Blow Torch

By this time next week I’ll have been slapped awake by a woman in a nurse’s uniform and told to get dressed and get out. Just thinking about it takes me back, except this time the treatment will be free. Although I expect the after effects – spending the next few days feeling like I’m pissing razor blades – will probably be the same.

The past few days things the aches and sharp pains have eased off and I suppose I could back out of the upcoming procedure, pleading with the urologists that, “I’m getting better”, but I suppose it’s worth having them ram their probe right up my urethra and beyond to make sure there aren’t any more nasty surprises to come further on down the road. And at least getting the all clear means I can get off these meds and hopefully stop feeling completely run down long before the day is done.

It was probably because I was feeling so worn out last week that I found myself sprawled out on the sofa watching Torchwood of all things. In the past I think I’ve made it pretty clear what I thought of the show. Supposedly fashioned to be an adult drama, the results, more often than not, proved to be, at best, distressingly juvenile. After two series in which one or two entertaining and rather well thought out stories were forced to rub shoulders with episodes that ranged from mediocre to hopelessly embarrassing to utterly dreadful, I could have quite happily ignored this third year.

Except this time around they had ditched the thirteen-episode format in favour of a five-part serial, stripped into the schedule over consecutive nights. Rather than thumbing my nose at it, instead it piqued my curiosity. There were things that annoyed me. After the first episode I still wasn’t sure it deserved the plaudits being unreservedly showered upon it, and by the end of the second hour I would have liked a few minutes on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square so I could stand there and bellow, “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?” at the top of my lungs.

But come Wednesday’s episode everything turned around as the pace picked up considerably, and the elements of drama and comedy, characterisation and plot all balanced out rather well to create a far more cohesive story. Even more remarkable, the usual ‘jokes of a sexual nature’ that Torchwood apparently cannot live without had a subtlety that made them far funnier than the typically obvious and annoying cock–custard pie–in–the–face gags.

One of the drawbacks to the third part was that having reached such a high point at the midway mark, the remaining two episodes didn’t continue to sustain the momentum and seemed to simply peter out. As it worked toward its unexpectedly dark finale, rather than build up dilemmas where the consequences were still far from certain, squeezing every last ounce of drama from the situation, it bluntly telegraphed the outcome far ahead of time, thereby diminishing the end results.

Though there were times across the five episodes where the dramatic tension seemed to be directed in the wrong place I still kept watching, which was more surprising. While the story didn’t always make sense I had to remind myself that this was, after all, a show that started off its second series with a goldfish driving a sports car. If there were problems with the finished product it was down to the fact that the production obviously didn’t have the budget to realize what was on the page.

Following the massive explosion that totals the secret underground base that everyone seems to know about, I kept getting distracted by the fact that the blast had apparently left the surrounding glass-fronted buildings untouched. Later in the same episode, after the cell Jack Harkness is laid out in is filled with cement, the size of the hardened block his Torchwood teammates make off seems to indicate he was interred standing up in a telephone box instead.

While that prop may have been a knowing wink to Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge model and can be seen as one of many trivial details best ignored, what couldn’t be overlooked was how relentlessly useless everyone involved was when it came to handling firearms. The John Woo moment where the gap-toothed, goggle-eyed Welsh bint leaps from the back of the ambulance, guns blazing, was just embarrassingly bad.

Even when she was standing up the woman couldn’t grip and fire a pistol to save her life. Worse were the roving black ops soldiers that kept rearing their gormless heads. When the sharpshooter missed not one but two of his intended targets they immediately started to look a bit rubbish, and the show had only really just got going. Then when the men came under fire in the cellblock they squealed and shied away like a bunch of little girls.

Pick up any recently made war movie on DVD and the extras will undoubtedly include footage of the actors being given a brief approximation of a soldier’s boot camp experience and, more importantly, instructed on how to hold and discharge their weapons properly and work together as a cohesive team. Obviously the excuse here would be that they didn’t have the time, money, or inclination to make it look the least bit convincing.

However much the director might have thought they really looked the part, all kitted out in the uniforms with their boots, helmets and tactical ammo vests, without any kind of instruction to make it look like they know what they’re doing, on screen they appeared as a bunch of jobbing extras fannying around with guns as they pretended to play soldiers. It was as if the Keystone Cops had been inducted into the Imperial Stormtrooper Academy, and then failed to graduate.