The phrase "as the bishop said to the actress" is one that I have often been asked about. Everybody knows that it is used as a suffix to a double entendre, but nobody knows who the original bishop was, or who his actress friend was either.
Bishops play an interesting bit part in the dialects of English. "The bishop has put his foot in it" is an old saying, a very old saying, still to be heard in England's North Country, in parts of Scotland, and among the older Doneagal and Tyrone folk who have worked in those airts across the water. It is said of porridge etc. that has burned dry; and food that tastes of burning is said to taste of the bishop's foot.
Tusser's Husbandry of 1580 has a couplet that goes: "Blesse Cisley, good mistris, that bishop doth ban for burning the milk of hir cheese to the pan." Who was Cisley? Who was the bishop? We are not told. Earlier, in 1528, Tindale in Obedience of a Christen Man explains: "If the podech (pudding?) be burned to, or the meat over rosted, we save the bysshope hath put his fote in the potte, or the bysshoppe hath played the coke (cook), because the bysshopes burn who they lust and whosoever displeaseth them."
I am reliably informed that such sayings as "Keep an eye on the milk, Joan, in case it gets bishoped" are commonplace in the kitchens of the north of England to this day.
To bishop something also means to furbish it up so as to, conceal some of its deformities. One could use it of a car, or a house, but it is very commonly used by horse dealers. I have heard English dealers and Irish travellers ask if a horse had been bishoped as they examined its mouth; one can conceal the animal's age by tampering with its teeth, or rather hope to conceal it - those boyos are no daws. The term bishoping is in Bailey's famous dictionary of 1755 and in The Sportsman's Dictionary of 1785. The latter informs us that "bishoping (is) a term among horse coursers, which they use, for those sophistications they use to make an old horse appear young and a bad one good." I doubt, however, that your modern horsecourser would fall for the old bishoping stunts of yesteryear to make a horse show some mettle. A stick of ginger placed you know where has now given way to coloured pills and stuff that comes in disposable syringes.