And in tonight's telly...

[avevale_intelligencer]

...Torchwood demonstrates once again that shallow and self-centred people can't hack being alive after death, that people who claim to have no feelings can do petulant and sullen quite well thank you, and something else which would be a spoiler for next week.

We've also been watching Jekyll, which we missed on the first run, and are enjoying it a lot more than I for one expected. Steven Moffat is one of the good writers who occasionally almost redeems nuWho, and in tonight's episode of Jekyll we saw James Nesbitt channeling the Tenth Doctor for a brief period. I'd got the impression from the trailers and other publicity that they were going to play it as a simple case of multiple personality disorder, but the reality is far otherwise, and it's keeping us guessing as to what's really going on.

There is now a set of characteristics emerging, with nuWho, Torchwood, Being Human (if it makes it to series) and Jekyll, which in future decades will I think be seen as defining British telly fantasy of this period: how much of this is due to the comparatively small number of writers turning the stuff out is open to debate. The advantage of being old and decrepit like me, of course, is that you can look back over previous periods and know that these characteristics, like the ones that defined the genre in the Sixties and the Seventies and the Eighties, are transient artifacts of the state of the world and of television, and not (as someone who only started watching within the period might think) the one and only True Way to do it.

Comments

[braider.livejournal.com]

Go check your email.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The marquis and I rather liked Dead Man Walking on the grounds that a) Burn Gorman really can act and its nice to see him given a chance to show it and b) it had very low amounts of Jack.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen Jekyll, but Torchwood is p*ssing me off no end. I watch it because:

(a) some episodes were entirely bad (but you'll forgive me if I fail to remember which ones ... oh yes, I remember now: the one where the fae won and the little girl didn't get rescued)

(b) I like picking scabs

I cheered, oh how I cheered, when Dr Frog-Boy got shot. If only the lecherous self-centred amphibian would just s*dding well stop moving, and talking and, well, being in the series.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I suspect you might have meant "weren't" under (a) there (though I didn't like that episode much: if I'm told that a particular bunch of people are the heroes, then I expect them to be at very least effective).

I don't hate Owen as much as some people do (though I enjoyed lark_ascending's characterisation of him last year as Punchable Monkey-Faced Twat): what I object to is the blatantly cynical two-facedness of pretending to kill him off For Real This Time Folks and not even waiting a week before bringing him back, as far as anyone knows at this point, permanently. It robs major character death of the precise value that they were talking about in the documentary, and ups the ante yet again on what you have to do to your characters to Prove You Mean Business, whatever that means.