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.

It Should Be Okay, Torch Wood

The Doctor Who News Page reports that Torchwood is coming back for a week.

I'm not kidding. The third series, at the moment, is comprised of five episodes to be shown within the same week. Not only that, it's a five-part-story.

I'm not so sure how to feel about this. Torchwood can be really naff at times, and rather excellent at other times. A five-part story of 50-minute episodes however... that's four hours and ten minutes worth of Torchwood. And what would the plot consist of? Will it be one monster? Will it be resurrecting Owen and Tosh and dealing with the consequences? I don't know how Torchwood can do this- they've never even done a two-part episode before. And, previous cliffhangers involve Captain Jack hearing the TARDIS (which wasn't even resolved in Torchwood, Owen dying (which was resolved by resurrecting him) and Owen dying a second time (which was a bit naff).

I guess I'll feel more about it when they announce what it's about.

How To Watch Torchwood

Thanks to the BBC's iPlayer service, the unmissable is now unmissable™. It's not always that simple, though, so here, based on my experience last week, is a guide to using the new service:

1. Set Torchwood to series record on your hard-disk TV recorder set-top-box. Use the BBC Three broadcast; it's almost a full week ahead, after all. This will suffice for almost the entire series.
   
2. You will have to remember to record the last two episodes manually, as these have randomly moved to a different day (presumably to get them out of the way before Doctor Who started up again) and the finale is not on BBC Three because this would be making life too easy for us. In any case, the series is now on two channels, on two days, at two times, with gaps of anywhere up to two weeks between episodes, so the series record feature can't be trusted with this.
3. Make sure you are not discouraged by the fact that the penultimate episode was a thoroughly missable (oddly, Firefox's spellchecker objects to "missable" but not to "unmissable") affair or the fact that the antipenultimate was shit. The finale is actually pretty good.
   
4. If you miss the finale, and the series record feature didn't work, you can download it from iPlayer. Go to the TV Replay menu on your HDR box and select "Torchwood".
5. Torchwood may, for no apparent reason, be absent from this menu. If this is the case then (a) you will have to use a PC, and (b) the associated episode of Torchwood Declassified is probably there.
6. Fire up your laptop. Go to the iPlayer website. Browse to Torchwood and click "download". The file should register as 500MB. Do not click "stream", as we want to watch this later, elsewhere, offline, as downloads permit us to do.
   
7. You are told that you must download some software. Do so.
8. You are told that you must restart Firefox. Do so.
9. You are told that you must update Media Player. Do so.
10. Browse to Torchwood again and click "download" again. Wait for a pleasingly short amount of time, partly because the file now registers as 250MB.
11. Shut down the laptop using hibernate mode to save time, and take it to your chosen viewing location. In my case, the train.
12. Reboot the laptop. The iPlayer software has crashed, so you'll need to restart that.
13. Browse to Torchwood, and click "play".
14. You will be told that you must download a license to play this file and cannot watch it without an internet connection. Start mentally composing an angry blog post.
15. Return home, safe in the knowledge that Torchwood is repeated on Tuesday evening.
16. Turn on the TV at the appointed time.
17. You will see a documentary about various inept conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Not-Actually-A-Princess Diana, which has replaced Torchwood at the last minute despite very obviously having taken quite a long time to research and make, because of the BBC's insipid obsession with showing every damn thing they have at the most 'relevant' moment possible, without considering at all how convenient or useful that is to anyone.
    

Nice job, BBC. You've made the unmissable very nearly unwatchable.

Torchwood Reclassified

When you watch a show like Doctor Who or Torchwood, it feels very slick. Like a big-budget, American-style, cinematic job. It's a far cry from the old Red Dwarf II era, when the BBC would shy away from sci-fi because it was invariably both very cheap-looking and very expensive. (Ask Ben why they don't do it now.)

The BBC, of course, still don't have huge amounts of money to spend on these shows. That's why we have Brainbox Challenge. The reason these shows look so good is the huge amount of effort that goes into making them as good as they can be without spending a year and twenty million pounds on each one. And you don't really appreciate that until you watch the little documentaries they show afterwards. You get to see even little scenes you barely noticed in great detail, and even those have been painstakingly crafted by people who actually care about the show.

(A few weeks ago on one of these little documentaries, after Owen was shot in Torchwood, Russell T Davies said he'd had to be shot because it was important that the audience realise that "almost any of their heroes can die at almost any moment". This amused me, because of course Jack can't die at any moment, but now it's starting to annoy me, because months later Owen is still here, and in fact has been in it more since being killed than he was before, and this week was even strolling up and down not breathing saying, "these people should be dead. This is impossible," with no trace of irony.)

And so when I see all this effort poured into making a programme look and feel and sound as real and as gripping, as immersive and as good as it possibly possibly can, it just makes me sad that all that effort was wasted -- all because the plot of this week's Torchwood was such unadulterated crap.

For those that missed it (and I use the term "missed" generously), I shall summarise.

• The monster was a Creepy Travelling Circus Ringleader Guy and his friend, Pearl The Strange Sideshow Woman Who Needs A Lot Of Water For No Stated Reason.
• These two were trapped on a reel of film (somehow) and escaped (somehow) after sneaking it into a projector (somehow) and now they're running around Cardiff "stealing people's last breaths" (somehow and whatever that means) and sealing them in a silver flask (somehow). It is never explained what they are, where they came from or how they ended up trapped on videotape, much like those tiny green flies in The X-Files only infinitely less plausible.
  
• Their victims go into coma-like states. If their breath is returned they recover; if it is lost, they die.
• Eventually, Jack kills them by videotaping them, thus trapping them again (since obviously that is what would happen), and leaving the tape in his car until they turned into Freddie Mercury (or was that something else?). When Jack announces this plan, Ianto turns to him as if he's just said something really profound and says, in a state of total awe, "a film of a film..." as if someone who films a film has anything more deeply impressive than two films. That said, this would explain why the people at the cinema are so keen that I don't video the movies, and in any case it was nice to hear Ianto say something for a change. I was beginning to suspect he was just a particularly well-dressed extra. When (if) they finally do get rid of Owen properly, they won't need to draft in a new character -- just let Ianto speak sometimes.

I mean, come on. Torchwood is sci-fi. Everyone knows that. Look at Wikipedia:

Torchwood is a British science fiction drama television programme, created by Russell T Davies and stars John Barrowman and Eve Myles. [See, they don't think Ianto is a real character either.]

So why doesn't Peter J Hammond know that? He clearly wrote a fantasy episode -- and bad fantasy at that. I mean, the plot made no sense, and I object to that because when the setup and the crisis make no sense, there's no reason for the resolution to make any sense, and when the resolution isn't obliged to make any sense, there's no tension because I've no real sense that anyone's in any danger (least of all Jack or Owen), because they could easily be saved at any moment by even the most preposterous Deus Ex Machina, and so no situation is even close to the level of apparent hopelessness you need to build up to make the audience fear the worst. And not only that -- not only could Hammond have picked almost any random combination of words and pictures, bolted it onto the episode and called it a resolution -- but the resolution he eventually chose was both totally predictable and stupid.

Seriously, Torchwood. This won't do. Where's Steven Moffat when you need him? Well, let's check Wikipedia again, shall we?

Steven Moffat (born 1961 in Paisley, Scotland) is a British comedy/drama writer who has contributed to television series since the late 1980s. He is married to Sue Vertue, a television producer.

His best known works include Press Gang, Coupling and some episodes of the revival of Doctor Who. He is currently scripting a trilogy of Tintin films for directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.

Er... okay then. (I was skeptical when I heard about Jekyll and can only assume he enjoys a challenge.)

But you know what? We don't need him. We just need someone who writes better plots than "an unspecified monster breaks out of a video and kills people in a needlessly impossible way until someone points a camera at him." (CCTV apparently doesn't count.) I could do that. You know what? I'll do it for free. Seriously. Me, Euan and Ben can each write an episode of Torchwood or Doctor Who, and the BBC can pick the ones they like, and if they like none of them, sod it; they've only lost a couple of hours' reading -- and they have a whole department just for that anyway. They get free scripts that are doubtless better than From The Rain, Last Of The Time Lords and Love And Monsters (because they'll make sense), and I get to impress slightly-geeky girls with my shiny new Doctor Who writing credit. Everybody wins, except perhaps the bad writers, and even they will at least have something decent to watch on TV as they sit at home all day without a job.

I mean, really it seems almost petty to rant at Torchwood for one bad episode (even if it was a really bad episode) when there are entire series that don't even get that good at their absolute peaks, but the point is that I can simply choose not to watch those series, whereas a bad episode of a good series not only wastes 45 minutes of my life, but it does so when I thought I would be watching something good. That's not fair.