Is it just me, or is there some really horrible stuff on TV? That nobody notices?

Claire cut off her toe on Heroes, and that was done brilliantly, but it was underplayed, I think, presumably because it play it as it would be would have been horrific. Of course, that was nothing compared to what happened to Jack in Torchwood after that. He was buried. In a hole. For hundreds of years. And when he came out, had he gone mad? Had he even lost his accent a bit? No. On his own, unable to breathe or eat or talk, for centuries on end, and the moment he's dug up he's straight on the job again, without missing a beat. I'm not buying it.

We've all seen the reports of torture in Guantanamo. It's becoming pretty apparent that you don't need to go to anything like those lengths to break someone's mind, at least for a while. We all know now that an hour feeling like you can't breathe and you're going to die is spectacularly awful enough to render most people useless for at least the remainder of the day. Unless you're Captain Jack. Earlier in the same series, Toshiko was basically date-raped and nobody said a thing. Even Jeremy from Peep Show can spot date-rape when it happens. (I did like that Toshiko didn't think of it that way, as she still 'loved' him, but I'd have thought Owen would have said something.) And don't get me started on the incredible stunts Jack Bauer pulls shortly after undergoing literal physical torture or while recovering from a heroine addiction or something.

It's so inconsistent, too. Staying in series two of Torchwood, because I think that has a lot more scope to do horrid things to the principal characters than most shows, when Zombie Owen went a bit mad and started breaking his fingers at Toshiko, she all but broke down. I thought that was great TV, and the final scenes between those two were also fantastic. (I'm struggling to think of a reason to watch the show without those two.) And yet, that was the same episode that Jack was dug up after apparently failing to notice that he'd been buried for longer than anyone else lives.

I don't know. It always seems fine at the time -- it's usually only after the show that I think "hang on, that was actually pretty fucked up" -- but even so. Maybe it's just really, really hard to write good TV without this kind of thing happening once in a while. Or maybe it's just lazy.

"24" Series 7 to be "Worst One Yet"

After much agreed outrage from every single fan of the show, the producers of 24 have decided to revamp the show for the series to be aired in 2008.

"For the past few years, we've tried to come up with original ideas" states producer Howard Gordon. "The thing is, it's difficult to come up with new original storylines that are emotional, gripping and dramatic. Many fans of today sit down and watch the show expecting to be disappointed. So, we're just going to play on that".

The basic plan is to deliberately make series seven illogical and implausible. Writers and producers believe that if they purposely write storylines from thin air, the audience should love it.

"First, we're going to make Jack Pregnant" says wrinkled-face teaboy Ron Howard, "this will be explained by all the radioactivity that Bauer has absorbed in the past ten years of his life."

"Also, the main terrorist threat will be 24 jar of killer bees spread around Los Angeles. Jack will have to try and track down one jar every hour. We will also add about three storylines per episode, but they will be resolved before the closing seconds of the episode."

Fans of the once-passable TV drama anticipate this new series, and believe that more people will watch it as they don't have to sit through all twenty-four episodes of the series.

"Hell, it'll still be better than Lost" states main star Kiefer Sutherland.