Yes, I Think It’s Shite Too.
Cruel but horribly accurate, from The Register:
Under Torch Wood
A parody for voices
By Verity Stob Published Monday 6th November 2006 11:46 GMTFIRST VOICE No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own;
SECOND VOICE Ahem. Hold on there, Richard. Wrong script.
FIRST VOICE I do beg your pardon. My mistake. I thought you were Jeff Wayne for a moment. May I have a glass of water? Thank you. Here we go.
To begin at the beginning. It is a wet, windy, winsome winter evening over the Cardiff bay development; the headachy halogen and sour sodium lights tickling the glinty, greasy, newly-repointed-and-polished-up-nicely cobblestones and reflected and redoubled in shimmershivering puddles.
It is late; and the many and variously architected towers, domes, angles, spikes, aspects, canopies, canap?s and protuberances crouch unadmired in driving drizzle and the garish orange fog of electric allnite-everynite twilight.
Only you can see the mercilessly, migrainishly floodlit Norwegian Church, still cute as a baby mushroom, still astonished and agog, as though it has fallen here out of Disney.
Only you can see the baseball-capped Sennedd building, home of the Welsh Assembly, staring blindly out into the botulism-bobbing bay, dreaming dreams of passing baffling bilingual byelaws with which to befuddle the enemy.
Only you can see the beetled carapace of the Millennium Centre, its cryptic inscription illuminated in huge hostile letters, simultaneously making no sense in two languages:
CREV?GWIR?IN?THESE?STONES
FEL?GWYDR?HORIZONSO?FFWRNAIS?AWEN?SING
Only you can see these things. Well, only you, half-a-dozen webcams and 318 CCTV security systems.
Come close now. Zoom in, chopper-shot to crane-shot, down over Roald Dahl-As-We-Expected Plass and its mobile phone mast fountain and, deep, deep below, in his secret underground headquarters,
SECOND VOICE Captain Jack,
CAPTAIN JACK
Hi. I’m Captain Jack Harkness.SECOND VOICE the insomniac bicon; snug as a hobbit, pretty as a choirboy, immortal as carbon dioxide, wooden as a horse. He is passing the small hours sweeping up pterodactyl droppings,
CAPTAIN JACK
They get everywhere.SECOND VOICE and cataloguing his prize collection of alien artefacts,
CAPTAIN JACK
One off gadget for choosing the quickest queue at Tesco, check. And one off purple wig for a girlie going to the moon, check. And one off bottle of stuff for getting pterodactyl pturds off greatcoats, check.SECOND VOICE all the while humming the ten tenets of the Torchwood creed under his breath \
CAPTAIN JACK
Separate from the government,
outside the police,
beyond the United Nations,
independent of the judiciary,
not voting in council elections,
distinct from the Brownies,
non-members of the AA,
think iPods are rubbish,
cancelled the milk,
no TV licence.FIRST VOICE Up above, it is nearly dawn. Through the grille-shuttered windows of the swanky caf? district you can still see chair-leg-spikey tables and quainty-dainty chalked pavement blackboards, safely stowed for the night
CAF? SIGN Llanfairfach giant maggots, fresh in today! Organic? Of course!
FIRST VOICE and down by the waterfront, a swirling squall of pick-n-mixed rain and seawater soaks Police Sergeant Nye Thyme and WPC Efa Ng as they proceed flatfooted along the promenade.
WPC NG
F*ck me, I’m wet through to the b*ll*cks! What was that?SERGEANT THYME
The watershed, you b*tch.
I didn’t like the first episode of Torchwood at all (looked too much like it was made by the Cardiff Regeneration Company for promotional purposes) but I decided to give it three episodes on the off-chance, which really is as much as mortal woman can be expected to bear.
The wooden acting, terrible camera work and the total dogs breakfast of art direction – not to mention the clunky script, ham-fisted direction and general lack of zip- was bad enough. What did it for me was the sexed-up cyberwoman with the prominent tits and bum-cleavage, in a costume that looked like Anne Summers’ conception of of a naughty SFnal night in, made from gaffer tape, bits of old She-Ra costume and cannibalised hoover tubes sprayed with Hammerite.
Though the exploding head was rather good, it didn’t make up for that stupid Ianto character’s chewing up so much scenery he needed 3 fillings and a crown replacing. Overall, and it’s got to be faced, despite my best hopes Torchwood is utter shit.
Read more: UK TV, Science Fiction, Dr. Who, Torchwood
