Ready when you are, Mr De Mille

I went to the Cinema last night. You are surprised, perhaps? Well, I do sometimes indulge myself in the pleasures of the mob. And despite being an unrepentant Luddite (indeed, being a man proud to follow the banner of Ned Lud), despite my fanatical dislike of television and other broadcast media, I like to go to the Cinema.

I suppose I share the Great Comrade Stalin's fascination with it. That, and a desire to liquidate my opponents.

Indeed, the business runs in my blood (I mean Cinema, not liquidation): was my uncle not a projectionist before the Second World War? If Herr Hitler and his band of third-rate leather-drawed deviants had not provoked a degree of quite unnecessary unpleasantness, who knows where it might have led? But I digress.

I went to the cinema with the memsahib and a friend, to see a film which we insisted on calling Batman but the rest of the universe apparently calls the Dark Knight or some such portentious nonsense.

It was quite funny. I think we were meant to be excited but it didn't really achieve that for me, although I got a bit dizzy when, at one point, the camera appeared to have fallen into the hands of an epileptic.

The trouble is, Batman is such an intolerable prig and a bore. I quite liked his butler, who clearly has what we would term "a history", but Harvey Dent was smug and a prig, Commissioner Gordon was Nice but Dull, Lucius Fox was Dull but Nice...In fact only the Joker interested me, because he was egregiously amusing. As is always the case when I watch these sort of Yankee films, the only endearing characters seem to be the so-called baddies.

And what was so very bad about the Joker? He was charming, in a raddled, psychotic kind of way. He killed bad guys. I admit, he killed Good Guys too, but in the great scheme of things, they all have to die sometime. I admit, he blew up a hospital - but that was funny. He killed Batman's girlfriend, but she was even more Nice and Dull than the others (Now if only Maggie Gyllenhall would reprise her invigorating performance from the Secretary...How much more one would have striven to save her). I mean, he wanted to break Batman's character armour and make him kill - and by the end of the first 30 minutes, so did I...The only failing for me was that the Joker didn't want to kill Batman. Whereas I would have happily deployed battlefield nuclear weapons against Gotham City (without warning) just on the off-chance of frying the Caped Crusader.

But the thing that made me sit up, the thing that made me smile, was that at one point the police remark that the Joker has no identifying marks - and even his clothes are without labels, being bespoke. "Of Course!" I thought "What else would he wear?" I was with him all the way after that.

Anyway, when the film eventually ended I found myself thinking who could take Heath Ledger's place as the Joker, given his unfortunate demise. Who, I thought, can I think of who would be convincing as a skinny, lank-haired, knife-and-explosive-obsessed maniac with a taste for bespoke clothing, a truly twisted sense of humour and absolutely no interest in the moral implications of his actions?

My God, I thought. My time has come at last!