In north Africa he was withdrawn and largely humourless - as a lover of deserts and hater of agitatives he brings TE Lawrence to mind, though we are shown that he has only a strained approval of love between men. After the burning that has left his face disfigured with a web of scars, his calcified lips straining to take in the pulp of a plum, he has a dry wit and a my-dear-boy persona - as if merely being thought to be English was enough to instill a tincture of Noel Coward.It's only in romances, of course, that suffering is good for the sense of humour, or that love makes people imaginative. There's an awful lot of contrivance in The English Patient - the film is like the monestary piano that Hana plays at one point. Precariously balanced on rubble and with a landmine inside it, but with all the notes working and even miraculously in tune.

Almasy's inexorable dying over a period of years is hard to swallow, as is the coincidence of being tracked down by a Canadian thief (Willem Dafoe) with a score to settle. But Minghella's touch is so sure that it feels the other way round, not that we're swallowing something a bit rich but that something is swallowing us, a mighty foaming Jacuzzi of precarious feeling.Though Minghella is a writer as well as a film-maker, there's nothing literary about his approach here. He has no track record as an action director, but the moments of violence are extremely well done, all the better for being dispatched abruptly and not turned into set pieces. When he does want to build tension, he can do it - one sequence of torture, and a scene of a Sikh bomb-disposal expert under pressure - he just doesn't do it for its own empty sake. He uses music as the indispensable manipulative force that movies have always known it to be, but without crassness.When Minghella's first film, Truly Madly Deeply, came out, it seemed like a British riposte to the banalities of Ghost, and to represent a sort of emotional truthfulness, romanticism that would choose prose over poetry.

It would be hard to make those claims for the lush melodrama of The English Patient, which comes much closer to traditional Hollywood territory. Everyone complains about the north African heat, yet sweat is visible only on special occasions, specifically as a shine of dampness on the part of Katharine's body that most obsesses Almasy, the hollow at the base of her throat (he learns that it is called the supersternal notch). At one point, Almasy walks across the desert for three days, and still looks so good that many men in the audience will add Sahara tramping to their workout regimes.Even so, Minghella manages to sound the occasional unexpected note. Many men in the movies have torn women's clothes in the eagerness of their passion, but Almasy must be the first screen hero to do some mending afterwards (even if his sewing is less than exquisite). And there is one moment of glorious rule breaking, when Katharine, having broken off with Almasy, does something truly unforgettable as she makes an exit that is meant to haunt his memory She bangs her head on a piece of scaffolding. In life, Romeo and Juliet is always being interrupted by You've Been Framed!.The clearest change in the years between Casablanca and The English Patient is a plummeting in the share price of self-sacrifice. Katharine's choosing to stay with a husband who calls her his "sausage" is inadequately motivated - it's just a pretext for the romantic disaster to come.

But even on the larger level of a film set around one of the century's few candidates for the label of a just war, self-sacrifice has no meaning. If Bogart's Rick had helped the axis powers, Casablanca would have become an impossible object, but in The English Patient the hero can give plans to the Nazis and be forgiven, even by a man who has been obsessed ever since by the desire to kill himnOn general release from tomorrow. Terry Nation did not create Doctor Who. Depending on who tells the story, that honour lies somewhere between BBC producers Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert and writers Anthony Coburn and EC Webber, all of whom pitched in on the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, broadcast in 1963. However, Terry Nation was the first writer who understood the potential of the show semi-accidentally developed as a "tea-time educational science fiction series" He was the man who created the Daleks. The first serial ran an uninspiring course, with William Hartnell's crotchety Doctor, granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford) and two staid teachers - there to explain the history - helping cavemen make fire.