Alexe Sayle

There is an old saying that you should be very careful what you wish for as there is only one thing worse than not getting your heart's desire and that is getting it. I'd definitely subscribe to that - Christ knows what I thought I was going to do with a live crocodile in a bucket.

It is also something of a truism that you never get what you want until you don't want it any more.

It certainly applied to me getting acting parts in Hollywood movies. I'd always longed for a big role in a blockbuster film, but one never really came my way, so in the end, peeved, I went off the whole idea of acting in American films. I convinced myself that Hollywood was the seat of all evil in the world and anyone who has anything to do with it has lost his or her soul.

At the precise moment when the very thought of appearing in a big-budget US movie brought me out in palpitations and a rash, the casting directors working for a Big Successful Director rang up and asked me to audition for a part in A Gigantic Hollywood Movie featuring A Huge International Star, Of course, not being one to do these things by halves, I told the casting directors I wouldn't under any circumstances audition for them. They were astonished that anybody would turn them down and they told me that the Big Successful Director really wanted to meet me, so finally I agreed to come and have a coffee with him at his posh hotel.

When I meet the Big Successful Director, he told me how much he liked my work and then he told me all about his fabulous movie and I told him I really didn't want to be in his movie, not at all, no way Jose, thanks but no thanks. So he offered me a big part, so I said yes. Then all the finances fell through and I didn't get to be in the movie anyway (though I think it's now being made with another director).

Mind you, my theory of things happening to you if you really don't want them to has its worrying side. I mean, I really really don't want to be sexually assaulted by a goat - does that mean that it will inevitably happen to me? I hope not.

I was just reading over that last bit and I got the nagging feeling that there was something more than usually irritating about it. Then I figured out what it was - if I was reading the preceding paragraphs, and they had been written by somebody else, what would really annoy me about them would be the simpering fey refusal to name names, the coy references to a "Big Successful Director" and a "Huge International Star". I mean, what's the point of a story if you don't know who it's about, if you can't picture the people involved?

I hate it when people do that. It's like when you read an article, usually a newspaper diary piece, which says something like "a certain MP" was recently seen in "a certain place" doing "certain things'' with "a certain rear-admiral" of "a certain North Atlantic Treaty Organisation" - I mean, where's the fun in that?

The no-name anecdote has a close rival in the annoyance stakes, namely the untranslated phrase in a foreign language inserted into a piece of writing. You know the sort of thing where the author suddenly drops into French or Latin or Medieval Finnish for no particular reason and then assumes that all their readers speak every bleeding language on the earth and that an O-level-French-failing monoglot like myself doesn't deserve to know what they're going on about anyway. Ezra Pound was particularly prone to this type of thing, managing to get up to 10 languages (some of them spoken only by him) into a six-line poem. I reckon that's why he was exhibited in a cage by an angry mob - his politics has nothing to do with it.

You must have come across the type of thing I mean, things like: "In those days the ladies of the court were often prone to 'Cherchez l'herrison' with certain military officers stationed in the nearby towns, a practice that has been rendered obsolete with the invention of Sellotape." Or, "There is a feeling of hupshrauber in the air tonight, screamed Professor van Heimlich as he bit into a piece of Nachmittagsvorstellungbrat." I mean, I don't even know what the bloody hell all that's about and I wrote it! So I don't know how you're supposed to figure out its meaning. I think when authors use foreign languages they're just showing off, so anyway until next week onko taalla ketaan, joka puhuu englantia?

PS the director was Paul Verhoeven, the film was called Crusade and the star was Arnold Schwarzenegger.