The Duchovny Files

At the age of six, David Duchovny proudly announced to his father that he "wanted to grow up to be a bathtub". Three decades later, over ten million viewers tune in to BBC1 every week to watch him play Fox Mulder in the award-winning series the X-Files. As the show moved from cult to mainstream status, books about the X-Files and the two main members of its cast, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, have certainly not been few and far between. The Duchovny Files, complete with glossy cover claiming that "the truth is in here", is the latest (unauthorised) biography on the market.

This book deters all but the most fanatic Duchovny fans (and those who have to write reviews for student newspapers) from reading beyond the first thirty pages. It promises to provide an insight into the man who threw away his PhD at Yale to pursue a career in acting, moving from one minor role to the next until he landed the part of Mulder in the X-Files. Sadly, this book turns out to be a tedious description of every B-movie that Duchovny has ever been in.

The episode synopses are poorly written, and the section titled ‘Selections from the Internet’ is just sad. The only truly amusing section of this book is that which lists the X-Files drinking games… Worst of all, Mitchell does not seem to have ever met Duchovny, and uses magazine articles, the Internet and other biographies as his sources.

As far as the Duchovny Files is concerned, the truth is still out there.

Calvin