IT has impressed critics, gripped six million people every night and kept South Wales glued to our screens looking for local landmarks, old schools and workplaces.
While the Ashes have garnered the headlines for Cardiff and Wales, Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood has put the region and its residents at the heart of the BBC’s most successful week-long drama “event”.
It hasn’t just been buildings and city-wide aerial shots on display, but what appears to have been an even more concerted effort to establish on national television strong, recognisable Welsh characters who make jokes rather than being the subject of them.
“Oh my God, Severn Bridge, I’m going into England, farewell forever,” says Ystradgynlais-born Eve Myles, the heroine of the show as she approaches the bridge in the first episode of the five-parter.
“Good luck. Have you got currency?” replies her partner Rhys.
“Yes, and I’ve had my injections. See ya.”
With fewer dodgy aliens and some classy actors, most notably the brilliant Peter Capaldi as a civil servant thrust into the frontline, this season has moved Torchwood a couple of notches along the sci-fi scale of seriousness that starts with Red Dwarf and ends with Sigourney Weaver in Alien.
And as far as anyone asked to be involved in the filming, the bigger the show the better.
Headteacher Marilyn Biddle has seen the playground of her school, Gaer Infants, in Newport, broadcast across the nation filled with stupefied children chanting “We are coming”.
“This week has been so exciting,” she said. “You can go into any shop or anywhere and everyone is talking about it.”
Some six million people every night have thought so. The viewing figures hit 5.9 million on Monday, 5.6 million on Tuesday and were back up to 5.9 million on Wednesday. And that does not include those who watched the repeat or pushed all three episodes into the top five spots on the “most popular” section of BBC iPlayer website.
In comparison, that almost doubles the viewing figures for season two’s premiere and beats previous week-long “event” dramas such as Criminal Justice and Five Days, or even the three-day Iraq war Occupation drama which hit 4.4 million viewers.
Critics have also been kind. It was the Sunday Times pick of the week and The Independent’s Brian Viner wrote that the series was “written, acted and directed with verve and wit, fully deserving its transfer to BBC1 and five nights of prime-time”.
America’s Huffington Post website promised viewers in the States that the series, starting over there on July 20, is the “television event of the summer”. The writer added: “In fact, this is one of the finest productions you will see all year.”
It all leads to the question: Where next for Torchwood? Victim to a BBC budget cull, back to a late-night slot on BBC Two with a smaller budget or another crack at delivering something different for a prime-time audience?
Source
A BIT OF TOM JONES
FRAMED
as Angharad
TORCHWOOD
as Gwen Cooper
