’s foolish, not stupid), but evil is a word too far. Or, indeed, a Labour peer too far, as he goes on to emit the amazing sentence, “I would send him in the army as fast as possible.” Is British English actually this guy’s first language? According to his biography, he’s Welsh, but he seems to speak English like he’s French. But then according to his biography:

He is a member of the Magic Circle and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Which makes me rather worried about criticising him. He might turn me into a newt.

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’ve just seen the Lemony Snicket film, which is probably the prettiest thing I’ve seen for a long time. It’s no doubt common for people to compare it to Harry Potter, so I certainly won’t – and mostly because Lemony Snicket should not have been a film. It was crying out to be a TV series being, as it is, a series of unfortunate events. Great fun though it was, it did the road movie thing, which is to say everything goes wrong in one place so they move somewhere else in case that’s a bit better.

Also, if it had been a TV series, they probably wouldn’t have got Jim Carrey. It’s not that he’s bad in it – indeed, I can’t remember seeing him better – it’s just that he’s outclassed by everyone else (except perhaps Billy Connolly). Yes, I’m sure the character is hammy and ridiculous in the books, but hey, this is a different medium, and while the visuals were great, he just took it a bit too far on a couple of occasions.

Three books went into this film – there are going to be thirteen books in total (apparently), although they’ll surely run out of not-quite-relatives before then, meaning that the Baudelaire children will come out from under the shadow of the adults at some point. A bit like Return Of The Jedi, without Mark Hamill.

Actually, why didn’t they get Mark Hamill to play Olaf?

Well, several dresses, really – last night I saw the Old Vic pantomime, Aladdin. Which very much has Ian McKellen as the pantomime dame. (Note that this is in no way worse than Aled Jones singing O Holy Night – it’s entirely possible that Ian McKellen is a better singer than Aled Jones, although probably not a better dancer.)

It’s actually been some time since I went to a pantomime – years, in fact – and although it was heavy on the innuendo and celebrity references, it was still very much a children’s pantomime. Actually, thinking about it, children’s pantomimes are always full of innuendo and celebrity references. Fun for all the family, providing your family knows about sex.

I really want to see the script, though, because there was a scene to music where Hanky and Panky covered each other in wallpaper paste, and I’m convinced that in the script it just said “lazzo”.

Anyway, that’s not the point. Ian McKellen in a dress, on stage at the Old Vic, in a wonderfully camp pantomime. Who’d have thought?

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.

I woke from a dream of teaching Willow improvisation. I offered to share a taxi with her from her house to school, but apparently her laptop wouldn’t fit. I pointed out that “taxis are, like, quite big these days”, but she wasn’t convinced by my pretending-to-be-Oz antics.

Also, related to the impro workshop (no, really), Xander was drawing things on a tree, although it turned into a whiteboard when Oz started drawing happy clouds. I had to show him how to use the board eraser though, so I feel pretty good about things.

It’s just occured to me that I might have been Buffy, which is quite disturbing. Maybe I was Giles, though, which would be good.

In real life, there’s a guy at the station who looks a bit like John Goodman. The dream world was still better, though, and the happy clouds were really cute.

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”.)