Wednesday, 25th October 2006.

Torchwooden

There's a rumbling and a moaning in the back streets of Cardiff. The remains of blood-soaked corpses lie strewn about rain-soaked alleys, while the night wind howls and a hundred car lights bounce around the ring road, creating an eerie strobe effect that looks very BBC. The sound you hear is the moan of a thousand half-decent writers crying in frustration and anguish, and a fresh look at the body reveals it to be none other than British prime time drama. There's a killer on the loose, and his name is Russell T Davies.

I really wanted to like Torchwood. I genuinely did. Like many others I became increasingly tired with the direction taken by the last series of Doctor Who - with its annoying wrap-around love story, stupid gags and the constant reappearances of the irritating Tyler family (much like the relatives who pop in for a surprise visit just when you'd planned a quiet weekend). But Torchwood was sure to be different. It was leaner, darker, more adult. It was the show that Doctor Who would like to have been but for the fact that it's broadcast at seven o'clock on a Saturday evening. Torchwood, on the other hand, was destined to take the family-friendly blockbuster entertainment that passes for the current incarnation of Who, and twist it into something meaner and more profound. In the face of cynicism and a hundred collective scoffs I was determined to give it a chance. I was even quite encouraged by the trailers.

By the end of the first episode, I was ready for a cold shower and biological cleansing of some sort - anything to wash off the stench of mediocrity. I should have seen it coming. Any programme that features one four-letter word within the space of the first five minutes, only to subsequently consign profanity to the ranks (as if it had been uttered by an on-air radio guest who was then privately cautioned between records) is asking for trouble. It's one thing to have a Cardiff police officer mutter that "it's a fucking disgrace" - it's another to then leave it at that, and then tone down the language to that of a parental guidance film: simply, it makes the earlier outburst stick out like a sore thumb.

I tried to put this to the back of my mind, but it more or less set the tone for the rest of the hour. Everywhere you looked were signs of a show that couldn't decide whether it wanted to try too hard or just not try at all. You'd witness the occasional flash of gore, but one that served no real purpose other than to say "Hey! It's blood!". There are fleeting references to drugs, sex, and so on and so on, but the impression you get is of a group of ten year old schoolboys who have been left alone with a tape recorder, charged to produce a radio report but unable to resist the temptation to goad each other into muttering the occasional rude word.

Part of the problem of episode one, which is something that will at least be remedied over time, was the fact that the whole story was seen through the eyes of Gwen - the brash, impulsive police constable who stumbles across the shadowy organisation while on a routine murder investigation. It's no real surprise that Gwen's still a constable, as she demonstrates comparatively little intelligence - the only thing she did of any real merit was her partial conquest of a hypnotic block that is placed in her drink by charismatic Jack Harkness. Jack himself - or, more to the point, John Barrowman - was the only thing that kept me watching; Barrowman has a decent screen presence and can put in a good performance when he's working with the right script (this wasn't it). He also has a lovely singing voice. Now, that's an idea: Torchwood, the musical, with songs by Frank Miller. "One girl / one guy / not gay / but bi / False memories are made of this…"

Assisting Jack are a bunch of cliche-ridden and not particularly endearing sidekicks: Toshiko Sato, technology expert and closet lesbian; Suzie Costello, "second in command"; and the insufferably irritating Owen Harper (Burn Gorman, recently seen in Bleak House, in cheerful Saarth Lundon laydee's man mode). We also get the immaculately-dressed Ianto Jones, who by nature of his slight foppishness is at least semi interesting, even if he dresses like he's either on his way to a funeral or a G4 video shoot. Elsewhere, Gwen finds time between all the alien hunting to snuggle up with her logistics-obsessed boyfriend, who is so boring that I can't even remember his name. Presumably he's destined to meet a fiery end, to give Gwen some much-needed maturity and to pave the way for her inevitable (and now guilt-free) shagging session with Jack.

The best dramas - even sci-fi ones - are by nature character driven; the characters define the way the story goes. Not so here: Gwen asks blundering, meandering questions and shows very little ingenuity but is still smart enough to find her way to Torchwood, at the beginning of a ridiculous sequence that sees Jack tell her everything that's been going on ("Here comes the science part - concentrate!") before wiping her memory. We're then forced to endure ten minutes of her showering, eating and wandering the streets of Cardiff before the penny drops and, like Midsomer Murders' Chief Inspector Barnaby, she experiences a moment of clarity that leads her back where she'd been the previous night. This sudden flash of out-of-character brilliance isn't enough to keep her out of trouble and it's only sheer luck that she doesn't get herself killed. That doesn't stop Jack - in a move that's again quite out of character - from offering her a job on the spur of the moment, with no interview, reference check or even details of starting salary or health perks (surely pretty good in a company like this). The rest of us are left scratching our heads, wondering if we missed a chapter somewhere.

I've already mentioned the sense of unbalance generated by spurts of bad language and blood - testing the water and making a statement, but not jumping in too deep. By the time we'd reached the second episode - which was presumably screened back to back in order to tempt a disgruntled audience who wouldn't have tuned in the following week after the disaster that was part one - the producers had gone for the opposite approach, by including a storyline about a pink cloud of gas that got its life force from 'orgasmic energy'. This was, basically, an excuse for lots of and lots of sex - no actual nudity, but orgasms galore, all justified by the plot (such as it was). The problem was that the writers, having been granted the relative freedom that a post-watershed screening brings, decided to take it to an extreme and include an absolutely pointless sequence showing a seedy nightclub owner (onscreen for a minute and a half before vanishing), masturbating in front of his CCTV display panel. It brought back memories of Vince Vaughan doing much the same thing while Anne Heche undresses in Gus Van Sant's tedious remake of Psycho: it's not that it was offensive as such, just gratuitous and completely unnecessary, adding absolutely nothing to the programme. Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of the whole scene (and hey, maybe this was the whole point) was the thought that assorted teenage boys were probably sitting at home doing much the same thing.

The central problem here was one of the target audience, and who they were - or weren't. Touted as "Doctor Who for adults", the whole thing played more like a vastly substandard X-File, with flashes of Angel. (Brushes of Angelness - Touched by an Angel, I suppose you'd call it - were epitomised by long, swooping shots of John Barrowman standing on a rooftop. On occasion, when the camera got close enough, you could see that he looked as if he were about to jump. Presumably he'd read next week's script.)

If this were a show aimed at teenagers (albeit with a rather patronising tone) then that's fine, but we really ought to have been told. If it's aimed at teenagers, put it on at half past eight on a Thursday on Bravo or something - or relegate it to E4, home of celebrity obsessions and endless Friends reruns. Yes, I know it's a BBC production (rendering this sort of syndication all but impossible) but work with me here. The truth remains that we seem to have been misled: here was not an intelligent sci-fi drama with snappy dialogue, brooding suspense and clever ideas. Here was a ninety-minute (only that long? felt like a week and a half) disaster with all the chemistry and excitement of a sputtering firework on the morning of November 6th.

By far my biggest beef with Torchwood as a whole was the fact that no matter what happened, I didn't care. A decent drama / adventure would have you worried about the fate of your characters: I was too busy looking at my watch to even know what they were doing most of the time. When Jack and the boys (and girls) were careering across Cardiff trying to find a possessed teenager before the monster within her destroyed her completely, I got the feeling that this was supposed to be a big deal, but it really wasn't - we had no time to get to know here before she'd been possessed, and the few moments of lucidity she'd displayed throughout just made her come across as whiny (although I suppose you would be if you'd been possessed by a horny nymphomaniac alien). If we don't care about the characters, then there's nothing to be lost from their deaths, so there's nothing at stake - sure, this girl was also a serial killer, reducing grown men to ashes in the flick of an orgasm, but I was unable to shed a single tear over any of her victims, which made the episode a colossal failure.

Adding to this general sense of nonchalance is the fact that Jack seems to have been granted immortality after his run-in with the Daleks and subsequent resurrection at the hands of the Bad Wolf (did anyone ever really figure out what she meant by that?). Broadly speaking, this means that he's as indestructible as Connor McCloud, or Bill Murray in Groundhog Day - injuries heal and, in one supposedly climatic scene, a bullet pops out of his head in a manner quite reminiscent of Wolverine in The X-Men. This is all well and good, but having a main character who can't die in a programme such as this completely deflates any real sense of tension: immortal characters usually face seemingly insurmountable odds, generally in the form of monsters and disasters generated by a far bigger effects budget than the BBC can provide here. And part of the fun of the X-Files - much like Batman & Robin before it - was knowing that your heroes wouldn't really die, but maintaining a suspension of disbelief by wondering how on earth they'd escape from the killer bees / carnivorous insects / rubber spikes on shifting walls.

It's early days, and it's also true that the second episode - as tedious as it might have been - was nonetheless a slight improvement on the first. If they can maintain this trajectory they should have worked their way up to substandard by the end of season five, so perhaps I'll stick with it. But I can't help thinking that one of the Cardiff police might have been on to something when, during speculation about the nature of this secret organisation, he suggested "I'd like to see CSI Cardiff. They'd be measuring the velocity of a kebab". A jolly good idea, and one that somebody high up ought to commission. It would certainly have been an improvement on Sunday night - provided, of course, that it wasn't written by Russell T Davies.