Plan to fire Andrew Lloyd Webber into Space Enters Phase 1

As it is announced that famous classical soprano and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ star Sarah Brightman will  join the ranks of private citizens to travel into space, the Shadow Culture Secretary has today assured the public that the circuitous plan to fire Andrew Lloyd Webber at the moon is continuing apace.

The statement, issued earlier this morning by Phalidami Whittakers MP, reassured a visibly relieved crowd that ‘Phase One’ is ‘proceeding like clockwork’. Pointing to the links between Brightman and Lloyd-Webber -they were married, collaborated on many musicals and remain close friends- she restated that this was to be the first link of the chain of events that have been set into motion that will surely lead to the composer and enemy of mirrors being sealed up in a capsule and being fired away from the surface of Earth as speedily as science allows.

“A precedent must be set” Whittakers told reporters, “A precedent for the spitefully posh and distressingly monied members of society, who have been responsible for decades of caterwauling about cats or phantoms or even jackets from the bible to start volunteering themselves to be stuffed into rockets and hurled into a vacuum.”

Fuck off, luv

“Brightman is our test subject. She has a strong personal connection to the Baron, having often appeared in his shrill and neverending  West End shows and she apparently slept with him on many occasions without turning to stone. If we can fire her off of the planet, well, first off hooray for us and for our ears but secondly, we can begin our preparations to snag that melted-Peter-Hitchens looking motherfucker.”  

Plans to send Webber spinning endlessly through space like the villains in Superman 2 were first initiated as far back as 1981 when the musical ‘Cats’ came to undue prominence. Letters of complaint flooded the Home Office, as distraught theatre patrons suffered through the trauma of dismayingly asexual spandex Macavitys high kicked around stage to the horror of the audience and mental health professionals everywhere.

However it was not until the televised contest ‘Any Dream Will Do’ wherein Lloyd Webber sat on a throne bidding young women to dance for his approval that the Government began stepping up the campaign to put him in an oxygen-free environment. “Seeing hopeful young actresses weeping before his medically unsound face as he perched on his golden throne like Henry the eighth crossed with a sarcastic toad really was the last straw” claimed Whittakers.

“It was then that we began approaching members of his inner circle with offers of trips to volcanoes, voyages to the bottom of the ocean and trips to space. Brightman was the first to accept, but she shall not be the last. We will wash the West End clean.We will finally be rid of this blight.”

Brightman will be spending the next six months in Russia’s ‘Star City’ cosmonaut training camp before she and her three octave voice will be fired to the International Space Station, which will then be annihilated with missiles.


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Newly Unearthed James Joyce Children’s Book ‘Really Boring’

The Dublin based publishing firm Ithyss Press has announced today that it has received and is getting ready to print ‘The Cats of Copanhagen’- the lost children’s novel by the acclaimed modernist author James Joyce

The text, which was written for Joyce’s grandson in 1936 is being described as a 700 page symbolist epic. The story- which begins with the story of a silly cat called ‘Tiddles’ chasing a long ball of yarn- then turns into what is being called a ‘breathtaking investigation’ of turn of the century irish politics, Catholic orthodoxy, the epiphanic cycle in christian theology and the life and death of Moses as represented by a symbolic retelling of the myth of Prometheus.

Literary critics are already calling the manuscript ‘the most profound and technically challenging children’s book ever published sine Dr Seuss’s reinterpretation of The Illiad’.

Oxford English professor and Joyce expert Johnny Blaze told us: “It truly is an astounding find. Even though Joyce sets out to weave a simple tale of cats having adventures in Copenhagen for the delight of his then-six year old grandson, three hundred and seventy five pages in, we see the facade of mere children’s literature fall away, as Joyce fights against the traditions of the medium.”

“When in the second volume, he brings in the Jesuit orthodoxy and begins to discuss the fall of Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell in a two hundred page run-on sentence entirely written in gaelic that we see the scope of Joyce’s work. Frankly, this makes A Very Hungry Caterpillar look like very unambitious juvenile babble by comparison.”

Related in only three stream of consciousness sentences, the letter accompanying the manuscript- which is preserved as a prefce to the novel- explains that the text is intended as a punishment to his daughter who called Finnegan’s Wake “unreadable sillyness with very few redeeming romance plots” and accused Joyce’s most well known work Ulysses of being “really bloody long and woefully lacking in exciting fights or car chases”.

It is thought to be in reaction to these comments that Joyce penned the manuscript, knowing that his daughter would have to read it to her son, despite the fact that the novel contains no commas and as such she would frequently run out of breath

Already a study guide to the children’s book is being planned, and an annotated version replete with footnotes that explain the many erudite references to pre-socratic philosophers and eighteenth century irish political figures.

Experts are predicting that all across the land, English students will be be purchasing the book on its release in the vain hope that they can actually finish the thing. Meanwhile, in keeping with descriptions of the rest of Joyce’s oeuvre, literature lecturers are already insisting that the work is actually ‘surprisingly funny’ even though it definitely isn’t


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