Wood Torched

I stopped watching Torchwood at the end of the first season, after my toes couldn't take the curling any more. Their stupid, kid's TV set base, their sudden showy bouts of alien sex for no reason, the archly constructed set of characters, and more than anything, the terrible stories – especially the fucking cyberwoman in her fucking cyberbra – took away so much from the newly revived and wonderful Doctor Who that it was better to pretend it wasn't there than engage with it and have it undermine the fun of my favourite TV show. Instead I discovered the joys of The Sarah Jane Adventures, which instead of attempting to make Buffy in Holby was a really great homage to old Doctor Who - quirky, shambolic and occasionally bloody scary, with the odd classic story to warm the cockles.

So, I didn't watch series two of Torchwood or their recent BBC1 mini-series Children of Earth. But it was only when people started to say the magic word Quatermass that I began to get interested in CoE. BBC3 have just repeated the five episodes, and I thought I'd give it a go. And I have to take my hat off to them, never have I seen a programme so improved. The story was brilliant – paedophile junkie aliens demand a tenth of the kids from the planet to incubate chemicals that feel good as the Barry White alien creature gasps orgasmically, and the government weasles its way from spin to Nazism over the curse of the tale (even with the wonderful Peter Capaldi doing a Goebbles and killing his own kids). All the moral dilemma stuff was pushed way beyond the usual TV or movie plots, with Jack topping and tailing the story by handing over a trial run of the kids in the sixties, and then blowing his own grandson up to stop them. The morality was quite revolting and brilliantly explored.

And along the way they've ditched the things that have held this series back. With boring Tosh and sleazy Owen already dispatched, this time it was the turn of Ianto, the man who put the wood into Torchwood, to cop it, and not before time. And they've blown their base up too. In fact, the series ends with the terrific Gwen Cooper beig the only surviving member of Torchwood left on Earth, after Jack understandably jets off for a bit of R&R among the stars.

Jack, of course, remains the weak link. A totally charming character when sweeping Rose Tyler off her feet in 1940s London, renegade Time Agent Jack Harkness has outstayed his welcome on an epic scale - across six series of two TV shows this character has roamed, getting progressively less interesting and sympathetic as each year passes. His costume is as irritating as Colin Baker's terrible outfit, and there's a heartbreaking moment in CoE when Jack has lost his clothes and is finally in civvies, and then stupid fucking Ianto goes and buys him another set of RAF surplus, which was the final nail in the Welshman's coffin for me. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, please!

Russell T. Davies has taken a stupid amount of stick from wanky 'fans' (ie, people who hate Doctor Who but know all about it) who don't seem to appreciate what he's done in bringing back a totally moribund format and making it viable and more popular than ever before. For me, Torchwood has been his big misfire, and The Sarah Jane Adventures his secret triumph. But CoE finally showed what this odd adult sci-fi show could be - not a slash porn version of Doctor Who but a show that takes the legacy of British sci-fi legends John Wyndham and Nigel Kneale and brings it up to date, as he had done in The Second Coming, which was probably the closest thing to CoE he has written thus far.

I didn't want to like it, but there we go, we can't always get what we want. Yes, it's still saddled with the ham, but at least the dead wood had gone, and it thoroughly deserved to be the massive ratings hit it was. I do hope they make some more in this vein, and wave goodbye to the gimmicks which had sat on the series and slowly killed it before our eyes.