Truly We Have Experienced A Miracle

Be warned, for a little while this blog will be operating in an image-lite mode due to the catastrophic terminal malfunction of our hard drive, which has broken our hearts. So iPhone is our only link to the Internet, which has made us so grateful to Apple that today has featured way more speculation about buying an iMac than we ever thought we'd do. However, as great as the iPhone is, it's a pain in the ass to use it for editing posts, so apologies if this looks like an unfortunate Scrabble accident.

However, I want to talk briefly about this week's episode of Torchwood, or should I say last week's episode if Lily Allen And Her Dwindling Supply Of Friends didn't put you off watching BBC Three forever. It featured the return of MARTHA JONES, who was a big part of why the third season of Doctor Who was so wonderful. We were worried that appearing on this show would ensuckenise her, just like what happened to Jack. As ever there were some regrettable choices. A sciencey montage scene was straight out of CSI: Miami, with the rapid cuts and annoying music, and there were the usual stupid macho moments and bizarre John Barrowman line readings. All of these things would be causes for celebration, as they would represent the comedy highpoints of the episode, but this week they were a distraction, because...

::drumroll::

...this week was good. Not just good by Torchwood standards, but actually just flat-out good. With someone less frivolous behind the camera than Ashley Way, someone who knows how to frame a shot and restrain the actors when they are tempted to go into melodramatic meltdown, it would have really good, but even taking that into account, we were gripped. The script, by Between The Lines creator J.C. Wilsher, featured the strongest concept and most dramatic plot construction of the series so far. It even had sub-plots! And callbacks! Unprecedented. Okay, so there were some terrible lines (Ianto's comments about Jack's penis powers were silly, and Alan Dale should never say the word "funky"), but this was still a huge improvement over previous weeks. Can we make Wilsher the showrunner now, please?

Even more amazing, they totally fixed Owen in his last half hour of screentime. Okay, so it was only a manipulative conceit so that his death at the end of the episode was more emotional, but if it works as well as it did here, it should be praised. Kudos also to Burn Gorman for bringing some charm to the table. Again, nothing more than a device to generate some emotional power at the end, but it worked, because we saw that he could be a likeable character without betraying his dour persona, and then he goes and gets plugged and dies in Tosh's arms. It wasn't Fred and Wesley, but it did the trick. We were gutted that he died, even though we've always hated him. That glimmer of potential made that transparently mechanical plotting work. I really can't believe I've written that and meant it instead of being a snarky jerk.

Maybe Martha helped. Partially because herarrival meant much less time spent dealing with Gwen's usual bullshit, but mostly because Freema Agyeman is a naturally likeable actress whose liveliness transformed the atmosphere of the show for the better. Jack was happy, Gwen had someone to talk about sex with (yeah, screw you, Tosh, you are the anti-gossip), and poor Owen finally made a friend. It doesn't bode well for when she leaves the show; everything could revert to normal sucky levels. The next episode might be a Meat-level debacle for all we know. I hope not. Not just because it was engaging for once, but because Martha might get back to her parent show unscathed. It's more than I had hoped for. Here's the highest praise I can give it; if we had a working laptop that didn't explode in our faces, we would be watching that next episode on iPlayer right now.

Still don't see the point of Tosh or Ianto and his ubiquitous iantaser, though.

Actually, Speaking Of iPlayer...

...It's bloody great. I dissed it a while back, but it turns out that was the Beta version, and was good for nothing. This version, however, has surprised me greatly. I used it last week to catch up on Phoo Action and Lily Allen and Friends, which had been cruelly truncated by our increasingly glitchy Sky+ machine, and though I had difficulty getting it to work until I had closed down all of my other windows (easier than trying to figure out what was causing the trouble using a process of elimination), once it was up and running it worked smoothly.

The same cannot be said for Lily Allen's show. She's had a pretty terrible year, made worse by the ever despicable Mail waging a typically mean and obsessive campaign against her, with elements that are simultaneously lascivious and jugdemental. No one deserves that, especially someone who seems as harmless as Lily. I'm bound to side with her, but boy was her show weak. Partially it was disappointment that the David Mitchell who appeared on the show was not the genius who wrote Ghost Atlas (yes, we both thought she would be interviewing him and not the Peep Show guy. ::blushes::), but mostly it was the depressing sight of not only grainy cameraphone clips of animals having the sex, but the little box at the bottom of the screen showing Lily giggling like a toddler watching La La the Teletubby fall over repeatedly. She found the cat sex particularly hilarious.


Guest Cuba "Daddy Day Camp" Gooding Jr., however, was not as amused by the masturbating bear.


When the guy who starred in Boat Trip is embarrassed by your show, you need to take a long look at the format. David "Not The Genius Author" Mitchell looked even more mortified, clutching his drink to his chest like some kind of talisman to ward off badly conceived TV show ideas. Lily herself seems likeable enough, but she's no Paxman or Letterman. Or Lipton. Even Chris Moyles has more intellectual heft, and he's little more than a brain-stem with a libido grafted onto it. It's the sort of show that makes Telegraph readers shake their newspaper in anger over their continental breakfast in the tea shop down the road, a subset of humanity that I suspect I now belong to (actually, I didn't get that mad. I just felt a bit crap as I wanted poor Lily to have one thing she could point at proudly this year).


Phoo Action was possibly more troublesome. It's based on a comic strip by Jamie Hewlett, someone whose appeal mystifies me. It was directed by Euros Lyn, who went overboard on a couple of episodes of Doctor Who when perhaps some subtlety was needed and as a result made a terrible hash of things (though he got better; The Girl in the Fireplace and The Runaway Bride are two of my favourite episodes). It appeared to be very wacky and filled with pointless pop culture references that would doubtless get my goat (I actually felt a little offended by the Bruce Lee references in Terry Phoo's costume). I anticipated hating it.


I ended up reasonably amused by the whole thing. Yes, Phoo's Green Hornet / Game of Death hybrid costume irked me at first, but once I found myself giggling at the Celestial Wedgie moment (complete with Bruce Lee cry of triumph), it seemed stupid to be so precious about it. Eddie Shin and Jamie Winstone were more charming than any of the Torchwood goons to a practically cosmic degree of measurement, and even though the casting of Carl Weathers was pure stunt (made worse by him not getting any good lines), it was still Carl Weathers, dammit! If I had worked on this show, I would have tried to cast him too. Anything to save him from having to save money by making stew from leftover bones.


The majority of the humour fell horribly flat, it was as self-consciously "what-BBC-thinks-is-hip" as I had feared, and it would work much better as a half hour show than it did at a very flabby hour, but some of it was terrific. Pretty much every joke involving the two Princes (especially their dorky monarchy-themed exclamations) made me laugh, and the BBC News spoofs had some terrific detail: the rapidly spinning logo, the use of Frankie's Two Tribes as background music, and best of all, the superb crawl, so packed with jokes and pop culture references (Monkey Gone To Heaven!) that I spent ages trying to catch them all. I don't know who wrote them, but I'm tempted to give credit to script editor and Masticator-muse Jessica Hynes, because she's super-duper. Euros Lyn dialled everything up as far as possible, but it suited the material and didn't piss me off anywhere near as much as I'd feared. A dancing set piece even won me over. This took me quite by surprise.

So, BBC Three's big night featured a failure and a half-success. For the Beeb, that's not bad, and definitely better than the entire run of Torchwood thus far, though certainly not enough to make me forgive them for "disappearing" the online archive of Mark and Lard sketches. A national disgrace and no one seemed to notice! Questions should be asked in Parliament. One day all of those shows will be available for all of us, and the sky will weep lotus petals out of sheer joy (not factual).

Woolly Brilliance From Scotland

Apologies for just sticking a YouTube clip up (such laziness), but the excellent Rich Johnston linked to this in his most recent Lying In The Gutters column, and it begs to be embedded here, just so I can keep flogging this particularly dead and stinky and laughably inept horse. The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre presents Torchwool:



There's much more sock stuff on this MySpace page. For taking the time to put the boot into the show, I shall love them always. Oh, and what's going on with Torchwood's latest episode turning up on iPlayer early? I saw the damn thing up there the other day, but that episode, Reset (featuring ZOMGMARTHA!), is actually on tomorrow night. It wasn't on last week after all (a quick check of last Wednesday's papers has cleared that up), and the official BBC Torchwood page features no link to the iPlayer version, but it's there on the actual iPlayer page (for 21 more hours, before it appears again), as this screen capture I just took shows.


Is it a mistake on the BBC's part? Or is it a false memory implanted by evil Adam in an attempt to discredit my campaign to spread the word about this show's terrible and evil genre-destroying nature?!!?!? *

Enough of that. More laziness! Saw this for the first time earlier tonight; Dave Chappelle's take on The Matrix. Not the funniest thing ever (not a comment on Chappelle, who is incredible, IMO), but it's done shot-for-shot and choreographed with slavish accuracy. I was impressed. Actual content coming soon!



* Answer: Mistake. Its ineptitude is apparently total enough to corrupt technology.