Torchwood (BBC One), Rufus Wainwright, Prima Donna (BBC One)
The thing that I’ve just realised about Torchwood — and God knows why it has
taken me so long — is that it is essentially very, very silly.
Why did I never notice it was silly before? How could I not have noticed that?
What did I think it was — normal? This is not normal. It’s the bloke from
Tonight’s the Night saving the Earth from a souped-up basement in Cardiff.
In a fractionally different universe — the type Torchwood deals with all the
time — it could be Des O’Connor kicking alien butt from a “special” loft in
Cornwall; or Il Divo thwacking Greys in Troon. Torchwood has a level of
inbuilt ludicrousness so large that it may even be the bedrock of its
existence.
But despite all the silliness, or maybe because of it— after all, it never did
the equally ludicrous Spooks any harm — Torchwood has gone from strength to
strength. For a show that started as a cultish Doctor Who spin-off,
Torchwood now has an international audience — it, like David Hasselhoff, is
huge in Germany, and it is BBC America’s biggest show — and has grown in
prominence in the UK. From a late-night slot on BBC Three, the second series
of Torchwood got bumped up to BBC Two, and last week Torchwood: Children of
Earth was stripped across five nights on BBC One, essentially making July
6-11, 2009 the BBC’s “Torchwood Week”. Given its inexorable promotion
through the BBC’s channels, you do wonder where the BBC will schedule the
next series. At this breakneck rate, it will have to invent a special BBC
Platinum First Class for it.
With five nights to play with, the scripts of Russell T. Davies and, on
Wednesday, James Moran, took on an Aga slow-cook with the plot. It was your
classic “aliens are coming to steal our children” scenario. Aliens make
contact, demanding 10 per cent of the Earth’s children, or they will wipe
out the human race. A high-ranking civil servant — Frobisher, played by the
always hot Peter Capaldi — is put in charge of the crisis, which is in some
way linked to a secret event in 1965. Back then, the aliens were referred to
merely by a number, “The 456”. The 456 are, from their disturbing name up,
clearly bad news. In all his increasing dealings with them, Capaldi does a
good impression of a man gradually losing all the saliva in his body from
pure terror.
Meanwhile, and obviously, Torchwood gets involved. Two major cast members died
in the last series, but that’s OK, because Captain Jack is just about to pay
an incredibly unexpected visit to his daughter and grandson! Yeah, that’s
right. But Jack didn’t have much time to enjoy being the world’s first
bisexual, immortal granddad. By the end of Torchwood Monday, a bomb sewn
into his stomach had exploded, destroying the Torchwood Hub. Given that the
big fact about Captain Jack Harkness is that he ends up, billions of years
into the future, being the Face of Boe, the explosion raised the real
possibility that this was the point at which he lost the “Rest of Boe”, and
that the remainder of the series was going to revolve around John
Barrowman’s head stuck in a jug.
But as Torchwood Tuesday confirmed, the power of light entertainment is so
strong that in Barrowman it takes a lot more than 3kg of high explosive
detonating in his intestinal tract to stop him. This is, after all, a man
who can handle a Barry Manilow medley in a glitter suit, while dancing down
some steps, and then do a live throw to a karaoke team of nurses from
Arundel. Having been reduced to mince, although admittedly, not for the
first time in his life, Barrowman managed to reassemble and then re-animate;
just in time for a government hitwoman to entomb him, alive, in concrete. I
know. In another world, it could have been Bruce Forsyth in there.
The next five minutes marked what will surely be the all-time highpoint of
Torchwood silliness: the rest of the Torchwood team busting the
concrete-covered Jack out of a secure military compound on a forklift truck.
While I don’t have much hands-on experience with forklifts, I’m fairly sure
their mph tops out at about 3mph, possibly 5mph, if you floor it. It seemed
fairly obvious that if anywhere on the secure military compound the
government assassins had been able to find even a golf cart, or a pogo
stick, they could have successfully given pursuit of a forklift operated by
a screaming, pregnant Welsh woman, bearing the fourth plinth from Trafalgar
Square on its prongs.
But what was ultimately devastating about Torchwood Week was that, by
Torchwood Wednesday, the encroaching darkness of the 456 started to crush
brutally all the silly, Scooby Doo-ness out of the show. Indeed, by
yesterday’s concluding episode, it was hard to imagine that Barrowman had
ever starred in a two-month run of Aladdin at the Birmingham Hippodrome, in
a pair of peach-coloured satin harem-pants.
The 456, you see, materialised in the M15 building, in a glass box full of
poison, screaming and ejaculating against the misty windows. Even without
the screaming, Murray Gold’s orchestral theme for the 456 — dissonant,
corroding, two-note brass stab, as if this was all of Holst’s Mars that
could be salvaged after a nuclear catastrophe — made every scene with the
456 feel hopeless: as if they’d already won. When we finally pierced the
mist, and got to see what the 456 looked like, we found that each one had a
human child, stolen in 1965, bound up and living in its ribcage, like a
silk-bound fly in a web; eyes bulging and black.
The aliens didn’t need the children because they were dying; a scenario in
which, in our sci-fi conversant age, one is apt to think, “Fair enough,
aliens”. But the aliens wanted the children inside them “because they make
us feel good. There are,” the 456 explained, delicately, “chemicals.” Human
children were, in short, alien narcotics. And to prevent the world’s
destruction, the Government was willing to turn dealer to the 456. In a
plot-move that will surely see exam results rise perpendicularly among young
Torchwood fans, the Government chose the sacrificial 10 per cent on the
basis of schools Sats results — “the ones who are going to spend a lifetime
on benefits anyway” — and sent in the Army to round them up.
Society began to collapse. Children were bussed to collection points as their
mothers wept. Ianto, Captain Jack’s lover, died in the confusion. Capaldi,
unable to save his own children, quietly went upstairs into his daughter’s
pink bedroom and shot his entire family. Anyone who had been watching
Torchwood Friday as the prelude to a “big night out” would have silently
taken off their stilettos around 9.30pm and sat silently on the sofa with a
large vodka, crying.
In the end, the only way to save all the Earth’s children was to “fry” Jack’s
newly discovered grandson. The boy vibrated in the centre of a metal plate,
blood pouring from his nose and ears, screaming, before he died. It was an
ending so unhappy that Jack teleported off the Earth ten minutes later, in
much the same way that Russell T. Davies has teleported off to Los Angeles:
finished with Doctor Who, leaving Torchwood’s future up in the air, and
exiting on such a cold moral appraisal of humanity’s attitude to its
children that you wondered if Torchwood could ever be silly again. As the
456 pointed out, we let thousands of children suffer and die every day for
no reason other than indolence. At least the 456 were getting a kick out of
it.
After such a dispassionate, God’s-eye view of the Earth, it was a relief to
plunge back down to the level of pavements, pianos, cigarettes and arguments
in one of Alan Yentob’s Imagine profiles.
When Yentob does these portraits of artists and celebrities he always looks
uncomfortable hanging around them. Whenever the camera picks him up, walking
down the street with, say, David Hockney, he invariably looks like the kind
of furtive stalker that security would bundle on to the floor, shouting,
“You are not to give that poem to Mr Hockney — do you understand? You are
not to go near him.”
This week, Yentob was shiftily furtling in the margins of the life of Rufus
Wainwright, the acclaimed singer-songwriter who has all the quiet,
don’t-mind-me demeanour of a pissed rainbow on a trampoline. Ostensibly a
documentary about the making of Wainwright’s forthcoming debut opera, Rufus
Wainwright, Prima Donna ended up being more of a study of Wainwright’s
family. The Wainwright clan are one of those families, like the Mitfords, or
the Durrells, who are less family and more a collective industry of mad,
rivalrous eccentrics, who spend their lives dealing with each other in their
art — as if their family home were part incubator, part index.
Here’s Rufus’s father, the singer Loudon Wainwright III, writing Rufus is a
Tit Man about the infant Rufus — one of the worst lyrical calls in history,
given that Rufus was cruising the gay bars of Montreal by the age of 14.
There’s Rufus writing songs about his equally famous singer-songwriter
sister, Martha Wainwright — Little Sister — and mother, Kate McGarrigle, of
the McGarrigle Sisters. When Rufus wrote Beauty Mark for his mother it was,
of course, as she explained, “the only song he’s written in a kind of
neo-honky tonk style because he knows that’s my favourite genre”. Most of us
just make do with a box of bath salts. And while we might spend every
Christmas listlessly eating Miniature Heroes as we watch Harry Hill’s TV
Burp, the McGarrigles gather to record their infamous McGarrigle Christmas
Hour at Carnegie Hall in New York, “helped” by a couple of friends, such as
Emmylou Harris and Lou Reed.
And in the middle of this unrecognisable world is Rufus, with his four-octave
voice, like a viola in a farmyard, singing songs that are all a little bit
too much, so long as we all acknowledge that, in the words of Irene Cara in
Fame, too much is never enough. I can’t wait to see his opera. And to hear
what songs his family will write about it.
