Timothy Dexter is basically the best person who ever lived. Apart from literally
managing to sell coal to Newcastle: "At the age of 50 he decided to
write a book about himself - A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain
Truth in a Homespun Dress. He wrote about himself and complained about
politicians, clergy and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and
33,864 letters, but absolutely no punctuation, and capital letters were
sprinkled about at random. At first he handed his book out for free,
but it rapidly became popular and ran into eight editions in total.
When people complained that it was hard to read, for the second edition
he added an extra page - of punctuation marks - asking readers to
"peper and solt it as thay plese"."
March 2008 Archives
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1) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang/Spike's Welsh Vacation
James Marsters, best known for pretending to be an English vampire on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, pretends to be an English something or other on the series that wishes it was Buffy The Vampire Slayer. This would be all style and no substance except for it not having any style. Spike from Buffy zooms through time to fight Captain Jack, kiss Captain Jack, then do some generically bad things to Captain Jack's mates so that he can find a secret stash of space diamonds or something. This is padded out with some reminders of which dull characters fancy other dull characters. Ianto says something sarcastic and we all go home.
2) Sleeper
I think I was drunk when this was on and missed the first bit. A woman discovers she is turning into an alien so some philosophical issues of identity can be explored in the most perfunctory way possible before Torchwood can run around shouting about nuclear weapons and shooting people in the head. Despite this, still manages to come across as a sort of duller, science fiction version of Casualty.
3) To The Last Man
We are briefly introduced to the 1910s version of Torchwood and wonder whether that might be a much better programme, before they send some bloke from World War I to the future. He cops off with the Japanese one before inevitably bloop de bloop de splurg TRAGEDY. There's actually some reasonably done character stuff in here that ultimately falls apart because the conceit driving it is utterly half-arsed.
4) Meat
Something to do with sentient space beef. If I wasn't drunk when I started watching this I definitely was by the end.
5) Adam
A GOOD ONE! This lifts elements of the excellent Buffy episode 'Superstar' by having a new member of the team (Adam, obv.) suddenly appear with everyone convinced that he was there all along.This makes the Torchwood team slightly more interesting, as Adam accidentally turns the rapist into a nerd and deliberately turns the receptionist into a murderer.
This almost succeeds by packing lots of simple but strong ideas in (the above character changes, plus Gwen forgetting who her boyfriend is as a side effect of having her brain scrambled & Jack remembering events from his childhood) although it does start to run out of steam about 30 minutes in leaving us with some not very good "You won't kill me!" "I surely will!" "Oh no you won't!" "Oh yes I will!" stuff to pad it out. And apparently Captain Jack grew up in Star Wars.
