Wyndhamesque
Posted 8 July 09 by Scott AndrewsAbstract: Gosh, Children of Earth’s a bit good, isn’t it!
I watched the first ever episode of Torchwood twice in one night. It was fresh, fun and exciting but the series that followed didn’t live up to the high water mark set by its pilot. ‘Countrycide’ was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on telly and ‘Cyberwoman’ was eye-bleedingly awful.
The cast were good, the production values were, on the whole, impressive, but the scripts were all over the place. It seemed the show was trying so hard to prove how grown up it was that it came across as embarrassingly adolescent – the telly equivalent of Ben Folds bellowing ‘you’d better watch out, coz I’m gonna say fuck!’
Some moments were laugh out loud bad, and while the potential was plain to see in episodes like ‘Small Worlds’, ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’ and ‘Random Shoes’, moments like the big kiss at the end of ‘Captain Jack Harkness’ and Owen pushing Gwen up against a tree and delivering THAT line, just blew believability out of the water. Lots of people, me included, really wanted to like the show, but it was hard work – partly because the characters themselves came across as an unlikeable bunch of self-absorbed narcissistic idiots.
Season Two saw the show promoted from BBC3 to BBC2 and it was a vast improvement. There were still wince-inducing moments here and there, but it wasn’t trying so hard to impress any more and seemed to be finding its feet. The confident opening episodes – ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ and ‘Sleeper’ – served notice that this was a show that was capable of genuine thrills n spills, and Joe Lidster’s superb and moving ‘A Day in the Death’ achieved the impossible and made Owen likeable, while providing Richard Briers with the kind of death scene every actor relishes.
The addition of Martha Jones for three episodes helped no end (I don’t understand all the Martha-hate online; she’s great), and the characters mellowed and evolved, becoming rounded and sympathetic in unexpected ways. By the end of the season, when Owen and Tosh sacrificed their lives to save the day, the show felt like it was properly grown up and ready for great things.
Featuring the Torchwood team heavily in last year’s Doctor Who finale was a key moment, demonstrating that these characters and their set-up could function outside of the restrictive guns n’ swearing n’ sex remit they had been shackled with at the start – if they could work at 7pm on a Saturday evening for a family audience, then the format was proving itself much more flexible.
Now it’s been promoted again, to BBC1, and a five night event mini-series designed to bring in new viewers. It seems an odd thing to do on the face of it. With the best will in the world, Torchwood has been an acquired taste – often too self-conscious to win over its target audience of sci-fi fans, yet simultaneously too bonkers to cut much mustard the mainstream audience.
Despite the evident talent in the writer’s room this year – RTD, James Moran and John Fay are extremely capable and effective writers – there was a nagging worry that ‘Children of Earth’ could fail spectacularly unless it raised Torchwood’s game significantly.
Certainly the promotion of it, and the ‘event’ of stripping it across a week, drew the attention of people who would not previously have looked twice at the show – even my Dad expressed mild regret that he’d missed episode one while out of the country, which blew my mind a little bit.
But what would these new viewers make of Torchwood’s heady brew?
Well, the verdict appears to be in, and Children of Earth is a bona fide hit. Episode one found an audience of over five mil and, astonishingly, retained almost all of those viewers for episode two, which was the most watched telly programme on Tuesday – a remarkable achievement for the little show that could.
Part of its appeal lies in the simplicity of the premise – the frozen children chanting ‘We are coming’ strikes strong chords of John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale, harking back to the kind of high concept, uniquely British sci-fi that older viewers like my Dad grew up with and would conceivably tune in for. The execution of those scenes was chilling and effective, becoming an instant classic TV sci-fi moment that will be reminisced about for years to come.
Meanwhile, the lovely, unexpected character moments scattered throughout the first two episodes – Gwen’s conversation with Clem; the revelation of Jack’s daughter; Ianto’s brash brother-in-law; the nicely underplayed tension of the Jack/Ianto relationship; We. Want. A. Pony. – counter pointed the sci-fi gubbins with genuine heart and humour, the kind of thing RTD does so very well.
On top of that, the government conspiracy strand benefited enormously from Peter Capaldi’s sterling performance as the ambiguous Mr Frobisher and Cush Jumbo’s winningly tentative turn as a PA who has to decide whether to commit treason on the first morning at a new job.
With all this sterling work going on, when Torchwood started doing the kind of thing that has hitherto defined it – the bomb is where!? – it felt fun and cheeky and gleefully dangerous rather than try-hard and cringe-worthy.
Episode two’s final fifteen minutes took it to the brink – harking back to the outrageous Torchwood of old; that escape sequence was INSANE – but it felt like they’d earned it. Yes, it said, we’re proper grown up adult drama now, but we can still be totally bonkers when we want to, and aren’t you glad?
It’s lovely to see Torchwood finally living up to its obvious potential and garnering critical plaudits and large viewing figures. The team behind this mini-series have crafted something populist, spooky, thrilling, funny and mad that dresses itself in familiar couture – it’s a bit Spooks/Shameless/Midwich Cuckoos/Quatermass/State of Play – but manages to remain idiosyncratic, silly and fun, in the best possible way.
Here’s to the now surely inevitable season four – and here’s hoping ‘Children of Earth’ doesn’t all fall apart in the final episode. On the evidence so far, I’d say that was extremely unlikely.
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