Torchwood - Tonight, 9pm, BBC One. Fingers Cross It Is OK.

As well as being the longest running sci-fi TV series of all time – and the best - Doctor Who can also claim to have one of the best spin-offs of all time. A spin-off that is well-written, well-paced and pitched, and sometimes so sublime that it is better than the original series. But enough about The Sarah Jane Adventures. I’m going to talk about Torchwood this afternoon.

Torchwood is back on our screens this evening – 9pm, BBC One. In fact, it has completed its journey from joke station (BBC Three) through to a key slot on BBC One. Although that isn’t quite enough to please the star, the ever-present John Barrowman:

Barrowman said "We were the most successful show on BBC3, ever. We moved to BBC2 because the ratings were so good, the ratings were great again and we were beating shows that had been on BBC2 for a long time. The decision was made to go to BBC1, and then we were cut. From 13 episodes down to five.

"The five episodes, the miniseries as I call it, are incredible, I have no doubt about that, but personally, I felt like we were being punished. Other shows move from BBC3 and 2 to 1, and they don't get cut. So why are we? It felt like every time we moved we had to prove ourselves."

Hmm. Now, it is worth nothing that what Barrowman says is spot on. Whatever station Torchwood has found itself on, it has tended to do very well. In terms of viewers. However, unlike both Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, it has struggled to be an artistic success. The tone of the series has always been all over the place, and – as much as it pains me to admit it – it sometimes comes across as crass, poor and just plain disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some superb episodes. The creepy as hell From Out Of The Rain, the poignant Out Of Time, the clumsy yet moving Captain Jack Harkness and the gleefully energetic and utterly insane Something Borrowed are great bits of genre television. Less effective, but still watchable, are Small Worlds, the very nasty Countrycide*, the predictable mid-season episode Adam and the faintly touching (in an utterly geeky way) Random Shoes.

Yet the very fact that all these different stories and styles can be part of the same series over the course of just 26 episodes is the problem. You never quite know what you are going to get from Torchwood. Which is also sort of true of Doctor Who. Yet the latter has a mesmerising lead character, whilst Torchwood is headed up by a polysexual version of Roger Moore’s James Bond. Captain Jack works as a sidekick in Doctor Who - however, his ersatz charm and predatory nature is not quite enough to work as the lead character of 13 episodes of TV each year.

And that isn’t even taking into account the poor episodes. The futile Greeks Bearing Gifts, the so macho it is homo-erotic Combat, the moronic Meat and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - all of these would be instantly forgettable, if they weren’t meant to be part of the Doctor Who universe. And at its very worst, you have Adrift - a plodding, over-directed story that manages to make every character in someway unsympathetic. 

Torchwood’s producers make their thought processes very clear. Take Cyberwoman - a passable episode that clearly came from a “wouldn’t it be great if…” conversation within the production team. “Wouldn’t it be great if… we had a Cyberman in the series.” “No, no! A Cyberwoman.” “And… ooo… she’s a woman, so she can show a lot of flesh despite being a Cyber-form.” “And she can, like, create loads of tension in the Torchwood team. Don’t worry, we’ll forget all about that tension in the next episode…”

This all comes down to a failure to set a tone for the series – a style and a background against which all episodes can be judged. More often than not Torchwood feels like a pitch rather than a plot. Yeah, it is the adult version of Doctor Who. But what does that mean? Other than occasional fucking and swearing. At its most jarring, Torchwood feels like soft-porn for geeks. Witness the sex-beastie in Day One. Oh look, there’s sex. And girls snogging. Which has been seen before on some many different programmes - and many different websites -  and as a result just feels moronic here, because there isn’t anything other than a lazier than lazy script to back it all up.

In fact, we see far more mature and adult themes in the main show. Such as in Father’s Day, The Girl In The Fireplace, the wonderful Human Nature/The Family of Blood, Blink and the dark as pitch Midnight. Even The Sarah Jane Adventures had managed a story more adult and more spooky than anything that has been shown as part of Torchwood**.

So I reckon Torchwood’s success comes mainly from the fact that it comes from a more popular – and much better – parent series. And as such, it is lucky that it is still going, let alone on BBC 1. Had Torchwood not been spawned from such a great series, I think – as harsh as it sounds – it would have sunk without a trace, vanishing after its first series. It has been lucky – very lucky - to have graduated to BBC 1 in a core slot. Going down to five episodes is a small sacrifice to achieve that.

Of course I’ll be watching this evening***. Hoping that it is better than it sometimes is, and hoping that it is worthy of the parent series. And also marveling at the fact that a programme that was derided for many years as dead by so many has now managed to propel an erratic, unsatisfactory spin-off into a prime-time slot for the next five nights on the BBC.

*Actually the first episode of Torchwood I actually enjoyed watching.
** Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane?, in case you are wondering.
*** Review to follow. At some point.