The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Sound of Drums'

One can only marvel at how clever Russell T. Davies is. So clever, in fact, that it took the Bishop almost twenty-four hours to realise that ‘The Sound of Drums’ is built on an untempered schism of its own. Which is this: If the Master can become the Prime Minister of Britain, he does not need the Toclafane. And if he can make use of the Toclafane, he does not need to become Prime Minister of anything at all.

Davies’ justification may well be that the Master is both Evil and Mad, and concocts these rather complicated schemes just for the hell of it; and there is a temptation to believe this is true. Or he might insist it needs no justification, and what the hell does it matter if everyone is having such good fun. Still: whatever the excuse for Davies plotting house of sand, ‘The Sound of Drums’ is great fun; and any Who fan of the older type who did not enjoy this (and ‘Utopia’, before) is deliberately trying not to. It is, the Bishop must reassure, far from perfect, but imperfect things have their charm, too, as forty-four years of Doctor Who have ably proved. The highlights for us ancients were of course the fanwank, and with this and ‘Utopia’, your canonical commentator finally believes that Davies loves this show. What he has done, with flashbacks to Gallifrey and a host of things besides, is bring to bare the Doctor Who we of the old school always had in our heads when we remembered what was all those years ago. Not a re-envisioning, but a simple putting on to screen of what was already there but never shown before.

The cast: The Bishop, as always, feels sorry for the extraordinarily pretty Freema Agyeman: she has been saddled with an imbecilic role, and to make matters worse she can’t act. Still, she is extraordinarily pretty. John Barrowman, as always, is unavoidably charming, and while David Tennant is doing nothing new, that he might now simply be referred to as the Doctor is about as high a praise as one can give. Colin Stinton, as the American president, plays an American president about as well or not as anyone on British TV ever does, and the rest are fine, though special mention goes to Alexandra Moen as Lucy Saxon: she is a find. It is not entirely clear whether Davies has scripted her as Lady Macbeth or Lady the Labrador, but she realises both, and each, and neither with ease. Performing sleight of hand with a face that’s as inscrutable as it is seductive, her performance leaves the Bishop happily lost for words.*

But of course it all comes down to the Master; and the Bishop cannot help but feel a fraction churlish in not being over-thrilled with John Simm’s best go. Reaction elsewhere has largely been that he is either painfully over the top or perfectly over the top, but while both of these are true, they are not the problem; rather, the problem with Simm’s Master is that there is nothing there—no reason to believe he’s all that. Roger Delgado’s Master was never the Doctor’s intellectual equal—despite what the scripts tried to tell us at the time—but had a quiet force of personality that saw him through; Anthony Ainsley had his manic deviousness.** If the Doctor was all cosmic wit and science, they in their megalomania were art bending science to their ends: the result, essentially, a draw. Simm, without the mesmerism of the former or the devilishness of the latter, is given nowhere to go but wide of the mark; his Master is simply an impenetrable nutcase who is very, very clever, and the only reason we realise he’s clever is because the story tells us he has done some very clever things. Even his one-liners, one of new Who’s superficial strong points, are tepid.***

In fact the Master’s absent presence tells us quite a bit about why ‘The Sound of Drums’ works. Davies, at the end of the day, for all willingness to turn convention on its head, and shock the hoi polloi with one ‘guess what?’ idea after the next, is basically just a very good writer of conventional mysteries. Given time and a universe to work with, he always leaves one wondering what’s next, but his worlds are made of light and mirrors; anyone who delves backstage to see how it’s done is sure to regret having asked the magician to reveal his tricks.

*Sadly, she is unable quite to salvage Davies’ typical indulgence in the final scene, but at least her white-girls-can’t-dance act managed to distract the Bishop as the tension wilted to the strains of yet another postmodern twentieth-century reference. Never has a lack of rhythm held such guilty appeal.

**Ainsley, despite generic fan opinion, was good; and, when on form, one of the very few acceptable things about the program’s eighties run.

***That Davies has conceived the new Master as the (Tenth) Doctor’s contrapositive is as obvious as it is dumb, and was never the engine of their relationship. Delgado’s Master, armchair theorising aside, was not the third Doctor with an evil bent. Nor was he the Doctor’s Moriarty. Nor was Moriarty Holmes’ Moriarty, which is exactly the point.

The Bishop on Torchwood: 'Day One'

Can anyone actually say what was going on in episode two of Torchwood, ‘Day One’? There was sex in a toilet, heavy petting between two women (it’s nice to see Russell T. Davies hasn’t forgotten those straight men amongst his audience), a naked man handcuffed inside a prison cell, and sex in sperm donor clinic—all hung together by an alien creature that feeds off ‘orgasmic energy’ (the Bishop is surprised no reference was made to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone) via a story that seems to have been written as if Chris Chibnall was distracted having sex at the time.

‘Day One’, meant to be shocking and not much else, will shock no-one who has passed through puberty or knows someone who has. Filling in the gaps between the shagging is by far too much info-dumping, wherein the questioning Gwen Cooper seems not so much like a new member of the Torchwood team as an audience member who has wandered on set and asked to have a peek at the script. Writer Chibnall, who has been roundly slagged for his work on Torchwood elsewhere, is not altogether bad, though perhaps head honcho Davies might require next time that he finish what he starts.

Still, if one didn’t watch too interestedly (the Bishop himself was reading at the time), it made do with an hour, and the exercise as a whole shows signs it might be worth enjoying once it stops telling us about itself. Eve Myles continues to be a right little sort, and if your voyeuristic vicar might pass on a little advice to Davies et al: if you really want to shock us, having this pleasing lead actress get her kit off (or rather, more of it than she already has) would be an excellent place to start.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Vengeance on Varos'

It was June 2007, and the Bishop had lately wondered whether he had been perhaps a touch unfair in not being 100% totally thrilled with the first half of the third season of the new era of Doctor Who. Then he watched 'Vengeance on Varos', and realised that he had.

The TARDIS runs out of power, stranding the Doctor and Peri inside for what seems like a week, most of which for some reason appears on screen—in scene after scene crafted solely to show Philip Martin can't write dialogue. Finding a small amount of spare back-up energy in an old broom cupboard, the dynamic duo head to Varos, there to refresh their supply of the extremely rare TARDIS-powering element zeiton-7. It transpires that the Varons are selling their extremely rare zeiton-7 extremely cheaply to a nasty, exploitative galactic mining company; which suggests that when Martin heads back to school to study scriptwriting, he should also brush up on the law of supply and demand.

Various hi-jinks follow, in an attempt to make some sort of allegorical point about the modern obsession with violent, badly made TV—wherein the Who production team don't so much throw stones in their glass house, as bring in a dozen sopranos to test its resonant frequency.

Much has been made of how poor old Colin Baker was doing his best with some of the worst scripts and production in Doctor Who history. The Bishop agrees with the second part. In C. Baker, we finally had a lead every bit as rubbish as the supporting actors around him - which is not to say those minor players were going to make his achievement easy. All they had to do was act wooden and hammy, and they couldn't even get that right. Lines are bawled as though the boom mic is in another room, and the entire 90 minutes features more missed cues than a pool hall playing host to a kleptomaniacs' convention.

Strangely popular with Who fans despite its intergalactic awfulness, much has also been made by them of the predictive power of 'Vengeance on Varos'; but what, exactly, did it predict? That people will watch any old crap you stick on TV? John Nathan-Turner and co only had to wait another four stories to find out.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Utopia'

That's more like it, Russell.

The Bishop on Celtic Frost at Manning Bar 13.6.2007

Cultured though the Bishop obviously is, he has been known to dalliance within those slightly louder, slightly darker, slightly less un-asexual realms of rock and roll known as HEAVY METAL now and again. Yet while your musicological man of the cloth did enjoy his teenage ‘metal’ phase, and still retains a love for a select few early exemplars of the style (the present subject of discussion falling well within that category), he is in general largely baffled by the more extreme forms of modern metal—not so much that they exist (artistic experimentation always expanding to fill the available space), but that anybody can be bothered listening to them. What, however, the Bishop finds most baffling is the ability of serious headbangers to identify the line of demarcation between what they call ‘good’ and ‘bad’ black metal: how the latest Decimated Sphincter record—to the Bishop’s ears as musical as hail falling on a mine field—is the gateway to a musical Elysium ne’er dare dreamt of by mortals afore, while the new release by Axabalababathon—equally, as far as the Bishop is concerned, a battle between competing kinds of white noise—is considered rotting sonic vomit not fit to be thrown up after twenty-five lagers and a 3am kebab. Finally, though, the Bishop has acquired some appreciation for this distinction after watching two what could only, in undeserved fairness, be called ‘lesser’ bands take the stage before Celtic Frost.

The first of Chaotic Impurity’s litany of mistakes was to place the drum kit front and centre as the dominant feature of the stage, requiring their goblinoid grunt-vocalist to compete with it for attention. The second mistake was to hire said singer. Half-pixie, half-goat, and with all the presence of a rabbit caught in candle lights, he nonetheless provided the Bishop with some much needed amusement in regards his microphone technique: clenched as tightly as his malnourished fist would allow, held indecisively in front of his mouth as though about to stifle a cough. Noisy without being loud, belligerent without being aggressive, they would have been drowned out by a decent cough, and the sound would certainly have been preferable.

Whoever the second act were, the Bishop sends his thanks for their inoffensive 30-minute set, which allowed him to sit outside in moderate comfort and get ploughed. Having achieved said state of ratarsed-ness, the Bishop made his way inside to take in an hour or so of Celtic Frost, who surprised. Never the tightest of outfits, even on record, your canonical critic was pleased to discover they had, since their creative highpoint in the mid-eighties, been to the musical equivalent of a fine gentlemans tailor. Tailoring, too, seems to have been on the agenda for Tom Fischer nee Warrior, whose sensible overcoat, beanie and black hole starburst eye-paint was one of the more tasteful black metal get-ups the Bishop has encountered. Martin Ain, meanwhile, who looked mostly like a large amount of hair, proved that being middle-aged and fat is no barrier to being copiously metal.

Musically, the Bishop was reminded that simple does not mean simplistic, and that heaviness, like most musical qualities, is not an easy-to-define thing. Many bands since have been larger and louder (well, perhaps not larger than Ain), but few have been nastier or darker. Free of the idiotic double-kick assault that passes for Angry Young Metal these days, the lads just stepped onto stage and filled up the room. And after thoroughly enjoying a set list that included ‘The Usurper’, ‘Circle of the Tyrants’, ‘Procreation of the Wicked’, the misspelled ‘Into the Crypt of Rays’, and the adjectively excessive ‘Necromantical Screams’—as well as some interesting material one assumes to have been off the new record (thus all but leaving out the band’s flabby middle period)—the Bishop can only wonder why other musical ensembles can’t put on something this entertaining for fifty well-spent bucks.

The Bishop on truth

The Bishop can only wonder how Daniel Dennett has made it in the world of philosophy. His most significant ideas come in only three forms: those that he doesn’t understand, those that are obvious, and those that are wrong. It is the latter two sorts that are at issue in Dennett’s latest on the free will problem, Freedom Evolves.

Ostensibly a layman’s summary of Dennett’s thoughts on the subject, the book does however promise something new; but the first half sees little more than Dennett re-repackaging his tired old arguments. As any bright twelve year old will tell you, free will doesn’t exist, and probably never could. Dennett, undetered though, soldiers on, comfortable with his tenured place in the What I Would Like To Be True school of philosophy. He begins by assuring us his argument is no mere linguistic trick, then spends the next 100 pages attempting to pull a rabbit out of it and saw it in half. Whatever hair-thin delineation Dennett intuits between the words ‘determined’ and ‘inevitable’ is not in any dictionary the Bishop is acquainted with.

One can usually deduce the relative merits of a philosophical argument by the amount of space it takes up, and there are no prizes for guessing which length is preferred. While the better proofs against free will (for there are more than one, all more-or-less equally valid) take up less space than this book’s copyright notice, Dennett’s musings dither all over the place, in an attempt to distract the reader’s – and perhaps Dennett’s own – attention from the gaping paucity of his position. In a manner that seems to have been nicked from Plato, Dennett sets up a counter-interlocutor ('Conrad'): literally a straw man, intended to offer the arguments of Dennett’s opponents, the better for him to counter. Disappointing, then, that not only are those arguments rather obviously and deliberately flawed – and not the standard arguments against free will – but that Dennett fails to address them successfully, too. And in a final desperate bid to salvage his jigsaw of logic, Dennett undermines the position of free will libertarians,* who he supposes more wrong even than his determinist opponents. But this is silly. If you think two plus two is five, and I think two plus two is six, the fact that I am even further off has little bearing on the fact that two plus two equals four.

For the book’s second half, which the Bishop declined to read out of general boredom, Dennett proposes that free will is something that evolved. (The clue is in the title.) This is a no brainer. If we have free will, or anything like it, of course it evolved. How else would it get there?

But at the end of the day, the worst thing about this book is that it is intellectually dishonest. It is almost certainly true that Dennett doesn’t believe in free will himself, and really just wants to show that the illusion thereof is good enough. Only an idiot could hold to the contrary, and Dennett, despite the clumsiness of this particular diatribe, is probably not that thick.

*Those that believe that free will is real because the universe is indeterministic; as opposed to Dennett, who believes (or claims to believe) the universe is deterministic but that free will exists all the same. (Go figure.)