The Bishop on The Proposition

Like surprisingly many pretentious things, The Proposition is, intermittently, engaging, though whether this is due to its attempted gravitas, or the relief occasioned by its intermittent let ups from pretension (here, in the form of cleverly surprising snaps of violence), it is difficult to say.

Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone, miscast) captures outlaw Charlie Burns, and his younger brother, Mikey, and makes him an offer: go out into the desert and kill his older, far more criminally dangerous brother, Arthur, and the two will be pardoned. Otherwise, Mikey will be hanged. No convincing reason is presented for why Captain Stanley makes this pact, except to give the film its title, and its plot. Unless, sensing that he is in a film, he has some meta-dramatic awareness that Charlie is not all that bad.

No character in The Proposition could be said to bare any resemblance to anyone who ever lived. Guy Pearce’s Charlie Burns is a man of so few words, and not much more action, that the Bishop, at least, never really caught his shtick. Captain Stanley behaves according to the dictates of the plot, then frets about it; and Emily Watson, as Martha Stanley, is about as well-thought-out as she is tanned. David Wenham has in other roles displayed a knack for finesse, but it is soon clear that his Eden Fletcher is only here to be hated (perhaps writer Nick Cave felt his otherwise ‘grey’ characters would look greyer against a background of black). Wenham, with nowhere to go, revives the horrid Australian tradition of kooky kitsch, and it is only the actor’s unassuming charm that saves him. Arthur Burns, pasted into scene by Danny Huston, reminds the Bishop of one of those mute bikers from Mad Max II—even down to the way he is shot: head craned forward as if looking for something but not quite sure what, hair gusting back like the parting of the Red Sea. Again, like Wenham, he has a nip of charisma, but seems to have taken those acting classes where one pretends to be a tree (or, in this case, a rock) too seriously. John Hurt, biting into the superfluous, and supercilious, Jellon Lamb, is the only one present who realises that Cave intended to provide his thespians with poetry, and declaims accordingly. (Hurt should do more Beckett; always weathered, he is starting to remind your canonical critic of the face of a crumbling cliff.)

John Hillcoat directs with little enthusiasm or élan, but for an ability to quickly bring the violence front and just-off-centre from a background of calm—though this may simply be because his calm is too calm, almost as if it has fallen asleep. Still, praise where it’s due, and one or two moments deserve attention. One: Captain Stanley is startled from his slumber by the sound of gunfire. He jumps up, panics, and promptly runs into a door. Hillcoat leaves him in the background, keeping the focus on his wife, and the effect of this muffled shot is to share Stanley’s disorientation, as if we had run into the door, too. Later, Charlie is roused from a desert sleep to find his horse dead. The not-quite-competent Charlie looks around in every direction except that of an incoming spear. Pierced (pardon the pun), he looks up to find his attackers, a gang of aboriginal ‘rebels’, stationed on the rise like burnt trees. Then, still in long shot (and from Charlie’s point of view), one of them is shot in the head. The whole threat rising from these elements is greater than the sum of its parts; it is like watching dominos fall.

Cave, apparently, wrote The Proposition in three weeks, and it shows. Had he spent another three, he might have trimmed two unnecessary characters, and fleshed out the plot. Like A History of Violence, previously discussed by the Bishop, The Proposition is too lackadaisical to entertain dramatic tension—too self-consciously dark to establish empathy (could any viewer, for example, really care less if Mikey Burns is hanged or not?). Cave fails to realise one does not have to approve in order to identify, and so the film’s injustices become simply a pretext for contemplating, and committing, violence.

What Cave does do, however, is paint his characters in such an even shade of gris that his musings on the human condition are welcome, or at least tolerable—there could be no proselytising from these opportunists. And while they cannot speak for humanity—because they are cartoon figures with only the trappings of verity: cheap hooch, blood and stubble—one is at least aware that that is what they are supposed to do. Cave’s eye, too, is much better than he probably realises. He could, it seems likely, pen an astute screenplay—there are too many inventive touches here to believe otherwise—once he learns to link one encounter to another in the Aristotelian sense. And leave out the fucking poetry. A scene in which Martha Stanley recalls a nightmare to her husband was a painful for the Bishop as it must have been for her.

One final point, on the Australian outback as mythic landscape. The Bishop has never really found it equal to John Ford’s American West, or even Sergio Leone’s Italian scrub; with it’s strangled trees, deformed canyons, and scattered, greying rocks, it looks more like the place where, during the Creation, God dumped his rubbish. It is still a worthy backdrop, though, an opportunity to show us sunburn instead of sunset; a land of boredom, flies and matted sweat, there is a real sense that one could die there. The Proposition almost captures that, but the Bishop wondered why more was not made of the oppressive desert heat (the film is set at Christmas, during the Australian summer). The Burns gang take on mystical qualities among the indigenous population for their ability to thrive in no man’s land, but Cave and Hillcoat just assume their spiritual connection to the place—we never really get to see why.

The Bishop on A History of Violence

The Bishop has learned something from A History of Violence; though it is not about history, and it is certainly not about violence. Instead, your Anglican adjudicator has discovered one interesting fact about David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg, according to the special features included with the DVD, does not storyboard his projects; he likes to improvise. This is not to say he doesn’t use a script. But, once he has read, and liked, and, presumably, got his head around the thing, he simply turns up on set and works the rest out from there. This explains a lot.

Cronenberg is a director who might be quite good if he ever chooses to make it up before he goes along. As it is—and irrespective of his disinterest in putting people in his films—he is a director whose haphazard technique struggles with the concepts of space and time. Any filmgoer with a functioning eye will have seen the way he is forever cramming people into shot (even when there are not that many people to cram), but here it is the chronological gaps he over—and under—fills. As the picture opens, we watch two (murderous) criminals checking out of a hotel (why Cronenberg begins with this patently unnecessary scene the Bishop does not know)—one goes inside to ‘pay up’; the other, slowly, brings up the car (we stay with the second). Waiting for the first criminal to return, there is a sense of bloated delay—this scene—suspense-less, because we have no background, even if it is clear the pair are up to no good—is taking far too long. And yet, hearing the first thug tell the second that he had ‘a dispute with the maid’, one’s immediate sense is that there has not been near enough time to get into a disagreement and shoot two people in the head. This is but one example of many; at no point is the drama navigated, vitally or patiently, by a sense of pace.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana, and though the previews for the film will have already announced the contrary, we are asked to play along and think that that is all. One evening, the two aforementioned gangsters hold up the diner with intentions to kill; Tom, in an unexpected show of skilful violence, takes them out instead. His face now on the news, he is presently beset by more gangsters—bearing further ill—who believe he is Joey Cusack, a killer from their past. Is he? And if so, what does that entail? It is the task of the rest of the film to (partially) answer these questions.

It does not. There is certainly something to explore here, as thriller if nothing else (the Bishop doubts Cronenberg’s ability to make incisive social commentary; more anon), but there is not enough in this film to maintain any sort of tension, of either the dramatic or the psychic kind. Events unfold about as basically as they can; if one might imagine the ultimate mystery film, where every twist and turn is the last thing one expects, this is its opposite. And none of this is helped by the fact that Cronenberg, wanting to show us every attitude and skew on violence, really only demonstrates how much it turns him on.

There is a further lesson here, about the difference between the simple and the simplistic. Watching A History of Violence, your Anglican adjudicator was struck by the thought that Cronenberg—who the Bishop assumed had a hand in the script—should be writing comics. And what do you know? It turns out that A History of Violence was, originally, a comic. As an intermittent funnies fan, the Bishop knows rather too well the paucity of many modern, violent ‘adult’ comics; said writers’ inability to guide us through the grey minutia of life being rivalled only by their belief in their ability to do so. The idea of the grotesque creeping into the everyday was an old idea when David Lynch pretended to come up with it, and when it comes to delusions of one’s insight and originality, a scene in which Tom tells his young daughter there is ‘no such thing as monsters’, thirty seconds after another little girl has been cold-bloodedly shot, just about says it all.

There is some value in Cronenberg’s vision, but Josh Olson, adapting with ill-spent enthusiasm from the graphic novel, has no place writing scripts. His characters, his situations—particularly in his depiction of small-town life—and most of all his balsa-wooden dialogue—are about as fresh and sophisticated as those paintings of draught horses one is always seeing at community art fares. And even in this he gets it wrong (though Cronenberg is equally to blame); unsure whether he wants to point his ‘ironic’ pen at the muddy mundanity of everyday life, or at its faux–Hollywood innocence.

And yet, this is not a bad film. Perhaps it is Cronenberg’s fundamental cinematic talent—seeping, once again, through the cracks of his bovine intellect. Perhaps it is a previously undiscovered gift for staging action (ironic in the one film where Cronenberg cuts the violence quickly so as—in theory, anyway—not to glorify it) and Mortensen’s adept physicality (somewhere, it seems to the Bishop, between a sure-fisted boxer and an anxious whippet). Perhaps it is that the basic premise—is he Tom, or Joey, or both, or neither?—is intriguing enough. Or perhaps it is just that no moving picture featuring Maria Bello in that cheerleaders outfit could in truth be said to be completely wrong.

Monsieur Mortensen shall never be a genuinely satisfying actor—nor, though, is he a disaster. His difficulty is twofold. One: He has, of late, been cast in roles that are too big for him (though the Bishop struggles to imagine what he would do with the urgent necessities of a character part). Two: He is too busy thinking. Mortensen may be an intelligent man—even if his face bellies it—but he is stuck in the confusion between schizophrenia of surface and multifariousness of depth. At no stage is he ever really Tom Stall or Joey Cusack. Yes, he does affect a sort of transformation, but that transformation begins and ends with his face. And though, perhaps, a face is not a bad place for an actor’s transformation to be, we need something apart from Mortenson’s slightly grimmer, slightly more mechanical, slightly perplexed visage, as though we—and he—are watching his reflection in a broken mirror.

Fortunately, perhaps, there is no one in A History of Violence to show Mortensen up. Bello, clumsy, fails to finds the point to Tom’s wife, Edie, though she is sumptuous decoration as the perfect everywoman—which is to say that every man watching the film will probably want to fuck her. William Hurt is silly. And as to Ed Harris, he has never really seemed to understand what acting is, and probably never will.

The Bishop on Good Night, and Good Luck

It is perhaps difficult for those who were not around—or present—at the time to appreciate an America in the grip of two red terrors—communism, in the form of the Soviet Bloc, and conservatism, in the form of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy. Among those too young to understand fully that time and place the Bishop must include himself—and, unfortunately, still must after taking in Good Night, and Good Luck.

There is an obvious parallel between George Clooney—who directs, co-wrote, and appears in Good Night, and Good Luck—and Robert Redford, who, though he tends not to appear in his own films, followed a strikingly similar star-cum-filmmaker path. In this case—beyond the duo’s similar good looks and public appeal—the parallel is well drawn. As with Redford in his better films—Ordinary People, Quiz Show—Clooney shows no lack of cadence with the camera; but, like Redford, he reveals no particular gift with it, either. As one might expect if, say, the works of Checkov were literally filmed—and in somewhat similar style to Clooney’s own acting—there is a charismatic directness to his choices: not understatement, but simply statement. Yet, unlike Checkov, his simplicity of presentation has no core; it is not in the service of the unexpected depths of life.

His writing (with Grant Heslov) is, again, agreeable, but without vigour. It is also—and this is the root of the problem—unfocused. As we enter the film, we spend perhaps two minutes circling—sans dialogue—a gathering of broadcast journalists—but the scene does little more than tell us that we are watching a film, and that the people there are having, more or less, a good time. From there we cut—via a speech by the picture’s central figure, journalist Edward R. Murrow—into the meat of the film; but here, again, there does not seem to be a story to follow.

The situation: Joe McCarthy, the Junior Senator for Wisconsin* is reaching the height of his anti-communist Senate hearings. Murrow, a journalist whose principles would normally eschew editorialising, is compelled to act when he believes the Senator has gone too far. Yet despite his own decision to step carefully over the journalistic Maginot Line, his straight-faced journalistic approach behooves him to simply present the facts, and let McCarthy damn himself. As commentary on modern-day broadcast news practice, the point is quietly clear—and well-taken—and one can’t help but hark back to a day when a newsman (and a senator) would quote Shakespeare—as well as enjoying that most civilized of recreations, a smoke—on camera. And yet we garner little understanding of these men—Murrow or McCarthy (playing himself via original footage)—their cut-and-thrust, or what it was like to be there at the time. Clooney should be praised for—like Murrow—refusing to editorialise, or invent drama, but surely there must have been some drama there to be found. Even if it is only there to say, as is more often than not the case, that sometimes the result is a draw, and that’s what happened here.

The players are all sufficient, which is all they can be—though the Bishop passes up no opportunity to praise the underrated Jeff Daniels and will do so again here. David Strathairn, as Murrow, is as authentic as the real McCarthy, but he is not properly a character and this is not properly a performance. Just two pieces of casting—and their related sub-plots—deserve comment. Ray Wise plays Don Hollenbeck, a journalist accused of communist sympathies who, under the stress, kills himself. Wise plays the role intimately, with an almost effeminate nervousness, but his fear seems, as must surely not have been the case, to come out of nowhere. Once again, there is no A-to-B, no invitation to discover why. And a romantic diversion involving the marriage of Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson) seems mostly to have been left on the cutting room floor. There is nothing wrong with their performances, but given their scenes seem to have been included to take the running time from eighty to eighty-six minutes, perhaps Clooney might simply have dispensed with the whole thing.

*This full title is used repeatedly throughout the film, and presumably in Murrow’s original broadcasts. The Bishop wonders if Murrow, and now Clooney, were making one small nod to rhetoric in continuing to note—legitimately, if unnecessarily—McCarthy’s non-senior status.

The Bishop gets serious for a moment

Cass R. Sunstein's New Republic article is a reminder of that too-often unacknowledged truth: at the federal (national) level, conservatives hold all the aces.

The evidence is obvious re: the US scene. Republicans have occupied the Oval Office for seven of the last ten presidential terms. At The New Republic (here, here, here or here), what commentator thinks any blue contender stands a chance against the likes of McCain in 2008? And consider this: would Democrats ever profit by proffering the slur ‘Kentucky conservative’ in response to ‘Massachusetts liberal’?

The logic is equally simple. America is steeped in paternal imagery—‘founding fathers’ and the like. The President (any president) no less—in spirit if not in competence—than those who came before. The upshot: the President is Dad. And as much as none of us look forward to his wrath when we write off the car, at the end of the day we all want the old man to be strong; not a pissant.

In the national eye—that silent majority of Americans not absorbed or engaged by politics—any Democratic Daddy is a pissant.

He’s softer on drugs; softer on crime; softer on ‘hard graft’ (who, when it comes down to it, do we respect more? The father who tells us to get out there and get a job, or the one who lets us spend all day asleep on the couch?). And, most of all, softer on standing up for house and home.

It is not that the 2004 presidential race was about character. Every presidential race has been about character. Thus Democrats, nee liberals, are rendered helpless by the very things they stand for.

What to do?

Democrats can only move so far to the centre before the very word becomes worthless. But if they’re serious about a serious national presence, they have to become hawks on national defence.

‘Tough on terror, fair on freedom’ must become their mantra. Their rhetoric must match—even out-match—the Republicans at every turn, while hammering the indisputable justice of centrist-liberal values re: the day-to-day at home.

There must be no nuance about this. No well-reasoned arguments. Just the techniques of oratory and mass communications that have served the conservative cause so well. We may look back on the days when our leaders would quote Shakespeare instead of spin doctors, but that is only because they had not yet seen they could achieve much more with much, much less.

Remember, as the present administration teaches, rhetoric is not action; that ends do, sometimes, justify means; and that the public memory is short. This may be a cynical view, but it is a cynical truth, and it is better to be led by a capable cynic than an incapable idealist.

The Bishop on 9 Songs

The Bishop has often felt that there is something fundamentally ludicrous in the practice of sex. Not so much Lord Chesterfield’s observation—‘the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable’—but rather, outside the realm of well-crafted pornography, a lack of physical (or, indeed, emotional) grace. Of course, this does not make the carnal pleasures any less pleasurable, as few of us, during the act of intercourse, are actually in a position to see what’s going on; but as anyone who has, like the Bishop, contributed to the world’s oversupply of porn with a little home-movie action will know, rarely do those amateur productions captivating viewing make. A lot of this may be simple embarrassment, of the sort that safely prevents us seeking lessons from our parents or masturbating in front of mirrors. But there is also something crude about the gross-motor get-on-and-get-off act of shagging that makes scrutinizing it about as savoury as watching rhinos do the same.

This is the first problem with 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s own attempt to masturbate in front of a mirror: it is not erotic. Filmed sexual activity may be, quite frequently, erotic; but when it is, it is for much the same reason that dramas are dramatic: because we have drawn from life, not photocopied it. Truth, in narrative, is not only—or, even, often—found in facsimile; else we would have no need of the facsimile. If Winterbottom were ever to have succeeded with this predictably ill-conceived project, he would have to have done much more with his subject matter than stick a camera in front of it and hope for the best. What we have here then, in place of a story, is a slightly embarrassed recording of a slightly embarrassing act.

Should eroticism matter, though? Winterbottom has stated, somewhere, that his goal was make a film about sex that was not erotic. (Perhaps he might have saved the Bishop sixty-nine minutes, and mentioned that he also wanted to make a film about sex that was not good.) This is a laudable (if slightly baffling) aim, but in eroticism’s absence Winterbottom has provided no reason for his sequence of intimate interludes. We watch this couple fuck; why? It tells us nothing about them—narratively, metaphorically, even physically—except that rather ordinary couples like to make out, too.

The use of non-actors works for Ken Loach; it does not work for Winterbottom. Margo Stilley’s Lisa is nigh-on unbearable: a self-absorbed prat played by a self-absorbed twat. He fares little better with his choice of the experienced Kieran O'Brien: his contribution to any film, on the evidence herein, could be little more than functional: he would be in it. Winterbottom doesn’t even have much luck with the bands; as shot by him, the Bishop can only wonder how they have drawn such enthusiastic crowds.

No script was written for this hour-long exercise in loitering, which the Bishop hears is typical of Winterbottom. That may be because this indolent director is incapable of writing one. In fact, Winterbottom makes only one concession to having thought about this dross for longer than it took to come up with the gimmick: that staple of films that are sure to be both ‘arty’ and dull: narration. At the movie’s beginning Matt informs us, amongst a string of platitudes and pseudo-allegorical drivel, that the only thing he identifies with the memory of Lisa is sex. The Bishop can only wonder, then, why on earth he remembers her at all.

The Bishop on Thumbsucker

If the Bishop might be so bold as to posit one inclination far too common amongst the young independent North American writer-directors of the last 15, or even 30, years, it is an almost pathological love of restraint. No doubt this is a reaction to Hollywood excess; and as one who largely resists the urge to take the top off the cognac until the sun is at least a yard or so over the yardarm, the Bishop concurs that this is a laudable goal. But when it’s time to have a drink it’s time to have a drink, and all too often the cinematic result of this penchant is more un-statement than understatement—the dramas ain’t dramatic, the funnies ain’t funny—and, more often than not, watching one of these fillums is like walking through a friend’s front door expecting to discover a tastefully furnished apartment, only to find two cardboard boxes, a mattress and a lamp. Todd Solondz, Wes Anderson and, at his intermittent worst, Jim Jarmusch spring to mind.

A genuine knack for the less-is-more approach is probably as spartan a gift as one is likely to find; but if it can be taught, the Bishop directs the American moyen garde to the first nine-tenths of Thumbsucker, wherein a thing or two might be learned. Here is a measured single malt with just the splash of water, only in its final minutes succumbing to the urge to grab the Johnnie Walker Black and gulp the whole thing down with Coke. It is a cocktail of intentions not so much foiled as ill-formed, hopes not so much dashed as dismissed, and conversations not so much not finished as never really started.

Seventeen-year-old Justin Cobb is nervous, and sucks his thumb. This is irrelevant. He is diagnosed, rightly or wrongly, with ADHD, prescribed drugs, and gains confidence. He becomes disenchanted, throws out the drugs, and relents to a state somewhere in-between. He is, throughout all, deeply concerned that he, his parents, and just about everyone else is not quite happy enough; but it is clear that this is only the sort of teenage fussing one never really grows out of.

In the world of the film, almost nothing is given away. Yet there is always the sense that it is there to be given away—the cellar, not often visited, is not, as in Spanking the Monkey, Welcome to the Dollhouse and the like, dry. And, while the balance between au natural and eau du quirky is sometimes uneasy, filmmaker Mike Mills is not afraid, thank heaven, to do funny things in his quest to be funny.

The awarding of awards for ensemble casts is an idea so silly it could only have been thought up by committee, but if such a thing were ever useful, it is useful here. Vincent D’Onofrio is a refreshing, pleasantly uncertain vodka tonic to the twitching, Ritillin-infused OP rum he plays on TV, while Lou Pucci, with one of the most characteristically teenage-and-American voices the Bishop has heard, would make a fine young California Riesling: doing quite a bit with not much, generic yet somehow distinct, and lasting well enough over the stretch. It is only when he places the title thumb in his mouth that he seems to be acting. Kelli Garner, as his paramour, recalls for the Bishop certain of the recent Burgundies: airy, precise, and lovely. And the addition of Keanu Reaves teaches a singular lesson in casting. His slightly ridiculous, pontificating orthodontist works because one is always aware that this is Keanu Reaves, an almost charismatic actor who, when out of his element, just about defines the word ridiculous; here, with artificially deep voice, characteristic clumsiness, and good-humoured sense of self-awareness, he brings comic timing that beats in 5/4 instead of the usual common time—and reminds one that even a shandy is the right drink if the weather is fine. His character could have been played by no-one else.

Tilda Swinton, finally, must be congratulated as an actor willing to take risks. For much of the film she rings slightly false; this is because she has stayed altogether true. She seems, in the early going, too lofty or insufficiently daffy as a mildly dissatisfied, celebrity-obsessed suburban mother, but events bare her choices out. And, of course, a good red must be allowed to breath for a little while.

Speaking of which . . .

The Bishop on complete rubbish

Or: What the Bishop was doing while the Doctor Who episode ‘Fear Her’ was playing in the other room.

In fact the Bishop won’t do as he originally planned and go into detail about all the shaving, washing up, sock-drawer arranging and general piss-farting around he got up to in lieu of subjecting himself to this poster child for tedium; not wishing to bore his readers in quite the way the team at BBC Wales saw fit to bore him. What he will note, however, for your hilarious amusement and open-mouthed disbelief alike, is how the episode ended.

The Doctor lights the 2012 Manchester Olympic flame.

Which, in the wonderful world of Russell T. Davies, shows what each and every one of us could do if we would only try to make difference like the Doctor. If we just gave it that ol’ college try, we too could slip past the planet’s tightest security, steal the centrepiece of an event the whole world is watching, and generally look as though we’re about to commit the biggest terrorist act in human history. All without anybody so much as batting an eyelid.

Or perhaps, like the Bishop, they had simply fallen asleep.

The Bishop goes from strength to strength

It’s been a ripsnorting July for From the Bishop’s Desk, your encyclical enunciator’s electronic log receiving a site-record one comment—a percentage increase over this website’s prior average (and aggregate) feedback so large the that the Bishop would have to invent a whole new branch of mathematics in order to calculate it.

The trend has continued into August, the Bishop’s newly installed web tracker (free and care of the good people at StatCounter—there’s the kind of plug you’ve been looking for) revealing a mean of nearly eight visits per day over the last three days; though this number did go down a bit when you theistical theoriser worked out how to remove his own IP addresses from the total.

StatCounter also revealed many more interesting factets of passing note, such as the most common hyperlinks used to reach the Bishop’s Desk. Most ‘readers’, it seems, come across said journal by hitting the ‘Next Blog’ icon—a random way of stumbling over other Blogger sites (you’ll see it tucked away at top right-hand of screen)—this promptly followed by their hitting it once again. So far the Bishop’s longest visitor—friends, colleagues and disgruntled dinner party guests aside—has stayed for somewhere in the vicinity of six seconds. A remarkable feat, especially given that it’s just slightly longer than it takes for this site to appear on the Bishop’s screen.

And how will the Bishop celebrate this milestone? With half a bottle of Justerini & Brooks tastiest and a headache the next day, of course.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Invisible Enemy'

One of the fascinating things about future histories is their nearly limitless ability to get the future wrong. Nothing the Bishop knows of predicted the Internet until William Gibson, by whose time it already existed. Metallic catsuits have yet to become the must-have item amongst the couture set, let alone replace the business suit. And, while, according to most sci-fi authors of the mid–twentieth century, we should soon be able to get a good second-hand spaceship, faster-than-light compatible and reasonably priced, they could usually imagine little more sophisticated than an electronic typewriter with which to design it. But the Bishop's favourite example is Dune, which sees the art of cloning perfected just a shade over 8,000 years too late.

‘The Invisible Enemy’ is only about half that far off. Except this isn’t cloning as we know it, with flocks of suspiciously identical sheep (if you were going to show off the wonders of modern biology, surely you wouldn’t pick a species famous as the very metaphor for being ‘all the same’). This is cloning of the sort the Star Trek universe could easily introduce, if they’d only spend two minutes looking at how those teleporters actually work. These ‘clones’ come complete with detailed memories, not to mention clothing, though surprisingly little rising panic at the thought that they have, according to the script, only fifteen minutes to live.

Serious Who fans will know, of course, that the finer points of genetics aren’t the only thing that writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin have ever gotten wrong. In ‘The Hand of Fear’ they showed they understand nuclear energy about as well as George W. Bush pronounces it, and in ‘The Three Doctors’, their particular brand of antimatter demonstrated a rather fickle reluctance to blow up on contact with the very matter-rich air. Presently, their script for ‘The Invisible Enemy’ reveals that, as microbiologists, their virology wouldn’t stand up under a monocle, let alone a microscope; and while the Bishop has no more experience with shrinking things or growing things than our dynamic duo do, he’s pretty sure there’d be a little more to it than that.

But this is Doctor Who, and none of the above would matter if what we had here was a rollicking tale of full of drama, humour, or just about anything else besides padding. Who fans regularly point out that this or that six-parter could have been four, or four two, but genuinely next to nothing happens in this story, and what does does so at a pace roughly that of the Equatorial Guinean Olympic swimming squad. The clones last but for fifteen minutes; if only this little ge(r)m of a story could have been over so soon.

The Bishop on the perfect dry martini

Much like Richard Nixon on the subject of hotel visits, the Bishop would be the lying if he said he didn’t like to take the edge off with a snifter of C₂H₆O every now and again. Yet your discerning diocesic was frankly taken aback during a recent morning’s drinking session, when a friend and fellow al-connoisseur suggested the Bishop’s idea of the ideal martini asciutto was a few swigs from a recently refrigerated bottle of gin. It now behooves the Bishop to set his mind at ease and the record straight.

The Bishop’s favourite olive-drop has its roots in the work of no lesser souse than Ernest Hemingway, whose famous tract The Old Man and the Sea is known, amongst the cognoscenti of cocktails, not to be a coming-of-age tale or a ditty on the perils of fishing, but an allegory on the aging author’s burgeoning capacity for drink. Old Papa, of course, liked to order a Montgomery—fifteen parts mother’s ruin, one part vermouth—supposedly the odds at which its namesake general preferred to enter battle; and, while the Bishop prefers to make love with his glass, not war, this combination, when handled correctly, gives the spirit of 1832 a fighting chance.

Purchase for yourself two bottles of London dry gin (the Bishop prefers Queen Vic’s own jewel of Bombay, though the juniper juice is such a fine drop that most any of the more popular brands will do) and one bottle of vermouth (it matters little which, though most keen drinkers should find Noilly Pratt inoffensive enough). Make sure you have as much gin in the second bottle as you do vermouth, for reasons which will soon become apparent.

Pour out the vermouth. If one is taken by the ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy, perhaps one could make use of it in any upcoming renovations projects as a substitute for paint thinner. Rinse the bottle with chilled, distilled water, then, when you are satisfied that minimal vermouth trace elements remain, replace the contents with those of your second bottle of gin. From here, it is simply a matter of mixing your martini in your own preferred style (the Bishop seeing virtue in both the shaken and stirred sides of the debate and having nothing conclusive to say on the matter), using the aforementioned ratio of 15:1—the greater proportion of said ratio, need the Bishop make more than is already patently clear, being added from the virgin of the two containers.

Add olive, lemon or lime to taste. Enjoy with fine conversation and a Cuban slim panatela.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Love and Monsters'

Well, the Bishop wonders as he whips back one more belt of single malt to ease the pain: What the fuck was that shit?

It just doesn’t get any worse than ‘Love and Monsters’; and even Doctor Who saviour and ego-in-residence, Russell T. Davies, must have sat in front of his TV, 7:00pm, June 17th, 2006 wringing his hands and wondering what on earth went wrong. A task to which your humble critic would ‘love’ to lend a hand, if only he knew where to start.

It’s been said more than once that that phenomena to which even this unassuming observer has fallen prey, the blog, is just an excuse for no-one in particular to tell you nothing in particular about something involving his cat; and despite having found his own way into the confession booth of cyberspace, the Bishop can, for the most part, only agree. ‘Love and Monsters’, the video diary of Elton Pope, a man whose life has been ‘touched’ by the Doctor, is, literally—and little more than—a blog on camera, and just about as good; though one does find oneself dearly hoping for an appearance by the cat.

The cast are thereabouts as interesting as one suspects your average blogger would be in the flesh. There’s little point going into detail, and in any case that would require the Bishop to remember who any of them were. He will say this, though: Isn’t Camile Corduri terrific? Warm, deft, a lesson in simply acting; even, dare one say it, and despite a jowl or two, in need of a damn good seeing to. She can spill the vino on the Bishop’s robes any time. (Don’t feel you have to wash it out, though, love; he’ll suck it dry later.) Her ‘maternal’ presence even brings something resembling character out of whoever was playing Elton for a couple of minutes.

Steven King, according to Elton, once said that salvation and damnation are the same thing. Elton didn’t get it then, but now, apparently, he does. The Bishop’s still not sure; but he’ll certainly know what King means if he ever draws a parallel between ‘Love and Monsters’ and crap.

(Oh, and Rose,* the blue one you pour on the script.)

*Speaking of Rose, Davies—in a rather American show of earnestness bellied by his pre­­–Doctor Who work, but altogether in keeping with the relentless bounciness of this series—seems to have missed the irony entailed by that particular prodigal daughter letting someone else have it for hurting her mum.