future of the genre (brit tv-wise, anyhoo)

Made the mistake of catching the last half of the edited pre-watershed version of Torchwood... not surprisingly, still a tawdry waste of everyone's time and money.  There was a flicker of a great genre plot in there, buried under a hundredweight of dreadful script, OTT acting and the most awful CGI beastie.  Said CGI obviously had half of 'Torchwood Declassified' devoted to it afterwards, as it was obviously so... Well, words fail me. 

Is hating Torchwood (and a lot of the last series of Dr Who) really just a matter of taste..? Something like that just ticks all my boxes for being badly made/written/acted, and I struggle to see the appeal in sitting through it when every other line jars... Oh well, I was going to try and stop automatically writing things off if it was just a matter of taste, but Torchwood bugs me because it's wasted potential, and not even half as dark, clever or sexy as it obviously thinks it is...

On the other hand, tonight was the first ep of Ashes to Ashes... I think my brain may have exploded somewhere around the part where George and Zippy from Rainbow showed up.  It's set the year i was born, which is weird, and feels like they're messing with my childhood memories.  It's also big, brash, verging on self-parody and constantly entertaining.  Keely Hawes just about managed to keep her character, Alex ,the right side of annoying (the girl just does not look old enough to be a single mum with a kid that age is all!) and is handling the meltdowns pretty well.  The advantage she has over Sam is that she thinks she knows the nature of the beast, but I'm guessing (somewhere around the freakishly scary clown) that it's never that simple.

Slightly insane main characters are always interesting choices, and the best line of all wasn't even Gene Hunt's for once... it was Alex screaming "Don't kill him, he's my DESTINY!  Oh, right, that isn't helping, is it..."

It's brave, and twisted, and clever, and knows how to push the concept and the characters in all the right ways.  And it's seeming even stranger that it's on BBC1 in primetime.  There's hope yet.