Column by David in The Times.

I cannot share this article with you, I’m afraid – because the link on The Times online website is broken!

- Blog Monkey

Column by David in The Times.

William Burroughs once said that the phrase “The Naked Lunch” refers to that “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. This would normally call to mind some horrific, destabilising realisition about the grim underbelly of things, but I think it can also happen in a small way: as happened to me this week with the title of Star Trek.

It’s so familiar, such a brand, and the words now sound like they go together so naturally, that it’s only through seeing them in so many papers and posters this week that suddenly I realised how weird a conjunction it is. Star . . . trek. Star . . . hike. Star . . . yomp. Star . . . muddy trudge. If you were — well, if you were beamed down to Earth from Mars, or indeed Archanis IV, ceded to the Federation in the 23rd century, and had never heard the phrase before, you would think it was a show about celebrity ramblers.

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Column by David in The Times.

This week, an interview with me, part of a series called, quaintly, Five Minutes With . . . went up on the BBC News website. It’s as it says, five minutes long, and they try to cram in as much as possible. Towards the end of it, the interviewer, a very nice fellow named Matthew Stadlen, cornered me somewhat on whether or not I might suffer from an insecurity about having had, in his words, “such a multifarious career”. And I had to answer yes, of course. All of us comedy types who have graduated from gags to novels and films and columns and documentaries, all of us — even his majesty King Stephen of Fry — fear the shadow of Jack and his numerous unmastered trades behind the mirror in which we mouth, anxiously, the words “Renaissance Man”.

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