Torchwood

BBC One

There was much crossing of frontiers emotional, physical and geographic in Torchwood last night. There was Gwen, the pouty, sultry, never less than patronising, Welshwoman crossing the Severn Bridge to England. “Goodbye for ever,” she said to her husband Rhys on the mobile. He asked if she 'ad currency and she said yes, and she'd 'ad her injections as well. They were buying a house together, but this was nothing next to the next threshold they were about to cross. Gwen was having a baby, which was “bloody amazin'”.

Not to be outdone on the emotional transition front, there was her boss, Captain Jack's boyfriend Ianto, explaining to his sister that he had crossed over to the other side and had become, as it was tactfully put, a “gender bender”. For Captain Jack too there had been a migration from solitary immortal to being part of a “couple”, not a word he was comfortable with but one we can live with if it stops him turning into the universe's most whiny singleton since Bridget Jones, namely Doctor Who.

Perhaps the writer Russell T. Davies was saying that, whatever Gene Roddenberry thought, space is not the final frontier, not when, without getting too Hallmark about it, there are still those chasms between human hearts. After all, as was acknowledged in the script, the Earth has been threatened so often in the last few years by aliens - mainly on Doctor Who Christmas specials - that you don't exactly need to blast off and find them.

The apparently decent Asian doctor from Chesterfield whom the Torchwood lot befriended last night had actually noticed a rise in the number of suicides since aliens had been visiting. A woman who had been a Christian all her life now considered that science had “won”. “She said she had seen her place in the universe and it was tiny.” Gwen, whom the Radio Times usefully explains is “the team's emotional core”, saw it differently. “The whole world is bigger. My life is bigger,” was her take on it. A fuller meditation on these thoughts is available in Martin Amis's novel, Night Train.

It was amazing with all this domestic stuff going on that there was room for a sci-fi plot but there it was and, fittingly given Gwen's new status, it concerned children. Just before school and during break time, all the kids in Cardiff - nay, all, the kids in the world - had stopped being kids and begun staring ahead of themselves blankly. Soon they were chanting: “We are coming”. They were speaking on behalf of an entity called the 456 who had abducted some Scottish lads and lasses back in the Sixties but been persuaded to desist thanks to a Faustian bargain struck by the Wilson Government. In the thick of the cover-up in Whitehall was none other than The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi, who disappointingly limited himself to the simple profanity “Oh Christ.”

The most important translation in television terms is, however, Torchwood's, which started out as something culty and adolescent on BBC Three, grew up a bit on BBC Two and is now being expected to hold grown-up attention across five nights this week on BBC One. The opener was well-enough written to engage the non-cognoscenti and not so full of special effects as to alienate those who cannot abide aliens. It is probably more and better than we deserve in the dog days of summer.

Teenagers Fighting Cancer

Channel 4

Teenagers Fighting Cancer was one of those programmes you would have to pay me to watch - and so you did - not because it was bad but because its subject is something to which we would far rather close our eyes. It followed 18-year-old Rebecca who had been found to have a bone cancer relatively common among teenagers, Alex, 16, an aspiring break dancer with a tumour the size of a brick on his leg who was refusing an amputation, and Adam, who nine years ago had had the same operation and was now battling secondary lung cancer. They were such feisty, vital young people that had this been drama, any compassionate writer would have written each a full recovery and made Adam, the would-be rock star, famous.

Instead Adam's band crashed out of a battle of the bands competition. We left him preparing for a fundraising concert for Queen Elizabeth Hospital's Young Person's Unit because it was better to get his friends and relatives together for it than “for something like a funeral”. Much worse was to come. We caught up with Rebecca, four weeks from the end of her first course of treatment, and in agony. “I'd love a day without pain, just one day. I'd love an hour,” she pleaded. Two weeks later she died. No one doubts the value of optimism, but James House's unflinching documentary put a lie to the guilt-inducing civilian myth that mere frame of mind can influence the progress of cancer. Rebecca's frame of mind was amazing.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010