The Bishop on Hard Candy

That Hard Candy was going to pass out underneath the weight of stupidity shovelled into its creation would have been apparent immediately had the Bishop watched the special features included on the DVD before taking in the actual film. This is a work about that most impossible of subjects—paedophilia—for which its empty-headed writer, Brian Nelson, has taken for his inspiration Sarah Michelle Geller’s Buffy, perhaps TV’s most sexualised young-girl protagonist of the last ten years; known, in her first season, for fighting in dresses so short one could high-jump over them. Here is not a scribe to be taken seriously, and neither is this silly revenge-fantasy-by-proxy.

Indeed there is a worrying sense that the hapless audience member is expected to be wooed by the boyish, mop-haired suggestiveness of Ellen Page’s Hayley, though she is fortunately such an unengaging young actress that this is unlikely to take place. Nineteen at the time the film was made, she plays her fourteen-year-old fury as though those ages were reversed, muttering over-importantly with the asthmatic delivery of one of those horrid adolescent prodigies who show up on current affairs shows on slow news weeks. (In other words, we might safely conclude that this is no Jodie Foster.) Patrick Wilson, as the paedophile, is held in check and out of rhythm by his co-star’s unsteadiness. He may or may not have some ability, but in this piece he, like Page, does his best work typing out his lines in the picture’s chat-room prologue.

Even as a self-absorbed thriller Hard Candy fails, not least because the notion of an adolescent girl threatening a rather nasty piece of work with castration might need be addressed with something other the gusto with which a teenage boy sits down to play Grand Theft Auto. The narrative ceases moving forward from the moment Wilson's predator wakes up tied to a chair, replaced by an extended torture sequence which we might all like to inflict on this sort of person but which gains nothing from being filmed. The Bishop gathers there is some attempt to fill out the drama with the possibility that the accused may be innocent, but when a barely pubescent teenager is taking a scalpel to the testicles of a suspected murderer and pederast, surely there are more important things to do than bait the audience with the question of whether or not he did it.

There is probably a worthwhile story, here, but it needs a goodly deal more thought than this comic-book production team is capable of applying. The Bishop also has something of a concern that no-one involved, apart from Page, appears to be a woman, and given her relative youth and the strength of her work here it is questionable whether she is, either. Death and the Maiden is no masterpiece, but it has certainly dealt with Hard Candy’s victim-victimiser role reversal with considerably more maturity, not to mention plot, and when it comes to the difficult subject of underage obsession, your Anglican articulator humbly suggests that the dull minds at work here leave Valdimir Nabokov in no danger of being emasculated. Hard Candy is balls.

The Bishop on Iron Maiden: A Matter of Life and Death

Straight up: Iron Maiden have not had a decent record since Somewhere in Time, nor decent anything at all since 1986, but for two covers of their own songs.* They really haven't even hinted at a reason to go on, except to sell out several hundred European gigs a year—which might be reason enough, but still . . . The Bishop, ever hopeful, puts his ear to the door every now and then to hear a peep of what the lads have been up to, but the result is always archly disappointing, like inching closer to what portends to be a juicy bit of gossip, only to overhear a conversation about tax returns.

Need the Bishop say A Matter of Life and Death is no different? No different at all. If the track snippets available on Maiden’s site are anything to go by, your liturgical listener can only be thankful the band’s latest tour is called Somewhere Back in Time. It is as if someone for who knows what reason had sat through the whole second side of Piece of Mind, and decided a whole album like that would be a good idea. And that person was Jon Bon Jovi.

The Bishop understands that rock and pop musician have a limited pool of writing capability—in most cases enough for one song (in Jeff Buckley’s case half a song)—and that with around two dozen wonderful tunes under their bullet belts, Iron Maiden have not done too bad. But c’mon boys—it’s been twenty effing years since you wrote anything that doesn’t sound like the Grand National on guitar. If you don’t have one more ‘Trooper’ or ‘Total Eclipse’ in you, isn’t it time to hang up the football socks and striped pants rather than go on being the focus group–approved version of your former selves?

*This will get the Bishop caned by some of his fellows, but the 1988 remakes of ‘Prowler’ and ‘Charlotte the Harlot’ are better than the Paul Di'Anno versions—the production is powerful instead of violent, the guitar better played and the drum sound less rushed (this from a chap who prefers Clive Burr's inventiveness to Nicko McBrain's uber-physical technicality), and like it or not a real singer (Bruce Dickinson) adds something Di'Anno, for all his charismatic laddishness (and laddish charisma) could not.

The Bishop on silliness

28 Weeks Later, the sequel to you know what, is not exactly indefensible, but it is largely incomprehensible. Watch it if you like this sort of thing—it will pass the time. But be aware that almost no effort has been spared to eliminate anything that might make sense; not so much at the level of the story, which is workmanlike in the way council workers are, but moment by moment, shot by shot, action by action. One is not so much expected to suspend one’s disbelief as one’s understanding of the law of cause and effect.

There is little point in trying to list the many holes, as it is not so much a case of holes as one continuous gap, as though all the mortar had been removed from a brick wall. A single example of unintentional fun will suffice. It is made clear from the early going that the rage-infected zombies move relentlessly and at lightning speed. Yet, in a show of tension-building contrivance during the final chase, they can’t catch up to a young girl, a child and a woman with a limp. (The Bishop says 'final chase', but this is really one long chase, between film and audience.)

The direction and its partner in disinformation, the editing, leave no cut unjumped in proving that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is exceptionally clever and has not a clue how to do his job. In essence, this is a ninety-something minute rock video in the nu metal, emo or some other over-painted vein, or would be, but that most rock video directors know to point their cameras at more than the ground, the foggy middle distance, and the bottom right hand corner of an actor’s face.

The performances are essentially harmless, but spongy, failing to hold water under even the slightest pressure. The Bishop had heard of Rose Byrne, but had never seen her before. Hopefully he will not again. Her army medical officer is supposed to be the film’s moral centre, which this self-important brunette interprets as an opportunity to pout and fawn. Imogen Poots is psychotically stunning, but something ungainly happens in the gap between her thinking words and actually saying them. Mackintosh Muggleton—cast, the Bishop assumes, primarily for his dome-headed pretty girl looks—is not a child actor to look forward to. Even Robert Carlyle can’t help much. He is engaging, as he often is, but his performance is so out of synch with the rest that it seems to be a hangover from an earlier, different and almost certainly more interesting version of the film.

The Bishop on fear

'Long Distance Call', an episode of season two of the orginal Twilight Zone, looks to be for all money in its first five minutes more mawkish guff in the 'Night of the Meek' vein, as lackadaisically obvious as 'The Eye of the Beholder', akin 'The Lateness of the Hour' in taking far too long to get to nothing much at all—so much so that an impatient Bishop started fast forwarding it. This was a mistake. Charles Beaumont (here writing with William Idelson) was never one to let his audience down, and gently sinister goings on follow what turns out to be an aspartane rather than saccharine opening act.

But the real reason to watch this is a moment from archtypal (though mostly unheard of) sixties blonde Patricia Smith. Marvellously young and beautiful and free of any sort of acting, prepare yourself as hard as you like for the moment she picks up her son's toy phone. It does not so much chill the blood as the cerebral fluid and curdle the placenta of pregnant women.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Survival'

'Survival' isn't the worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast, but, like all the serials from the Sylvester McCoy era, it's close enough.

The TARDIS arrives in Perivale, so that the charmless Ace can catch up with her friends. It transpires that those friends have been kidnapped and taken to the planet of the cheetah people, so that the cheetah people can hunt them for the cheetah person equivalent of sport. It's a fine premise, really, but it all unfolds with the charm of a trip to the local two-dollar store. Rona Munroe somehow manages to make her dialogue both uselessly banal and not what any human being would actually say, a lot of it involving the expression 'survival of the fittest', made worse by flashes of what the Bishop assumes is intended to be funny. Whole scenes pass by in which events occur but nothing actually happens. The Doctor stands next to a poster of the musical Cats. It's no exaggeration to say a mildly talented child could have written it, and by the evidence on screen there's no reason to suppose one didn't.

McCoy is as needless and unconvincing as ever, and Sophie Aldred, an actress so clumsy her own accent sounds put on, is bamboozled by yet another Cartmel commission mistaking Ace for a character. The rest of the performers, with the exception of Anthony Ainley, should be ashamed of themselves.

And in the end, the Doctor rides a motorbike head-on into another character riding a motorbike. How does he survive? I don't know.

The Bishop gets lost in time

Actually, having actually gotten the Doctor Who DVD boxed set Lost in Time—which brings together the various bits and pieces of serials left incomplete from the Hartnell and Troughton eras—some number of years ago, the Bishop thought it might be time to give them a proper watch and pass on his thoughts. This entry will get progressively longer as he makes his way through.

'THE CRUSADE'

Two episodes remain—'The Lion' and 'The Wheel of Fortune—which suggest a story as marvelous in its own way as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'. Indeed the comparison is just, because while Robert Holmes may have scripted all of Doctor Who's best lines, David Whitaker turns out to be the better writer of dialogue. His Shakespeare may be cod Shakespeare, but as every gourmet knows, fish and chips may make a fine meal when the stars are aligned just right. That some of that cod Shakespeare is being said by Julian Glover was never going to hurt, either, and the Bishop is once again impressed by an actor who never pretends, nor adopts a manner, yet is always exactly who he is supposed to be. Bernard Kay and others match him, and it is only the two regular Williams—Hartnell and Russell—who seem a little out of place on this collective stage: Hartnell does not so much forget lines as forget the point of them, and Russell doesn't really have the chops to match the likes of Glover. Still, Hartnell does the trickster as well as any, and one has to admire Russell's Ian, all no-nonsense pluck in the face of the dithering, tempestuous but ultimately wise king. Jacqueline Hill breaths a thoughtful calm which shows how very good she could be. Jean Marsh is unforgivably hot.

'THE CELESTIAL TOYMAKER'

Part four of this, known as 'The Final Game' at the time, is not near as bad as its reputation probably suggests. This is not to say it is good, but surreality in Who is like a blanket that can hide a multitude of sins. With Hartnell inexplicably missing for much of his scenes 'with' Michael Gough, the latter declaims as though he is reading off a cue card somewhere in his peripheral vision, and the game Steven and Dodo play is interesting much more for its camp eeriness than its dramatic immediacy. What is most intriguing, though, is the way the Toymaker's realm explodes instead of blinking out of existence—an illogical piece of direction which in the strange world of sixties Doctor Who is accidentally exactly right.

KEVIN STONEY . . .

. . . doesn't seem to be trying too hard in 'Day of Armageddon', the second episode of 'The Daleks' Master Plan'—much like the rest of it, apart from some wonderfully loopy costumes by Daphne Dare. This is a Hartnell that feels very much like a Troughton, and not in a good way. Still, Stoney has a way of keeping you interested in what he does, even when you have no idea why you're interested in what he does or whether he has done anything to be interested in. When he actually does do something, as in 'The Invasion', he is quasi-superb.

'THE UNDERWATER MENACE'

If you want to see when Doctor Who was crap, you watch the Cartmel years. If you want to see when it was awful, Colin Baker is your man. And if you want to see when it was stupid, ‘Time-Flight’ is as good a serial as any. But if you want to see what people who don’t get Doctor Who mean when they say Doctor Who is bad, you’ll always have episode three of ‘The Underwater Menace’.

There really isn’t much reason to watch this, unless you are the sort who gets a kind of kinky thrill from being slightly bored. The dialogue is functional at best and functionless at worst, and spoken by a cast of characters that, regulars aside, vary only in their tendency to psychosocial maladjustment. It looks—there really is no other word—shocking, and of the set and costume design, the Bishop can only be thankful that it wasn’t shot in colour. Of the tale itself, one scene sums this up. The dippy fish people at one point go on strike. These means, in essence, that they choose to do nothing for part of the story. This is filmed.

And yet there is a sense that this is exactly what Doctor Who is and should be about. A scruffy little man in a shabby frock coat getting up to surreal mischief with a cockney ab, a dolly mod and an eighteenth century Scottish highlander, in a setting that’s half fantasy, half Quatermass and weaves cod ancient Greeks, mad scientists, shipwrecked sailors and tinsel-skinned fish people into a, if not actually believable, at least acceptable, whole. There is also a second sense to this: that Patrick Troughton was and is the Doctor, by whom all others ’fore and since are simply variations on a theme; able without flash or show to paint some technicolour into this throwaway via the nooks and crannies of his marvellous face and a judicious helping of energy and pace.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: ‘Horror of Fang Rock’

For a name so synonymous with classic Who, there is surprisingly little material on which to anchor the impact of Terrance Dicks. Though he script edited the program for nearly one fifth of its span, he wrote—or at least is credited with writing—only five stories. He had some involvement with ‘The Seeds of Death’, which is hard to sit through. He wrote half of ‘The War Games’ which, even had it been shorn of Mal Hulke’s other half, would still be far too long. After that, despite a four year period of not just steadying the ship but getting it to float again—there is no doubt the Pertwee era is much better than the Troughton one despite both having interesting leads—it’s hard to say how much influence Dicks had qua writing (or re-writing) good episodes; and post his role behind—or perhaps putting together—the scenes, he only penned four stories, of which three were the mechanical ‘Robot’, the fallow ‘State of Decay, and the five-out-of-ten-at-best ‘The Five Doctors’ (‘The Brain of Morbius’ coming mostly from the mind of Robert Holmes). Still, if Holmes’s reputation can stand tall on ‘The Time Warrior’, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ and re-writing all the dialogue for seasons twelve through fourteen, it’s only fair to judge Uncle Terry on his best work, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’. So how good, the Bishop wonders, is it?

It was certainly quite alright when the Bishop was twelve, and a little scary, to boot. (Is twelve too old to be slightly perturbed by Doctor Who?) The actors, who have been dressed up to the nines by the BBC costume drama department, thesp like they think they might actually be in a costume drama, instead of doing what they think supporting types are supposed to do in Doctor Who, and the equally attentive sets could fool one into thinking there are more than three. The direction does what Who direction should—point the camera at the actors and make Tom Baker behave. The lighting may not make a studio look like an outcrop but it does make a studio feel as isolated as one, and of the regulars, Baker, discourteous though he may have been to Pennant Roberts, needs no introduction, and Louise Jameson is probably the best thing ever to have been associated with Doctor Who. After watching her the Bishop, were he to uncover some forgotten tribe of leather-clad savages in the furthest reaches of the earth, would be surprised to find they didn’t speak with RP accents.

But what of Dicks's contribution? Well. There are some marvellous lines for the actors (Leela: ‘It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy’. The Doctor: ‘Not in my opinion’), though some naff ones too (‘Enjoy your death as I enjoyed killing you’ is too much even for Jameson to say), and how much of the former were added by Holmes is open to speculation. The plotting is tight but still feels an episode too long (should the shipwrecked crew have been there from the beginning?), and while the claustrophobia is exactly right, it seems like something we are asked to accept rather than something we should believe (rarely has an episode begged the question of why the Doctor shouldn’t go and retrieve some plot device from the TARDIS—and if they’ve mistakenly locked the Rutan inside the lighthouse then, well, leave). The Bishop knows this is Doctor Who, but the lighthouse-diamond-destroyed-mothership thing is a stretch.* And while the episode bravely runs the Hammer Horror Who gauntlet of making the monster a bona fide monster (the Beast of Fang Rock) and making it not, it doesn’t quite succeed: one can’t help but feel a little unsatisfied when one Rutan on an island is just a stand in for a much more terrifying fleet of them in space; by contrast, the mummies in ‘Pyramids of Mars’ were correctly subsidiary, while Magnus Greel in ‘Talons’ made one feel as though the fifty-first century and the late nineteenth were actually one and the same. (Of the current series, Steven Moffat more adeptly pulls off the iconic-horror-that’s-not trick in ‘The Empty Child’/‘The Doctor Dances’ and ‘Blink’.)

And that seems to be the thing about Terrance Dicks—it’s all a bit fifty-fifty, or perhaps six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other. While he’s no doubt a better contributor to Who’s success than his Target novelisation–hating detractors say, he’s also not quite as good his supporters would ­like us to believe. On the special feature on the ‘Fang Rock’ DVD, he is asked how he would like to be remembered. His answer: professional. And he is probably right. But while it’s always nice to know there’s a professional on hand to take care of things, most of the time if we want more than nice we need a little magic on hand to spice things up, too.

*Oh, and wasn’t this show-a-bit-of-fighting-spirit-and-they’ll-run-away climax already done in ‘The Sontaran Experiment’? For two species of war-obsessed aggressors who have conquered half the galaxy between them, the Sontarans and the Rutans don’t seem to have much pluck.