Day 3875: TORCHWOOD: Molecule Day: Frying Tonight!

Thursday:

I may be a little slow, but I'm not quite sure why the triangle conspiracy need to engineer a Miracle in order to achieve their aim of segregating people into categories of alive and dead when, well, death was achieving that pretty well on its own. Still, I'm not a sinister geometric figure so what do I know.

It's difficult to describe this as "enjoyable" given that – spoilers – it concludes by incinerating Torchwood's only decent character, but it's certainly the best episode so far this series. If you'll forgive me, this is where the series caught fire.


Jane Espenson writes a fine episode, deftly handling the storylines of all the regulars: humorously tackling the rivalry between Jack and Rex; sympathetically bringing Esther back on board after her failure last week; providing some rousing if entirely cover-blowing snoggage between Gwen and her Rhys; actually delivering on Oswald's growing messiah complex and having him, in his increasingly demented speech, actively choose to sell his soul to Jilly's devil while deliberately shafting Jack at the same time; and ultimately horrifying us as creepo-supremo Colin goes mental and shoots Vera and then roasts her alive.

The episode manages not one but two effective thriller plots in parallel: Rex, Esther, Vera and Gwen all infiltrating overflow camps to investigate the "modules"; Jack's obsession with Oswald leading him to the Miracle Rally and the build-up to Oswald's speech. Both sides of the story ratchet up the tension. Rex misdirects us with various suggestions about what PhiCorp might be using the "category ones" for in order to blindside us with the idea that they've literally recreated death. And Jack and Jilly become the good and bad angels on Oswald's shoulders, tempting him to be hero or heel – and both of them want a "revelation" from him.

After last week's – to my mind – misstep with her characterisation, it was good to see Jilly back on wicked form, spikily dismissing people who let her down and apparently jumping over the heads of her PhiCorp bosses, attracting the attention of the "handsome man" (yes, thank you "The X Files") who presumably represents the triangle conspiracy people.

Meanwhile, Jack, I think, fundamentally misunderstands Oswald because he thinks – because of his own guilt over the death of a child – that Oswald is like him, and Jack's first reaction to immortality – going all the way back to season one of "Torchwood" even – was that he wanted to die. Oswald doesn't want to die. Oswald wants power, he wants to corrupt everyone, ultimately to make everyone be like lesser versions of him. In telling the world that they are angels, Oswald wants to be god.

And it's particularly fine that Oswald's final speech actually incorporates what both of Jill and Jack wanted him to say… but in such a way that Jack's intelligence – about PhiCorp knowing about the Miracle in advance – becomes not merely useless to him but actually an asset to them.

If there's a misstep it's only that writing San Pedro overflow camp administrator Colin Maloney as such a grotesque is massively unsubtle – bitingly funny, it's true, especially Vera's early contemptuous response to "you're so think you just might snap", but not exactly shying away from wearing the "I'm a villain" tee-shirt. On the other hand, you can't really blame Espenson for Bill Pullman's "Tony Blair having a stroke" delivery of the "angels" speech. And anyway, he clearly thinks Oswald's supposed to be going bonkers.

However, the real problem is that she is saddled with some crushingly banal "banality of evil" shtick, the sort of politics that even the Socialist Workers would call pitifully naïve I wish it were so!, and for that, the finger of blame really has to point at her boss. Oh, her too, surely!

It's not in the crass one-liner: "This is what you get if you allow private companies to run the health service" (well, no, actually, and perhaps someone from Europe could explain to Russell how the French or German or Swedish health services work). But that's just all very "teehee do you see what I did there"; it may not be big or clever, but the real problem is something far larger than that.

As a self-avowed lefty and so notionally in favour of big state power, Russell seems to have turned "Torchwood" into a medium for saying "all governments are shite".

Mind you, he's also an out-and-proud atheist who keeps on throwing Mr Floaty Jesus Doctor into his "Doctor Who" mix so maybe he's just wilfully perverse.

"Children of Earth's" finest hour was probably the episode almost entirely devoted to the British Cabinet discussing the 456's ultimatum and coming to the shittiest possible decision about what to do.

So, likewise, "Miracle Day" sees the governments of the world quickly snatch up the Final Solution offered them by PhiCorp. Apart from, apparently, the Chinese. Because they would never take any unethical action to tackle overpopulation.

And you know what? It's the most lazy clichéd cobblers going.

"Children of Earth" worked because it made drama out of people making the worst possible decisions because they were covering their own arses.

Here, we are just taking it as read.

Here they don't even both to show us the politicians discussing it; they're politicians, so now they'd just rubber-stamp concentration camps in under a day.

Would no one in any of those governments have objected? At all?

Even if you don't believe in the simple altruism of people – and I assure you, there are plenty of senior politicians who would speak out against anything like this – then consider the power of self-interest .

Even within the world that "Torchwood" has already shown us – rather than pretending these are anything approaching real people – Brian Green, the PM in "Children of Earth", ultimately takes the blame and gets fired because of what his government agrees to do. Okay, he's replaced by a woman who is arguably just as guilty and just as mendacious, but do we really think that no one on Earth learned anything from this lesson?

Would no one in any of those governments have thought they might want to cover their back in case their little mass-murder scheme came to light? At all?


In the Second World War, the Nazis… yes, I'm going to have to mention the Nazis because, in case you didn't notice, Russell just accused every government on Earth of being just like the Nazis (and by Godwin's Law that means he loses)… the Nazis were able to implement their Final Solution because they escalated the treatment of "undesirables" gradually and kept the number of people involved in the actual murders to a minimum.

(And I forgot to say: my favourite line from "Let's Kill Hitler" was "I was just on my way to a gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled and I thought, the Third Reich's a bit rubbish, isn't it." Which basically covers it. And bless them for that!)

Here, the number of people actively complicit with the treatment of "category ones" extends to a vast army of medical and military personal, plus the admin staff. Look if Gwen can work out that "burns unit" is a sick joke, then plenty of other genuine nursing staff are going to figure it out too. And Rhys really, really isn't the only driver in the world who's going to react with guilt-stricken horror when told where he's been taking patients. If nothing else, the dirty great chimneys belching out fatty soot – not to mention the smell – are going to give the game away.

So we have this crime against humanity happening way too quickly here and with way too many people getting their hands dirty.

And do they really think those huge crowds of relatives aren't going to notice? Pretty soon, someone will spot that no one can get see their "category one" relatives.


Alex suggests that Russell seems to be thinking: "Shit, I've made the New Labour government into Nazis. The Coalition can't be as lovely as Labour; I'll have to make them worse than the Nazis, and literally overnight, and without a second thought."

We dehumanise the process of government completely by not even showing the people who make the decision. What's that you say, Sooty? Dehumanising people is what the Nazis did? Lovely!

(And yes, Russell did it in "Doctor Who" too, in the episode "Turn Left", which sees the country go when London gets nuked. Of course, it gets nuked by a crashing spaceship in the form of a replica Titanic but you kind of had to be there.

(Except it wasn't "directly to concentration camps"! It was directly to house-sharing, and only the collapse of the world economy after America was reduced to Adipose and the after-effects of the Sontaran attack lead to racial purity quite a long time later.

(But "Turn Left" gets away with it because, really, it's a series of sketches, rapid fire vignettes of the world taking the fast track to hell without the Doctor. They're doing the story in 45 minutes not 300. And yet the journey from crisis to ovens is made faster in the 300!)


The mechanics of this crisis really does not make sense to me.

As I already touched on back in episode one, taking death out of the equation doesn't even double the rate at which we are already adding people to the planet. How does this cause such a spiral out of control?

Similarly, the notion that people not dying now means that cholera and typhoid and MRSA will spread like wildfire through our cities and hospitals does not add up. These things are already perfectly capable of travelling around the world and we do not have to rely on the carrier dropping dead to stop them. Indeed, as I remarked last week, we could annihilate MRSA, at least, by thoroughly bleaching every surface in the hospital (including the patients) because no one is going to die of bleach poisoning.

The last few episodes have given us glimpses of this gathering health Armageddon – Dr Vera's emergency room being overrun; the people being sent to the PhiCorp overflow hospital last week for Oswald to make undeliverable promises to; and now the full-on overflow camps. Yet in spite of having the last two, maybe even three episodes outpaced by a medium sized glacier, they never managed to fit in any sense of gathering despair and panic.

(Actually, I suspect this is down to trying to use one character, Vera, to fulfil three different roles in the plot: the medical woman, the Washington politician, and the doomed love interest. We could have been repeatedly going back to her in the hospital being gradually but steadily overwhelmed by the tide of ought-to-be-dead people, but instead we've had her making the moral points in the medical panels and then missing the conclusion of that too by taking a jolly spy trip to PhiCorp. And taking time off to bonk Rex.)

And I'm not sure how "category one" is even possible under the previously established rules of the Miracle. There's a graph and everything to say that "category one" is "low chance of survival/low brain function" which is quickly taken to mean "injured and unconscious". How are people being unconscious? Aren't people "so alive"? We've seen people blown up and still conscious, with their necks broken right round and still conscious, even crushed in a car crusher and still conscious. But now, people are shot and they pass out or they just suffer an old fashioned heart attack and they're k.o'd enough for some doctor to shuffle them off to the cooking farm. Is the Miracle wearing off?

(And Gwen, sweetie, if your dad collapses as you're trying to rescue him… keep going. He isn't going to die, but some jobsworth might just category one him if you start waving and shouting and drawing attention to him… oh.)


I said "this is the best so far", but I'm making it sound crap.

What we have is a really good piece of television… weighed down by the pace and contradictions of the arc plot it has to be part of, an episode of "Torchwood" that powerfully delivers the dawning horror of what PhiCorp are really doing… and yet is undermined by the hollowness of one-dimensional, frankly juvenile depiction of government and the absence of credible development to reach this point.

And that's without getting cross about the fact that the whole overflow camp investigation is going to turn out to be a massive wrong turn. But I'm getting into next week's plot now.

I guess what I'm saying is that Jane Espenson was better off writing for Joss Whedon because at least he knew what he was doing when it comes to a story arc.


And of course "Children of Earth" had a column of flame at the exact middle point too.

Next Time… The dead are walking. Who ya gonna call? Winston Zeddemore, the Zeppo of the Ghostbusters, guests as one of "The Middle Men". (And actually he's bloody good in it!)

"Torchwood: Miracle Day" continues tonight at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC1HD or if you're falling behind like me, then there's always the iPlayer!
.

Day 3891: DOCTOR WHO: Springtime for Hitler

Saturday:



Okay, it's Doctor Woo not Torchhoot so we're going to try to keep UP TO DATE.

But… we've been a BIT busy… writing the 50th Anniversary Special: "The All The Doctors".

Last weekend, Daddy Alex recruited the Villainous Valeyard and here's me auditioning a cast of itty-bitty heroes.



Now, all I need is for someone to buy me a Lego SUPER STAR DESTROYER for that big scene at the end…

Meanwhile, Daddy Richard can get on with doing reviews…

If I can put it like this – and without pejorative – Russell writes soap opera while Moffat writes opera.

I'm returning to the idea that Russell Davies writes "emotion" and Steven Moffat writes "plot". This week I'm thinking that actually they are both very emotional writers, but that Russell concentrates on the very small and human whereas Moffat writes on a grander, heightened, more bombastic scale.

Opera is a medium where it is routine, even conventional, to skip through time and space, conceding months of plot development to the conceit that all the big events happen in the moments that our cast are gathered on stage.

And that's how Moffat writes.

And it's a medium where the actual words that are said are less important than the cadences that are used and the patterns that they make. The rhyming is often cleverer than the meaning.

And that's how Moffat writes.

And in this specific instance, it’s Wagner.

(The Nazi uniforms kind of give it away.)

Seriously, this is a story of gods and mortals and supermen and tiny people and monsters that lurk in shadows, where the fate of worlds turns on a love story between a Valkyrie and a Time Lord. Where emotions leap from hate to love in the twinkling of a love potion or a brainwashing. Frankly, we're out of Hitler's league.



What a terrific entrance for Alex Kingston. Very much capturing the post-regenerative craziness of the Doctor (and his usual urge to check out his new appearance and try on new clothes). And if you think Moffat isn't "quoting" past regeneration stories, then rewatch the scene that "quotes" the high-speed "following the Doctor thinking" from "The Eleventh Hour" (and also "Sherlock").

We'd avoided spoilers so we were kind of blindsided by "Mels" in that we both kind of spotted it and kind of didn't: Alex tells me he was on the brink of saying "can Moffat only write one female character" when sarky gun girl suddenly regenerated into River and he went "oh"; I believe I actually did supply a "Hello Sweetie" as the corvette pulled up in front of the TARDIS, scattering Doctor, Amy and Rory before it. But then so did everyone: we were meant to say, "Oh, it's River," then be put off guard by the shock reveal that, oh, it’s not. And then oh, it is, again!

I didn't find Nina Toussaint-White's Melody as irritating as some people seem to have, mainly because she's got all of about two lines and a flashback montage before Hitler shoots the black woman and summons up the psychotic white lady. If I may channel Rory for a moment, I'm trying not to see this as a metaphor.

I'd be more interested in knowing if Amy and Rory's pasts have been rewritten by their daughter inserting herself into their timeline. Because we've never even heard of this best friend before – and Moffat is often, but not always, quite careful about setting up Chekov's timey-wimey. And Mels herself uses the "time can be rewritten" line.

It's not exactly inconsistent, but the past that we see of Amelia and Mels doesn't entirely gel with the lonely Amelia that we saw in "The Eleventh Hour" either. But then that past has already been rewritten once when the Doctor sealed the crack in Amelia's wall and so her parents and everyone she ever knew were not erased from time.

More inconsistent seemed Amelia's attitude to young Rory, given her later assertion that "my life was so boring until you fell out of the sky". Did she mean it was boring until she found a patsy to casually and half-heartedly torment? And how are we supposed to fit the Amy who thinks Rory is perfect but gay, with the Amy of "The Eleventh Hour" who is denying that he's her boyfriend?

(But then that would be like complaining that Melody/River gleefully references "The Graduate" with her "hello Benjamin" but later in her life – in "The Impossible Astronaut" – hates it when the Doctor refers to her as "Codename Mrs Robinson".)

What was sort of unusual for Moffat was just how many answers were supplied. Most of the episode was in fact exposition, completely filling in Melody Pond's story for us. Almost completely, anyway. We know that there aren't any other regenerations between the little girl in the spacesuit and Mels and the familiar River Song.

There's a bit of a puzzle about how toddler Mels got from 1969 to the 1990s to start growing up with Amy and Rory – either a time jump is involved or, also plausible from this episode, Time Lords (or at least River) can chose to age (or even age backwards), meaning she stayed a toddler until time caught her up with her parents-to-be.

Also, it's not completely impossible that the girl in the spacesuit is a later regeneration rather than just baby Melody ten years later. That is, baby Melody could have grown up controlled by the Silence, gotten shot or otherwise killed and then regenerated who knows how many times before arriving at the spacesuit of "The Impossible Astronaut". But let's keep things simple for the moment and assume there are only the three Melodies.

We also know that she's used up all her remaining regenerations to resurrect the Doctor. In part, that may be to suggest that there's really really no chance of a post-Library River getting up again. But I suspect that it's also to rule out River giving up another regeneration again to save the Doctor from his death on the beach; it's a get out of jail card that's been played and cannot be played again.

(Let's just not get hung up on the mechanics of how Melody can poison the Doctor via his lips with something that she's wearing on her lips to which there is no antidote and not end up dead too. Put it on her lips, fine – and she has time when she nips off to examine her… jodhpurs – but she has to have an antidote in her system. At the very least she ought to find it difficult to talk with the whole of the inside of her mouth sprayed with some kind of non-permeable plastic barrier!)

In some ways the oddest thing, in an episode that was revelling in throwing odd things at us, was the way that Moffat just tossed away the mystery of who gets murdered by River. He's been teasing us with it since "The Time of Angels" but here it's delivered almost "as you know, Bob," style, as though it's exposition we're supposed to know already. It's almost as though Moffat's just given up on the mystery with an "oh, you guessed".

I suppose that it's still possible to confound us, for it not to be Melody in that Impossible Spacesuit at Lake Silencio (Lake Silencio, are you kidding? "Why, Jo, Silencio is Italian for 'Bad Wolf Bay' of course…"). Moffat will almost certainly add some of his "but it's more complicated than that" to the mix. Personally, I'm not sure that there's enough happening in the rest of this series to account for two hundred years of the Doctor's life, so in all likelihood, he's going to turn up on that beach early and bugger up whatever it is that his two hundred years older self is/was/will to have been trying to achieve.

Ah, the joys of trans-temporal tenses – and I've not got to Douglas Adams yet.

Of course, the other clue that Moffat might be offering us is that the Justice Department people identify the TARDIS with Melody Pond. As though the two go together in their databanks. Which suggests that at some point – and you know, possibly post Lake Silencio – River gets to go off in the TARDIS and have her own adventures in time and space. Simon suggests that Moffat has been mutating the series into "The River Song Show"; could he be even closer to the mark than he guesses?

But anyway, what are we to make of the time-travelling, shape-shifting robot full of cross people?

"Is it a Type 103 TARDIS, you've got there?" as the Doctor very nearly said. "No! You're actually all miniaturised inside; I'll have to make a Slitheen joke instead!"

It seems to me slightly borderline whether Steven Moffat simply has so many ideas that he can't help throwing them in or that he uses an endless stream of ingenuity to cover up that he doesn't want to have to develop any of them. They travel through time to punish bad people is a one line pitch not a story. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Why are they doing this? How are they doing this? Should they be doing this? What, in fact, are the consequences of them doing this?

(The nearest we get to consequences here is the scene with the TARDIS voice interface – has he been trying to get her to talk to him again? – where we get some acknowledgement that the Doctor feels guilty for "screwing up" the lives of Rose, Martha, Donna and Amy.)

In a story that is called "Let's Kill Hitler", the possibility that they've buggered up their own history by nabbing the Fuhrer in 1938, before that little matter of the Second World War, isn't even touched upon. Still less the ethical considerations of their actions (short of a little bit of Doctorly scorn).

And that's a shame, because there was definitely the possibility there of showing Melody the rights and wrongs, and the dangers, of messing with the timeline rather than just whispering something to her that leads her to hear the choirs of angels and turn to the light side.

The design of the Tessellector robot was nice – both the effect when it tessellated its form and the submarine-like interior – more of a sketch rather than a genuine set, admittedly, but the darkened lighting and neons made it seem like the Deep Space Nine equivalent of the Star Trek spaceship from the last Christmas special.

Hitler's office too, was rather grand which may have made it slightly more disappointing to see the Nazi restraint salon where most of the climax of the episode takes place.

Oh look, it's the Manchester Suite. Again.

In Douglas Adams, every world in the galaxy has a drink called something sounding like Gin and Tonic. In Babylon 5, every race has a dish that tastes almost exactly like Swedish meatballs. Clearly, in Doctor Who, every civilisation anywhere in time will construct something almost exactly like the Temple of Peace in Cardiff.

And speaking of Douglas Adams, of course we have the Silence as a religious movement rather than a race just like Lawrence Miles' description of "the Enemy" in the Book of the War. Although that pretty much belies everything that was going on in "The Impossible Astronaut"/"The Day of the Moon". Was Joy right and they really are all wearing Star Trek masks? Are they like an intergalactic "Scream" convention where everyone has come as Ghostface? Oh all right, and they're something to do with the ultimate question, presumably to life the universe and everything, the answer to which may or may not be 42.

Douglas' theory was that should anyone ever fully understand what the universe was for – later put explicitly as having both the ultimate question and the ultimate answer (i.e.42) – then it will immediately be destroyed and replaced with something even more confusing. And that this may already have happened. Which indeed it did in "The Big Bang".

However, in context, the question is almost certainly "Doctor Who?"

The Doctor says it himself in this episode. Just after he's drezzzzed for the occasion.

(Again, I'm serious. Remember: "River, you know my name. There's only one time I would tell you that; there's only one time I could" from "Silence in the Library.")

So, what we have in the end is an episode that gives us a lot of the answers but mostly they're answers that we've pretty much guessed already, so it wraps it up in a crazy romp that is half Terminator half Numbskulls and gets Alex Kingston to turn it up to eleven to cover any gaps. And then teases us with a tiny little bit about the other questions that the plot arc has left dangling while we clear up just who River really is and what she's going to do with that lead piping in the ballroom.

Rob Shearman – yes, he wrote "Dalek", and to be fair has a reputation for using fiction in conversation – has described his own writing as "just trying to get to the next gag", and there's a sense that Moffat may indeed be doing the same thing, stringing clever idea after clever idea as he goes. The problem is not that the gags may not work along the way – there's always another one along in a minute – but that in the end you really need to come to a punchline.

"Let's Kill Hitler" covered itself very well, but it was really much more about explaining the joke.


Next Time…Mark Gatiss hiding in a child's cupboard. It's not going to get more scary than that is it. Unless he starts doing that "acting" thing he does. We're not going to see what little boys are made of, but the Doctor will be making a house call on some "Night Terrors".

.

Day 3868: TORCHWOOD: Madrigal Day: Escape to La la la Can't Hear You

Thursday:


Back in the real (ish) world, Daddy has received his conference accreditation. Apparently he's in category 1 with access to the Module. Er, that's good, isn't it?

Last time, I said Torchwood was playing join the dots between set pieces. This week, if anything, it's even more so.

Modern television presents us with unrelated events and by convention we infer links between them. We're so used to it, we're blasé. But here Torchwood is actually doing the reverse. These events follow logically from each other, but because of the blink-and-you-miss-it expository connections they appear like almost randomly unconnected incidents.

For example, it took me quite a while to realise that Dr Vera's field trip to the abandoned hospital is actually arranged by PhiCorp. It's part of her little visit to PhiCorp headquarters as set up by Jilly Kitsinger last week. It's PhiCorp who have bought the hospital and set it up as prototype for their Overflow Camps. Which, of course, is why Oswald is also brought to the scene later.

(It's also why she's away from Washington, so why she misses the outcome of the medical panel – hence her surprise that it's all finished when she gets back there next time.)

And, the hospital being owned and controlled by PhiCorp, I think the repeated question: "who left this baby here?" answers itself.

Isn't the image of the self-confessed child rapist and killer holding up a baby girl just the most skin-crawling thing in the series so far, even when we've already been clued up to it by Jilly's unexpected personality swerve into repulsion at the sight of Oswald's hands?

It almost makes the Oswald plot worthwhile, although the series' obsession with him is actually more sinister than Jack turning into his stalker.

I was moved to wonder if Oswald was in fact perfectly safe in the highly contagious atmosphere of the plague ship hospital, protected from all the viruses and bacteria because he's pumped full of even more deadly poison.

(Which in turn, led me to wonder why these deadly diseases aren't being treated with high doses of poison or blasts of gamma radiation given that we've established that only humans are immortal, and not germs.)

Oswald's reaction to having his airtime stolen – "I'm not going back to that" – is a bit off though: it’s as though he's had plenty of time to get used to all the luxuries that fame and PhiCorp can give him, even though in reality it's less than twelve hours since he was getting beaten up in police custody, and his experience of luxury amounts to, er, all the fun of opening every bottle of fizzy water in the minibar.

His rival for the airwaves is, for one week only, "darling of the Tea Party" Ellis Hartley Monroe, a character with all the shading of Venice beach at noontime and all the subtlety of John Barrowman doing "flaming". She seems to have no motivation for her "Dead is Dead" campaign beyond her own political ambitions. She's a machine politician on and off the camera.

Even more bizarrely, Ellis is a small time Mayor, and clearly only has a staff of one plus her driver, yet our friendly neighbourhood conspiracy, the mysterious triangle people behind PhiCorp, have still managed to infiltrate her team. They really are everywhere!

Clearly the exigencies of having that plot arc trail to keep on following mean that more interesting aspects of the episode will be reduced to a cartoon.

And the exigencies of only having your guest stars in for one episode each mean they'll either be "dead" or never heard from again (or both!), despite that making no sense. Do you really think the Tea Party would shut up about "Dead is Dead"?

But sticking your Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann analogue in a car crusher strikes as more than a little authorial wish-fulfilment.

The triangle conspiracy's given reason – "your message is revealing our plans a little too early" – hardly seems credible given that "their plans" has to mean segregating the "dead" (which is Ellis entire agenda): something that comes to pass in the very next episode which means within days of screen time, given the scheduling of the announcement before the LA Miracle event to which Oswald is now going which Jilly tells him will take place "at the end of the week".

The gift of a longer run of episodes – as Torchwood Miracle Day has been given – ought to be the chance to explore different reactions to and perspectives on the Miracle, and a look at the politico-religious response is exactly the sort of thing that was called for. It's just not the thing we got.

(The business with Rex's father – "I don't want to live forever like this" – was much, much better. In fact the spin-off-I-want-to-see-of-the-week is Cap'n Jack and Rex's dad taking on all the low dives of Hollywood.)


Meanwhile in L.A. (with crushing literality both the other side of the country and of the plot, though you could hardly tell as the light and scenery look identical) and also following the dot-to-dots from last week, Jack Rex, Gwen and Esther are breaking in to PhiCorp to steal a server full of secrets because of the information they nicked from Jilly's office last week.

No, it makes no sense at all that the location of the secret server (not to mention the specs of the security and the name of the guys whose biometrics they need) should be in the information available to someone who turns out to be a glorified temp.

(And the sudden downgrading of Jilly's place in PhiCorp is another of the things that really disappointed me in this episode. It was as though we'd discovered the Cigarette Smoking Man was just some guy from an agency. Jilly was a mover in this series who basically made the plot happen in the last couple of episodes. And now we're told she's a nobody? Perhaps someone should have told Lauren Ambrose that she's Henchman 3 and not the Bond Villain.)

Basically, the series is reducing itself to plot coupon-ing: each set piece results in something that superficially looks like a development but might as well be a treasure hunt clue saying "go to this place, do this thing and find where you need to go next".

And speaking of following the trail of breadcrumbs, we come to the world's luckiest cliché on legs, the assassin hired by the triangle people (why a triangle? Do the Mysterons have a copyright on the circles?).

Cliché? Have you seen him? Alex was unsure whether it was worse that he stands right in front of Gwen on Venice beach and snaps photos of her with a long lens, or that she doesn't notice. And then his dialogue goes all X-Files-esque – yes, it's that John Shiban – and then he gets himself shot just before he can reveal that the Thirty Nine Steps… arrgh!

And Lucky? Yes, because there he is working alone and of all the people he could pick to stake out, he chooses Esther's sister.

Because Esther, it turns out, has done a bad thing. She went to see her sister – the one we established "couldn't cope" back in episode three – and gosh dobbed her in to social services. The penalty for this betrayal is to get a good shouting at from Rex.

"What if you were followed!" bellows Rex. Bellows the man who has just driven them two thousand six hundred and eighty-eight miles across America and not noticed that he was being followed all that way. Demands the man who last night dropped by (and committed a felony breaking and entering while there) the residence of his father who we know is on the CIA's database. What if it was you who was followed, Rexy boy?

Rex of course is happy to bang on about PhiCorp's conspiracy on the phone to Dr V, but gets all coy about revealing his location. As though it's not easier to track him by his cell phone's signal than it is to break in on his call.

And then he complains that the rest of them are a bunch of amateurs.

To be fair, Gwen does then top this by taking her mobile on a mission, leaving it on and in fact answering it all while breaking into PhiCorp's secure computer suite. And then, since she's not actually paying attention, encouraging her husband to have her father sent to a concentration camp. Dressing Eve Myles up as Audrey Hepburn does not excuse this kind of thing.

The actual caper parts of the episode were pretty good, if you can excuse an American accent so bad that the actor is compelled to apologise in character for it and so long as you can get past the way Gwen's contact lenses are becoming the Torchwood sonic screwdriver.

This actually made for the best performance being… the one from John Barrowman. Which is probably saying something. His action moments went well, and – hooray, someone remembered Jack is omnisexual, not just gay – a lovely double-take at Gwen's boobs. Plus nice batting down of Rex's mild case of homophobia, replying to "Do you make everyone gay?" with a completely casual "that's the plan".

There's a moment where Jack returns to the loading bay and finds the building guys strangled in the back of his van. And the guy very obviously blinks. Ha ha oops, I thought. And then realised: of course; it's deliberate. No one can die (as we're told twice an episode) so he's strangled but still alive.

And speaking of mistakes that aren't, people have complained about Rex getting into the secure suite after all the fuss that was made of needing Mr Frumkin's biodata – or failing that bits of his person – to get in, but clearly the assassin left the door propped open as part of his lure to get Jack back in.

What does puzzle me is how did Jack get back upstairs without having to yomp up the stairwell too – 'cos if Jack can still use the service lift now that the fire brigade are on their way then why can't Rex? Or did Esther just send him up all those stairs as revenge for making her cry?

(And call me old fashioned, but I'd prefer it if my IT team rather than my security consultant had access to my server room. PhiCorp don't even seem to have taken the elementary precaution of having the secure suite lockdown if the guy who is key to getting in takes a sick day. Frumkin really was asking for it.)


What's becoming clearer is that "Torchwood: Miracle Day" isn't actually bad so much as it's just sloppy. It's not an original observation, I know, but the shorter five-hours-over-five-days form brought pace and focus to "Children of Earth"; "Miracle Day", by contrast, is just almost literally all over the place.


These last three episodes – "Rendition", "Dead of Night" and "Escape to L.A." – could easily have been compressed into the space of a single hour by trimming out a lot of the repetitive find clue go to next clue shtick. Where are we at the end of "Escape to L.A."? Torchwood have just stolen the secret computer data from PhiCorp… exactly where we were at the end of "Dead of Night".

And frankly, even though the next episode is vastly better, "Categories of Life" and "The Middle Men" could and should have been done in half the time as well.

I've not yet seen "Immortal Sins" but assuming that has enough shocks and revelations to make an episode four, then you only need a conclusion and you've got a "Miracle Day" that would be "Children of Earth" length. So when you're asked for another five episodes, you write 'em a new story, not try to pad out your existing one to twice its natural life cycle.

Next Time… If anybody out there can hear this… just ignore what I said last time I recorded one of these doomsday tapes. Yes, sorry about that.

"Torchwood: Miracle Day" continues tonight at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC1HD or if you're falling behind like me, then there's always the iPlayer!
.

Day 3861: TORCHWOOD: Monocle Day: Dead of Night

Thursday:

So… the plot, as they say, thins…

At the end of all this, do we actually know any more about what is going on?

We kind of knew about PhiCorp before, even if not so blatantly in-your-face, from Jilly Kitsinger's calling card. And we kind of knew the Miracle was turning a bit bad. So all we're left with here is a string to tie it all together. We're playing join the dots this week, as our little band discover their connection to, well, the rest of the plot. The surprising thing about this is how clunky it is.

Rather than everything seguing nicely at the climax, as happened last week, this time we are following a trail of breadcrumbs.

It's all a bit "here's a thing and here's a thing and oo here's a thing…" string together by tenuous connections and coincidences.

So the meandering story leads us from the guy who was trying to set up Esther and Rex – Dennis Nedry and his magic red telephone – to the TARDIS-gag warehouse – bigger on the inside – that tells us that EvilCorp sorry PhiCorp are behind it via the staggering coincidence of Rex's "not a professional relationship" just happening to be Dr Vera who is being seduced by devilish Jilly of, you guessed it, Pfizer sorry PhiCorp and so she can take them to the villains secret-base-cum-plush-conference-centre where Gwen can do the grand old cliché of post Mission: Impossible/post-Spooks espionage drama – i.e. nick the computer records by downloading their entire mainframe onto one memory stick – while, surprise surprise, Oswald Danes turns up to complete the circle.

It's as though the production team have decided that the story should hang on the set pieces and any old flim-flam will do in between rather than hanging the story on the plot and having the set pieces be the flashy moments that keep upping the game.

Hanging off of all this we get a succession of wet character moments set to varying levels of cringe-inducing. The most gratuitous being Captain Jack's "I'm off to do the sex scene now," moment. (Obviously you choose your own value for "wet".)

I do wonder if that isn't a big distraction, getting everyone hot and bothered about the intercutting – or in the case of the BBC, just cutting – of the gay and straight sex scenes so we're supposed fall into the "oh it's just Torchwood smut agenda again" trap and all the while blind-siding us with that moment where Vera just happens to have access to the next level of the plot.

And incidentally, Vera only tells Rex that she's got an invite to the PhiCorp shindig after he tells her the whole plot so far. This is Rex "do not even try and contact your family" Matheson casually blurting out all the secrets he's discovered to a civilian. With whom he's just had sex. Yeah, he's definitely Torchwood material.

Or maybe it's that PhiCorp's painkillers may be non-narcotic and non-addictive but instead make everyone spout exposition at any given moment. (In which case Gwen is probably on them too, if her opening speech or rather string of factoids, which no amount of flouncing around handing out phones or doing business with masks can disguise, is anything to go by.)

I love Vera, though. She seems to be the only person in this show who's actually putting a real character into her acting. Compare her performance to Mekhi Phifer as Rex's "I'm pissed cos I'm impaled" shtick or Barrowman's angsty "we're good aren't we?" whine or Eve Myles schizoid "Look how hard I am… ooh a baby!" behaviour or that thing that can only be described as "that thing that Bill Pullman is doing" and tell me I'm wrong. And I'll come to Esther in a minute.

Having said all that: does Vera actually sleep at all? Because she seems to do a double shift at the emergency room, nip down to the Capitol for time on the Miracle Panel, spend the night boffing Rex and then time for a shower before she's off back to the hospital. Her downtime appears to consist of sharing a cigarette with Jilly.

(And then Jilly – did I mention she's the devil? – teleports back to Atlanta, Georgia to arrive at exactly the moment that Oswald is dumped on the pavement after being beaten up by the cops. I mean, how can she possibly arrive with such perfect timing? If we're ascribing super-powers to her, Alex suggests she might have set up the whole business with the police assault just to put Oswald there at her feet.)

Meanwhile, Esther, who last week broke out of CIA headquarters in a stolen car, has to be taught basic spy-craft by Mr Grumpy von Spill-de-Beans. Doesn't this make you wonder: (a) how rubbish are we supposed to believe the CIA are (see also, Rex breaks into CIA chief Friedkin's house and, what, one police car is despatched?!); and (b) whether Jack only recruits Torchwood agents from the pool of people who've never even seen Spooks?

I'm struggling – I think a lot of people are – to justify the inclusion of the terminally extended "you say potato/I say sidewalk" English versus American-Englishisms gag. All I can think is that this is Esther's naïve attempt to ingratiate herself with her exciting new pals.

Is Esther in fact being written as somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum? Or at least "TV Asperger's".

We've previously had dialogue to state that she is a good CIA observer because she doesn't connect to the stories she's monitoring (although that's not really supported by any evidence). And we know that what she's good at is line by line analysis of the internet. We also see her entering telephone numbers into her new phone from memory – at least until Rex bawls her out for it. Plus there's the "family history" with her admitting that her older sister has trouble coping.

(And that's without looking into the slightly weird pseudo-mother/daughter thing that Gwen and Esther seem to be building.)

Or maybe Jane Espensen is just using leftover bits of the Buffy/Dawn relationship from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".


And then we have the "big reveal" of the evil company who knew the Miracle was coming (i.e. probably engineered it). Can I just say "yawn"?

Making the human race immortal to increase the profits from your range of painkillers is… well, it seems an awful lot of effort. Most companies would just adulterate the feedstock. This isn't really "banality of evil"; this is just banal.

And is there any company in fantasy television that isn't evil?

Is there some kind of insane Libertarian/Communist crossover that requires all companies to be bad? The critique from the left that they exploit the workers; from the right that they are nasty collectives? Or is it just that almost everybody works for a company, and knows it can be a soul-destroying drudge. Or at least everyone has had experience of one of them, especially the big faceless ones be they utility supplier or burger chain, and will have experienced the frustration of banging your head against the corporate wall.

And yet Russell Davis is a man who says that anyone taking money away from the British Broadcasting Corporation is "savage and evil".

(And would that be more savage and evil or less savage and evil than an illegal invasion resulting in institutionalised torture and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, Russ?)

Time to check your cliché at the door, I think.

Anyway, the episode concludes with the discovery of the people behind the people behind the Miracle, namely the mysterious triangle folk aka World's Cheapest Playstation.

I realised who they ought to be, of course. They ought to be Torchwood.

You know, the real Torchwood, the Torchwood who, after the debacle with the Cybermen, went underground and have been letting everyone think that Jack's hopeless little band of helpers are "Torchwood". Because they've been around for ages, they're "everywhere" and they would explain why the word "Torchwood" got broadcast to the CIA at the very second the Miracle occurred.

(And because I've always said Torchwood should be the enemies of this series, not the heroes.)

Sadly, they'll probably turn out to be Yartek Leader of the Alien Voord. With a big stick.

Finally, did "the Soulless" actually mean anything or did they just seem like a cool idea at the time?

Oh, and why didn't Jack tell Brad the Barman he had an "excellent bottom"? Cos he did have.

Next time… I bet no one has ever tried to do "Mission: Impossible" with a big gayer as the star before… what? And then we lose all contact with reality as the Tea Party try to muscle in. At least we can stop even pretending to shoot in Washington when we "Escape to L.A."

"Torchwood: Miracle Day" continues tonight at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC1HD or if you're falling behind like me, then there's always the iPlayer!
.

Day 3854: TORCHWOOD: Miniscule Day: Rendition

Thursday

Okay, episode two of the US-ified Torchhoot and it's got better.

This felt properly structured: three separate storyline that interweave before all coming together for the climax at Dulles Airport. Jack, Gwen and newboy arsehole Rex, aboard a tight little bottle show; fluffy mouse Esther caught in a re-run of every government conspiracy drama ever; and Dr Vera doing the science (fiction) bit.

…although I'm probably alone in hoping for the spin-off from a spin-off of "Danny and Greta's Giant Wacky Flying Rendition Wagon" where each week on route to Gitmo they have to do a "Blue Peter make" out of bits from the plane in order to save the lucky hostage/overcome the terrorists/kill all those mother-ing snakes.


This week also introduces us to the devilishly perky charms Julie Kitsinger (Lauren Ambrose). Future episodes (yes, I'm writing this from "the future") will make less of her, showing her to be a small cog in the larger Phicorp wheel, and in trying to humanise her by revealing her revulsion at her child-killer client Oswald Danes will in fact diminish her.

Here, she is basically the Devil.

She says as much in her exchange with Oswald: "If the Devil walked the Earth he'd need representation". Oswald pegs her at a glance, though: "If the Devil walked the Earth, he'd be in PR."

She's a very "Bedazzled" kind of Devil (I'm afraid I mean the actually-not-that-bad Brendan Fraser/Liz Hurley remake rather than the superior Pete'n'Dud original), with very obvious red coat and lipstick. And she smokes! It's the sure-fire sign of TV evil, more certain than a "666" tattoo. The only surprise is that she doesn't cause the ciggie she bums of Dr Vera to spontaneously ignite.

Her ability to be in the right place at the right moment is uncanny bordering on TV cliché. She "just happens" to catch Oswald's performance on the morning chat show (though to be fair, so do, apparently, the entire staff of the CIA information gathering desk in Langley) and then "just happens" (again) to be in the right room to hear Dr Vera take charge of the crisis and happens to have a supply of the very pain killers that Dr Vera needs to take to Rex at the airport (yes, it's Jilly's "free samples" that Dr V hands over to Rex – which is why he recognises them in Phicorp's X-Files brand warehouse next week).

She also appears to get from meeting Oswald in L.A. across America to meet Dr Vera in Washington in less time than it takes Rex to render Jack and Gwen across the Atlantic.

Okay, Oswald is probably still in Kentucky where they tried to execute him, but it's more fun to think Missy K can teleport.

Anyway, what this episode does is be a rather good early episode of "Torchwood: the ongoing series". If it feels really odd, it's perhaps because it's pitched as episode two of a ten-part thriller and develops precisely no plot at all. All the separate stories are about establishing our characters strengths: Jack gets to play the Doctor with his morphic fields and space gizmo (yes, yes, it's the Vortex manipulator but it plays McGuffin for this ep – odd how he doesn't just grab Gwen and teleport away once he's got it back); Gwen is all over taking control in a crisis; Vera is pretty good at seeing the big picture, whether it's rewriting the rules of triage or working out what a call for more anti-biotics actually means and the consequences for the planet; and Esther can outsmart Dennis Nedry.

Oh, I'm sorry, that last one was unkind; I should have said "Esther is quite good at 'spy stuff'," but the "escape from the CIA" sequences are so derivative, it's just a relief that Alexa Havins and Wayne Knight have the charisma to carry them. And to be fair to Knight, the scared years-of-pressure out-of-his-depth nervousness of his "CIA Director Brian Friedkin" is quite different to the panicked suddenly-it's-all-gone-wrong out-of-his-depth nervousness of his classic Jurassic Park villain. Friekin is almost… resigned to his having to commit treachery. It's a smaller role than Peter Capaldi's "Mr Frobisher" in "Children of Earth" but in the same mould, and as well done. Plus we get the first sight of his "special red telephone" and its triangle symbol.

But to return to my point about this as an episode of a series rather than a serial, series one of Torchwood would have benefitted enormously from a second episode like this (rather than that one by Chibnall about the gaseous alien that makes you shag till you explode – see also, all of his work on "Camelot").

This is about bedding in the characters and the situation, reiterating points from the first episode to make sure that the audience begin to bond with these people and their predicament, something that series one never did and might in part explain its floundering nature veering from hit to miss and back.

Also the plane trip is a metaphorical journey that transitions Rex and Esther (yes, I know she's not actually on the plane) from their CIA world to the Torchwood world of miracles and aliens. In a way it is those two who have been rendered, not Jack and Gwen, hence Gwen's concluding remark: "Welcome to Torchwood".

Next Time…Okay, we're back with the plot development, as the sinister Phicorp become more than just a name on Julie Kitsinger's business card; Jack get's obsessed with Oswald; and we start to find out some truths. Plus the sex scene. All Hail the Mighty Espensen; never mind Russell, here's a lady with serious genre credits. Check in with the Soulless for "Dead of Night".

"Torchwood: Miracle Day" continues tonight at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC1HD or if you're falling behind like me, then there's always the iPlayer!
.

Day 3873: Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the Headlines

Tuesday:


There's a lot of talk about "anarchy in the UK" about at the moment. But Anarchy means without RULERS not without RULES. As Mr Balloon, Bouncing Boris and even Mr Millipede fly back into the country, what we seem to have is the exact opposite!

Why are there riots in London (and Birmingham and Liverpool)?

Is it the world economy teetering on the brink? Is it the Metropolitan Police being in chaos after the discovery that they were in bed with Mr Murdoch? Is it Captain Clegg being left in charge of the country?

It seems inexplicable to me.

At least with the riots of the Eighties (Brixton and Toxteth, 1981; Broadwater Farm, 1985) and the Nineties (Poll Tax, 1990) you could UNDERSTAND, if not condone, that there was a HISTORY: crushing poverty, callous disregard, racist policing, negligent government, years of build up. How have we got to this level of anger so FAST?

It seems almost impossible NOT to link the chaos on the streets to the chaos overtaking the world economy.

How can we expect ordinary young men and women to continue to soldier on under the yolk of the system when the news portrays the "gods" of our capitalist society chucking money away with abandon at the deeply undramatic news that America may have somewhat overextended her credit and that countries in southern Europe have been overspending for the last several decades.

On the one fluffy foot we hear the "markets" calling for a trillion Euro bailout fund; on the other we the same markets burn up a trillion Euros as the stock exchanges around the planet topple into freefall.

How can we expect people to behave responsibly when they see the world come within hours of total meltdown because the Replutocrats and the Tea Party want to play chicken with the debt ceiling?

(Look "let's not borrow any more" is not an unsound policy, but there's a time and a place, just as it's too late to say "let's not hit the ground" when you've ALREADY jumped off the forty-fourth floor. "Let's not hit the ground" ISN'T AN OPTION; all you've got is "let's not hit the ground YET".)

In a sense, this HAS been building for years.

The first crash, the 2008 global near-annihilation that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers was an inevitable result of many years of party good-times fuelled by cheap borrowing. A global Ponzi Scheme in which MANY were complicit that wiped out huge swathes of the economy when it burst.

The actions (of governments and companies) taken in response to that crash and the deep and long recession that followed have resulted in FOUR YEARS of stagnant and falling living standards in the face of escalating inflation caused – at least in part – by an implicit devaluation when we printed all that money.

Portraying the Coalition's (actually very tiny) rowing back from deficit spending as a massive, savage attack that has fundamentally changed the attitude of government from loving, open-handed generosity to cruel and selfish denial, has poured petrol on a pyre of resentment and stoked a fire of fear and anger.

In fact the coalition's cuts are just one more straw on the camel's back. But are they the straw to break it?

But when you are told day in day out that your poverty is all the fault of "the bankers" or "the Tories" or "the foreigners", seeing them "do it again" is one heck of spark tossed onto that bonfire.

If AVARICE can do so much harm, RAGE and ENVY seem only logical in response.

But they are NOT.

You don't burn your neighbour's house down to protest the behaviour of bankers; you don't steal a plasma telly to register your disapproval of America's credit rating.

It seems, in the end, that these riots are an EXCUSE to go looting. They aren't protesting the GREED of our age; they're another expression of it; they are the outcome of a generation where some people (at the BOTTOM just as at the TOP) are just SPOILED ROTTEN.

BUT

The riots are contained to what can only be described as "places where there are things to nick".

So we could also do with a bit less irrational coverage from the commentariat. Homes and businesses burning are AWFUL but rerunning the footage 24/7 on rolling news makes it seem a LOT WORSE; a storm on Twitter is still only a Twitterstorm.

And, frankly, calls for the ARMY to be sent in are the SILLIEST form of PANIC.

We need to STRENGTHEN communities not INVADE them!

We don't need water cannons or rubber bullets; we need a sense of perspective.

Calls for "leadership" are, I think, overrated. You don't need "leadership" to not go rioting and looting. You don't need "leadership" to not go rubbernecking and getting in the way of the police doing their business.

You need to GROW UP.


This has been (another) huge blow to the High Street. Shops like HMV are already pressed to the wall by online competition and may well just retreat into cyberspace. Shops that can't go onto the web may just disappear altogether. That's few jobs and more empty spaces in the middle of our towns.

So we need to think of ways to reinvent the high street. Free public wi-fi, better access and transport, places to sit, places to go to the loo would all be a start. Government, and local government, can do a lot to make these places attractive again.

And after the high-street shop, young people are the ones who are going to be made to suffer most for these riots. And our young people are the politest hardest working, most long suffering they've ever been. From the unfairness of the minimum wage to the ASBO to those wretched mosquito buzzy things to the stories of binge drinking to the cut in EMA to the misinformation about student tuition fees young people have been made to feel like second class citizens.

So we need to rethink our strategy of focussing money on the old, because frankly, the baby boomers HAD their turn. We should think first about investing in the NEXT generation, not funding the comforts of the LAST.

The extraordinary thing is that these events ARE extraordinary.

London isn't Beirut or Los Angeles. We are one of the safest, cleanest cities anywhere in the history of ever.

We need fewer headless chickens calling for leadership and a bit more Keep Calm and Carry On.
.

Day 3847: TORCHWOOD: Mackerel Day: The New World

Thursday:

The problem with "The New World" is that it is structured very much like "Rose" but looks like the TV Movie.

There are moments of intense family drama that are signature Russell Davies; there are moments of awesome, mainly Gwen going ninja on that helicopter; there's some genuinely clever science fiction going on; even the in-your-face gore of the "live autopsy" is hilarious in the blackest of humour ways. But at its core there's something deeply schizoid about trying to blend British sensibilities with American drama. Like a ghastly transporter accident blend of The X-Files and the District Nurse.

Ask ourselves this: who is supposed to be the main protagonist? There are four possible candidates: Esther, Rex, Gwen or Jack? (It's probably not Oswald.)

Esther very much plays Rose in the remake of "Rose" that plays out in the first half of the episode, where a "mysterious event" draws her into investigating a "mysterious stranger" who appears in her life and then tells her to walk away. It's a story so successful that Russell used a version of it before for "Everything Changes" when it was Gwen's turn to play Rose.

The thing about Rose, though, is that she is clearly the lead, and not just for "Rose" but for a good bit of the rest of the 2005 series too, particularly "The End of the World", where she is still investigating the Doctor (along with all the other aliens) – who he is, what he and his box do, how she speaks alien all of a sudden, and the rest – (to the extent that Russell actually has to lock her in a room to force the Doctor to become pro-active); and "Father's Day, where the Doctor ends up dead!

But what everyone expected Rose's character parabola to be (and where she ends up once Davy T seizes the reins) is to be the identification figure who brings us to the lead and ends up as the supporting character once the Doctor comes into focus. And this is what's going on with Esther. She starts off investigating, but turns into a sidekick for Jack and/or Rex in front of our eyes. Which is a damn shame as she makes a likeable lead and a series where Esther and Gwen (and Dr Vera!) fight crime would be worth making on its own.

Incidentally, for a CIA analyst, Esther is remarkably uncurious about the massive bruising she has no memory of picking up. Because that's really a whole line of inquiry right there, starting with getting herself checked out by the CIA medics (what, Dana Scully's gone back to the FBI this week?).

And she seems to throw off her retconning remarkably quickly too. Jack erases her memory, right? But then the nice black guy from Greek drops the last Torchwood file on her desk and she doesn't react with a "What's Torchwood?" OK, it's the CIA – maybe they're trained to expect routine random memory wipes.

So if not Esther, maybe it's Rex. In the scenes set in LA doubling for "Washington", everything about the structure of the drama points to Rex as the central character with Esther as his support (companion if you like). The miracle happens to him; Esther and Dr Vera supply him with the clues; he makes the connection between the miracle and Torchwood (after Esther hits him over the head with it a good few times); he uses his magic laptop to hack in and observe the "live autopsy"; he manfully struggles to overcome having his heart punched out by a metal pole to get on that plane to Wales, England; he pays the Pont Hafren/Severn Bridge toll etc.

Except… In all the scenes set in Wales doubling for Wales everything says that Gwen is the hero figure. And in that, Rex turns out to be the antagonist; he's the villain who penetrates Gwen and Rhys's hideaway and he has the team arrested and carted off to America at the end. And we all know that "rendition" is not a happy euphemism these days.

Now, I'm all for plot twists and uncertain loyalties, but this comes across as just not having made its mind up. No, it's worse than that, it comes across as trying to have it both ways because it wants to please the UK and the US audiences differently.

And Rex comes across as a total jackass: crowing gleefully at the promotion opportunities afforded by the cancer of a rival's wife; shouting and bullying anyone and everyone and thrusting his badge in their faces with a grunt of "CIA!" (do the CIA have that kind of authority inside the US? For that matter do they even have badges? They're a secret service, not a police force!); grabbing handfuls of other people's medication off trays at random and downing them like a greedy ten-year-old in a Smarties factory. This is not an easy man to like. Plus, as the show says explicitly, he is the walking dead.

To be fair, Russell has written this character before, so having Cap'n Jack use unlikeable undead arse Owen Harper's name is just hanging a lantern on it. (Yes, I realise he wasn't undead in Russell's episodes, but the comparison is too apt.)

So maybe Jack is the hero. In spite of largely not being in it. Jack, who, by the way, is supposed to be freshly back from outer space but still has the resources to hack the CIA mainframe, pay for flights to the UK at zero notice and access a landrover, machine gun and rocket launcher. And then gets caught by the British police and a dead CIA guy. (It's like he's got superpowers except when the camera is on him!)

But then he goes and makes that suggestion about removing the exploded assassin's head. Which is a real bastard thing to do, reminding us of what Jack did at the end of "Children of Earth" and why he went away in the first place. Plus there's a really ambiguous expression on Jack's face when it momentarily appears that decapitation has killed the guy: is it relief? Nice touch from Barrowman.

The "autopsy" is a great scene, in part because, as I've already said, it's both horrible and really funny in a "live cartoon" sort of way. And it's good science fiction in answering the question "what would happen if people just didn't die?" But it also carries a moral punch by juxtaposing the complete abrogation of the exploded assassin's human rights with Oswald Danes using those same rights to get out of prison on the "technicality" that he has been successfully executed so they can't incarcerate him any longer.

Dr Vera loses points though for her passionate protest that "you just can't do that" being followed up by her completely failing to storm out, raise hell or call the cops when they go ahead and do it anyway. Way to show you mean it, lady. And anyway, what is the hospital's trauma surgeon doing at this top secret autopsy anyway?


On top of this, there's the fact this is supposed to be a crisis of global proportions that only about eight people actually seem to care about. Yes, Russell does his usual trick of throwing in TV anchors from around the world to make us think global, though that's a little undermined by the mostly US faces of the channels portrayed.

But, and this is actually slightly odd, having the focus on "the bit in Cardiff" and "the bit in Washington" seems to make the case smaller rather than larger. Short-cutting Rex's flight to the UK doesn't help this. Yes, I know it's the language of television, but it does make it look like he can travel instantaneously – or possibly Dr Moon is messing with everyone's heads. And who was the Hispanic woman he berates at the airport? I'm guessing she was his cleaner but her appearance out of nowhere makes it look like he's just nicking her passport. (And are the CIA happy that he's letting his cleaner have access to his personal documents?)

There is no sense of what the entire rest of the CIA are doing: shouldn't it be all hands on deck? And does no one care that in the middle of major crisis Esther and Rex have just, off their own recognisance, gone off on a wild goose chase after a defunct British secret outfit? Sure, they're probably not expecting Rex to be in – even the CIA must give you a day's sick leave when recovering from a mild case of death – but once he starts racking up transatlantic airmiles and tying up British security service resources, does no one on the top floor start saying "hang on, we've got more important things to be doing?"And Esther just wanders in late after her night on the tiles with Cap'n Jack and gets nothing more abusive than a mild "nice lie in?"-type remark from a colleague.

The reveal that death has stopped is done oddly too, basically as exposition in the mouth of Dr Vera, not once but twice – first she tells Esther that "miracles got easy" and later to explain that she checked out all the hospitals and no one's had a fatality. If anything calls for a sweeping "round the world" of vignettes, showing people not dying, then this does.


I've got to protest Russell's maths somewhat, too. PC Andy explains the crisis to Gwen with the aid of the Wackypedia: "there ought to be 300,000 people dying every day," he says. "So that's a million extra people every three and a bit days." Fine, with you so far. But then he goes on "and there's all the people being born. That's another half a million a day."

The way he says it, it's like the population increase has jumped by 800,000 a day: the 300,000 who aren't dying and the 500,000 births.

But those 500,000 births would have happened anyway.

If there's anything that's shocking here, it's that we are adding a net 200,000 people to the planet every single day even without aliens making us immortal!

Think about it: if a population increase of 500,000 a day… no, let's be generous and accept 800,000 a day… if a population increase of 800,000 a day means we run out of planet in four months, then a population increase of 200,000 a day – which is actually happening – must mean we will run out of resources in sixteen months!

It's like that thing with bees disappearing in Doctor Who. Reality is every bit as appallingly terrifyingly bad as Russell's "crisis of the week" and saying "aliens did it" is actually undermining that not reinforcing it.



As I understand it "Miracle Day" was supposed to be the first episode of "Torchwood: The New World" and I think I should have preferred it that way around to "The New World" being the first episode of "Torchwood: Miracle Day": "Miracle Day" is just one day, no matter how miraculous; "The New World" is opening up a whole new vista as well as referring to how everything has changed (to coin a phrase).

Overall, it was good in moments. There were some terrific – if a little derivative – directorial sweeps: Cap'n Jack appearing in the CIA archive; the helicopter on the beach (and why didn't we get the flaming zombies of the pilot and gunner emerging, eh?).

Lovely to see Tom Price back as PC Andy (I don't care that they've promoted him). Lovely to see Sharon Morgan and William Thomas reprising their roles as Gwen's parents. Lovely little cameo for Robin Sachs as "British Professor" (he's either Ethan Rayne if you're a Buffy fan or not-the-real-Adam Carrington from "Dynasty: the Reunion").

And there were good performances from the leading female actors: Eve Myles as Gwen, Alexa Havins as Esther and Arlene Tur as Dr Vera (notwithstanding the nonsensical character points listed above and the fact that her legs are skinnier than the exploded guy's remaining strands of neck!). I think it's the charisma of these three women that keeps the show on the road.

But for all the rounded family life of his Welsh characters, Russell writes the Americans as clichéd ciphers (hard-boiled CIA agent, fluffy ingénue and rushed-off-her-feet doctor). And Russell's writing should be better than that.

So it's only good in moments, and the feel is that those moments don't properly mesh. Not yet anyway.


Finally, why text the CIA with the word "Torchwood"? Wouldn't the words "Captain Jack Harkness" be more accurate and useful if it's his immortality that's been transposed with the world?

Oh, and what was that bit with the two hikers at the start? After Gwen's wonderfully hyper-paranoid performance, they could not have been more sinister if they'd winked straight at the camera and unzipped their Slitheen Skinsuits, and yet nothing at all came of it.


Next Time… A marked improvement in an effective bottle show: Jake's on a Plane!

(OK, OK it should be Jack's on a Plane, but give my puns a little wiggle room!) "Rendition".

You can watch episodes one and two of "Torchwood: Miracle Day" on the iPlayer and episode three, "Dead of Night", tonight at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC1 HD.
.

Day 3841: Goodbye Cruel World*

Friday:


It turns out that we owe an apology to Harold Camping, of all people, for LO the End of the World has arrived and the Elect has indeed been lifted to Safety!

In other news…

We may be in the gutter…



…but some of us are looking at the stars!




To the Space Shuttle Atlantis: go to Heaven.

To the News of the World: do the maths!

PS:

*In the absence of the Current Bun covering this appalling phone-hacking story, it seems the Tell-lies-o-Graph have decided to take their place. Says it all, really.
.

Day 3830: Either Or-ery

Monday:


Over the weekend Mr Mark Reckons wrote a piece I'd recommend reading on "Whataboutery", which is the way to play politics dirty so that you can attack someone who's proposing a policy you actually agree with.

This is the FALLACY of the RED HERRING: introducing an irrelevant case into an argument.

I'd like to give you a companion to Mr Mark's piece with one on another FALLACY, the fallacy of the FALSE DICHOTOMY.

Most famously presented by the former-Monkey-in-Chief, President Dubbya, as "you're either with us or against us", we've been seeing a LOT of this at the moment.

The most common occurrence is the "NHS fallacy": any reform is to be opposed with cries that the "only choice" is between the status quo and "privatisation", usually "privatisation by the back door" (to get around the fact that whatever it is clearly ISN'T going to be an actual privatisation). In fact, of course, the Hard Labour government oversaw the genuine privatisation of great swathes of our NHS through their Public Finance Initiative, which saw hospitals bought up by private companies and leased back to the public at often excessive rents (which is one of the things leading to the embuggerance of the NHS in spite of above inflation increases in government spending).

Topical this week, the public sector unions are going to go on strike over pensions because the "only choice" is between their current arrangements and "absolute daylight robbery".

Although SOME people might say that it's the UNIONS' position that is: "your money or your life public services"! I mean, just WHO is holding the "gun" saying "don't make me hurt the children" here?

Actually, the double standards employed by the Unions in this "debate" are outrageous. First, the Unions announce that they are going to go on strike. Then Mr Danny sets out the government's position. Now I call that being open and honest with the public, but the Unions call it "deeply inflammatory". They call it deeply inflammatory AFTER they've already announced that – regardless of the ongoing negotiations – they've decided to call a strike. Check the dates on the last two quotes: "Public sector workers back mass strike": 15th June; Danny Alexander's speech: 17th June. Deeply inflammatory. Right.

And now we have Ms Mary Bousted, leader of the ATL teachers' union, accusing the government of a "doing a Robert Maxwell on our pensions". So that would be saying that the government is illegally taking money OUT of the teacher's pension funds and using it to prop up, what, the rest of government spending?

Well, at the moment there is NOT ENOUGH money in those pension funds to meet the expected needs of the teachers (and other workers) who are paying in. So the government has to top that up from general taxation (that's ON TOP OF the employers contributions that we make).

So that would basically be the EXACT OPPOSITE of "doing a Robert Maxwell". That would be keeping the pension fund afloat at the expense of everyone else.

They tell LIES and they call us NAMES and then they have the CHEEK to try and distract your attention from it by saying that WE'RE traducing THEM!

I'd call Ms Mary a Bousted Flush!

Meanwhile, here is another example, this time from the Labour Conspiracy website:

"Our choice is to treat people with dignity or go back to the 1930s"

Is it actually USEFUL to polarise a very difficult debate about benefits and disability into "basic dignity" versus "1930s work programmes, institutions and eugenics" (and that's really not sufficiently coded to avoid cries of Godwin's Law, now is it)?

Could we not start from a basic recognition that the government isn't TRYING to be evil?

The aim of Mr Drunken-Swerve's reforms is SUPPOSED to be to enable people who want to work to be better off if they go to work, not - as the quote implies - to euthanase the disabled.

For the last thirty years, governments have been hiding unemployment among the genuinely long-term ill. It seems to me that one thing that could actively harm the interests of those who are ill is having to support the long-term unemployed out of the same pot of benefits. So, I have to ask: would a benefit system that undid that be better able to provide basic dignity for those in genuine need?

(You COULD reasonably argue "no"; e.g. you might argue that a sort of quasi-universal provision might be more effective, but you would need to justify that as a position, rather than just start from the assertion "any reform must be bad for the long-term ill".)

And if you are going to undo that hiding of unemployment, how are you to do it?

Again, it seems that either you let anyone claim disability-related benefits and accept that the benefit will be spread so thin that it helps no one, or you accept that at some point there's going to be some kind of medical testing involved.

At which point we're down to a question of degree.

So, the proposed tests sound to be too intrusive and too impersonal. And they sound like they are FRIGHTENING people (which I have to say language of "eugenics" exacerbates, which if you think about it puts you on the same side as the scary people - even though the LabCon author is clearly also one of the ones who are scared). Surely the useful question then is: "how do we conduct any testing that we have to in the most sympathetic and dignified manner?"

Clearly there ARE problems on the Coalition side here, almost certainly stemming from a terror at the department of benefits of seeing a huge spike in unemployment claims. So clearly they want to do the undoing by not jumping people from disability benefits to unemployment benefits, but by jumping them straight from disability to work, and that's just impractical. Equally, this is clearly a terrible time to be doing any forward thinking reform because the overriding need for spending cuts will at best muddle your thinking. Like, WHICH target is your main aim? Making sure that sickness benefits go to the sick? Making sure that work actually rewards the worker? Or cutting the overall benefits bill? (And your opponents are ALWAYS going to come back at you with "it's about the cuts" "it's ideological" (yawn)!)

Wouldn't it be better to think about OUTCOMES rather than INTENTIONS? The road to the toasty place being notoriously paved with the latter (as anyone who experienced the last government can testify), saying that a policy is wrong because it does this, or because it fails to do that is both more PRACTICAL and more HONEST than saying that it is just "evil".


The biggest false dichotomies, of course, are on the ECONOMY. And BOTH SIDES are guilty of using 'em.

"We must do this or the economy will fall over!"/"We must not do this or the economy will never recover!" is the now too-familiar battleline between the Coalition and Opposition, and this obfusticates the fact that the policies of both sides are REALLY VERY SIMILAR.

"It was the fault of the last Labour government"/"it was the fault of the bankers", is another.

OF COURSE it is in the Coalition's political interest to portray the Labour Party as credit-crazed spendthrifts, ruinous wastrels who would have us in penury and our children in hock forever. We, after all, are the ones who have to be in power while the agonisingly painful policies of deficit reduction are enacted.

But equally, the Coalition has to have an answer to Hard Labour's naked political opportunism when they seek to pin every scintilla of economic agony to Master Gideon's incompetence at the reins (a "bad news" policy by the Shadow Pocket Money Thief that leads to some frankly bizarre doublethink: for example, when there is a fall in unemployment, apparently, it's because unemployment is a "lagging indicator" when it goes down but "evidence of why we need a plan B" when it goes up).

(This of course was Mr Balls recent interview with Mr Marrmite, the one where he said that "the trade unions must not walk into the trap of giving George Osborne the confrontation he wants" because he spotted that choosing between supporting strikes or supporting the government was a trap for HIM!)

Any half-way decent economist (I do NOT include Mr Bully Balls in that category) will tell you that the cuts have neither begun to bite nor had nearly enough time to change the direction of the economy. The two main things affecting the economy are that MASSIVE RECESSION that happened in 2008 (in case you somehow missed it) and the fact that the government printed like a GAZILLION POUNDS leading to inflation and devaluation. (Though neither of these things are NECESSARILY as bad as they are painted either – another false dichotomy. E.g. inflation reduces the national debt as a share of GDP – as any property owner who survived the Seventies will tell you, it didn't half make their mortgages a doddle; though, flipside again, long term it started the inexorable house price inflation that leaves us now so overburdened.)


The truth is, the policies of Labour and Conservatories (and Liberal Democrats!) are not that different – in fact, given for example the discovery that Mr Alistair Dalek was secretly planning a VAT rise, you can bet your bottom dollar (which may be the only one you have left by now) that had they been returned to power, Hard Labour would have conducted a swift spending review and said "oops, it's worse than we thought, guys, have you SEEN what's happed in Greece? We have to cut faster and deeper!", and done EXACTLY what the Coalition is doing.

The MYTH of Labour's "pain free" cuts… their airy assertion that they would cut 80% of the deficit that we would but their tactical oppositionalism against every single £ reduction in spending… their repeated false dichotomy of "our way or the evil, ideological inflicting of pain on the poor"… it makes it VERY DIFFICULT to have anything approaching a RATIONAL DEBATE.

"We'd like to cut this."

"EVIL!"

"Well, maybe if we only cut it by half."

"INFINITE EVIL!"

I'm sure it plays well to the Labour Chorus, but it gets the country nowhere.

Regrettably, Mr Millipede's response to talk of a leadership crisis is a power grab for control of Shadow Cabinet appointments showing that Hard Labour are turning more INWARDS than looking outwards. While Mr Bully Balls, apparently, no longer even sees the need to run policies by the Shadow Cabinet before launching them. And sofa government worked so WELL for Lord Blairimort, after all.

In an equation where it is EITHER the Coalition OR the Labour Party, Labour seem intent on making themselves IRRELEVANT.

But even THAT is a false dichotomy. The Coalition of course consists of TWO Parties, and the true clash of ideas is now between Conservatories and LIBERAL DEMOCRATS.

You see, the ULTIMATE "either/or" is the MEEJA's HEADS WE WIN-TAILS YOU LOSE game of EITHER "on message" OR "gaffe". If you're "on message" you're a ROBOT, no to be trusted, only lying when your lips move, enemy of the people. If you" gaffe" it's even worse. Hence all this recent fuss over "U-Turns", as though LISTENING to people, DEBATING policy even, shock, CHANGING YOUR MIND were BAD THINGS for a government in what we still LAUGHINGLY describe as a DEMOCRACY (leading to the UTTERLY INSANE suggestion from a Questionable Time panellist that governments should do what is in their manifesto and only what is in their manifesto and the people should shut up for five years and only judge them at election time). DEBATING policy – in CABINET as well as in PARLIAMENT rather than at intimate tête-a-têtes with Fleet Street Editors – reduces the meeja's POWER to dictate the agenda. That's why, for them, a thinking government is a "weak" government and one that does what it's told (by a Prime Monster who does what she or he is told) is a "strong" one.

Obviously the REAL truth is the reverse, and that is why the Liberal Democrats bring real STRENGTH to this Coalition.

We are used to having Government and Opposition. In the Coalition, the Liberal Democrats are BOTH.

And how LIBERAL is that? Liberalism has NEVER been an EITHER/OR; it's always been BOTH: one and many; individual and community; local and global.

That is how I can write a big old self-important diary about "great big, important-y things" like the ECONOMY and SPACE and STUFF, and Auntie Caron, bless her heart, can read it and bring it right down to the REALLY important and PERSONAL with a post about the need for a real Liberal Voice. And they are BOTH what Liberalism is ABOUT.
.

Day 3828: The Deadly Sin of Sloth

Saturday:


We wake at the tellingly-lazy hour of half-past-eleven to hear the Weak (sic) In Westminster debating the House of Lords Club and NEVER have we heard such a smug, selfish, self-interested, inward-looking, ignorant proof that the place needs totally abolishing down to the ground!

Last weekend, we were with our families for Daddies Day, and – as can happen – one of our relatives went off on a bit of a "right-wing rant". "The trouble with this country is lack of leadership!" was the thesis. This, of course, is total HONK; the REAL problem of this country is CONTENTMENT.

The "strong leadership" canard itself implies lack of fault in the PEOPLE. I mean even if we didn't all know that "strong leadership" is a shortcut to poor by which I mean insane policy choices – Iraq, Poll Tax, World War Part II and we're straight into Godwin's Law – the implication is that the fault is in the LEADERS not providing answers rather than the PEOPLE for not getting off their fluffy bottoms to CHANGE things!

And people DON'T want, can't be BOTHERED to want CHANGE.

And I don't even mean Great Britain; I mean England. Because if you look at Scotland, whether you agree with independence or oppose it, there is a real yearning for change and a seizing of their own destiny, while England is content just to sink into our own apathy.

With basically only TWO political arguments – "time for change!" and "don't rock the boat" – you can make a case that the recent LOSS of the AV referendum, and certainly the insultingly low turnout, are a sign that people are complacently content as they are. Enough people are pretty much enough satisfied that things are "okay enough as they are". There is no… OOMPH for getting behind something new.

That same lack of drive may even explain the poor recovery from recession. The case made is "oh, people are just struggling to carry on in the face of austerity". No, people are wrapping the blankets around them and trying to IGNORE it; they're not going out there and starting new enterprises FIGHTING it!

The terrible thought strikes me that the one success of Thatcherism was not its economic insight (which was non-existent) nor its populism (which mostly came about by accident) but that it made SO MANY people MISERABLE that it meant they had to DO something, to FIGHT FOR something. The misery lead to STRUGGLE and the struggle led to on the one fluffy foot an EXPLOSION of creative arts from the oppression and injustice and yet on the other fluffy foot an explosion of entrepreneurialism and invention from the wideboys and chancers who took their opportunity. They may have been "nouvs" and absolutely ghastly, but they created new wealth and dynamism in a way that the settled establishment didn't.

The contented establishment have used the decades since to SMOTHER that. THAT is why Alan Sugar is now a LORD, and comfortably PARASITISING the creative insanity of his "Apprentices".

It is all too telling that the only things that will get our UNIONS out on the streets nowadays are a threat to make their PILLOWS slightly less PLUMPTIOUS!

(At least the students were rioting for the right to DO something!)

And the House of Lords is TOTALLY symbolic of all of that: a warm and cosy retirement palace, you don't even have to turn up, where you can be coddled while you congratulate yourself on your own wisdom.

So we woke up hearing the voices of Mr Fraser Half-Nelson guests Dame Joan Bakewell Tart and Mr Michael "FU" Dobbs telling us how SILLY it was of Captain Clegg to consider replacing the House of Lords with something THAT WORKS.

"There are so many people who want to get in, even though there is no pay."

Oh, well have you considered the possibility of having some sort of DECISION about who gets in and who stays in? If people WANT it so badly then they can stand up and prove they deserve it. Oh no, they don't want to go to the trouble of obtaining a MANDATE. They want it handed to them on a plate. Together with a cat-trim bed-blanket to prove they're part of the CLUB.

Yes, you'll only end up with "elected politicians"… as opposed to the UNELECTED politicians that we've got there now!

What could be WORSE in your governing political class than this exceeding smug self-assurance that they're not "politicians" they're "wise people" just because they don't have to face an electorate?

The House of Lords is ENTIRELY composed of "the ESTABLISHMENT", talking to themselves and most ABOUT themselves. Frankly, the House of COMMONS is ALMOST AS BAD, but at least elections mean there is a REMOTE CHANCE that someone INTERESTING can CRASH THE PARTY.

"You couldn't have people of 20 in the House of Lords…" says Joan Bakewell, JOAN BAKEWELL!, "…or it would turn this place into a bear pit!"

Well of course how shocking, we'd best not threaten to interrupt the gentle snoring of our self-appointed gerontocracy with anything that might approach REPRESENTATION for people less than a quarter of your age. It might disturb the horses.

"There are more important things to deal with."

You know, there really ARE. But Parliament doesn't debate them.

The problems that our Parliament chooses to trouble itself with are TRIVIAL, quite literally they are reduced to arguing over how to manage our pensions. This country that once RULED the WORLD, our greatest aspiration now amounts to RETIREMENT.

THIS is why SLOTH is DEADLY. It is killing us.

PS:

This week Daddy Richard read a really DEPRESSING piece of analysis about the Space Race to the Moon. I'm not saying it was WRONG; it's well-argued and well-written (and I recommend the "TARDIS rude-room" blog as a whole!) but it was depressing.

Not depressing because it claims that the Moon landing was basically a WILLY-WAVING exercise by the military-industrial complex as a proxy for fighting a nuclear war. (And let's face it a Saturn V rocket is a pretty IN YOUR FACE statement of "my Freudian rocket is bigger than your Freudian rocket"!).

No, this piece was depressing because of the suggestion that space is OVER. We've done that and we're BORED now. Exploration is for geeks and weirdoes; there are "more important" things to deal with here on Earth.

NO.

There are only two possibilities: life exists in great abundance everywhere in the Universe; or life is vanishingly rare and may be unique to this Earth.

To the very best of our knowledge, from all we have leaned so far, there is NO evidence for the former.

That makes the life on Earth the most VITAL and PRECIOUS thing that there is anywhere. And our most pressing duty must be to take life to the stars.

Chinese philosophy tells us there are two competing impulses, two "directions": "inwards" and "outwards". "Outwards" is chaotic, aggressive, creative, exploratory, inventive. "Inwards" is peaceful, calm, settled, content.

The "West", and that basically meant the British Empire and later the Americans, used to be synonymous with "outward" and the "East", namely China, with "inward". And we PITIED China for it: for being so INDOLENT, so fat and lazy and OLD.

And look at us now.
.

Day 3819: If Mr Balls Wants a Tax Cut So Bad… Why Doesn't He Propose Cutting LABOUR'S NI Rise?

Thursday:


When Mr Bully Balls, Labour's master of monetary mayhem, performs a complete U-TURN from "spend more!" to "tax less!" the real question is: why don't people just LAUGH?


But, okay, let's look at tax changes this year:

The Conservatories COST you £390(*1) a year by putting up your VAT.

The Liberal Democrats GAVE you up to £200(*2) with a rise in your Income Tax Allowance.

and

Hard Labour COST you £188(*3) by putting your National Insurance up. Oh yes they did. Mr Alistair Dalek did it a year in advance.

So who's REALLY "putting money back in your pocket"?

Look, just SUPPOSE that we had twelve billion quid to burn, and that completely reversing all the pain of narrowing the deficit we've done so far wouldn't panic the markets, terminate our triple-A credit rating and kick interest rates through the stratosphere…

Would the BEST way, if you want to boost spending by "putting money back in people's pockets", would the BEST way REALLY to be cutting a sales tax that – particularly in a time of high inflation – may or may not be passed on to the customer, rather than, say, a DIRECT tax cut.

LIKE THE ONE WE DID!

The IDEA of a short-term VAT cut to stimulate the economy is supposed to work like this: first, things cost less, so people buy more, which means more production in the economy for the same amount of money going around, which means more jobs and so eventually more money going around; second, and according to the IFS possibly more important, the KNOWLEDGE that prices NEXT YEAR are going to go back up again encourages people to spend money NOW rather than saving it till next year.

The only REAL problem with this theory is… it DIDN'T WORK.

(And even supposing that it HAD worked, then it's not a trick that you can KEEP doing, is it – if you encouraged people to spend more in 2009 because the VAT rate was going back up in 2010… and then encouraged people to spend more in 2010 because the VAT rate was going up AGAIN in 2011 – which it did – then how are they supposed to have any spending LEFT to "bring forward" in 2011 for when the VAT goes back up yet again in 2012?)

But studies showed that when Mr Dalek cut the VAT rate back in 2008 that most people DIDN'T bring their spending forwards.

Add to that the evidence that, after INITIALLY cutting prices, retailers put them back up on the sly and that it actually COSTS businesses a whole lot of money if you make them change all their pricing at the drop of a hat (it may not seem like much but changing all those price tags and reprinting all those price lists and altering all your advertising… it does add up), then you have to ask, HOW is this "stimulus" supposed to stimulate ANYTHING?




…Actually, what I suspect is that Mr Balls announcement is a pretty CYNICAL attempt to provide a STIMULUS for media coverage of the Labour Party.

Hard Labour had had a fairly DODGY week: the "Balls Papers" were pretty much the SMOKING GUN that revealed that Hard Labour KNEW that they were spending too much – but carried on spending anyway; Mr Potato Ed Millipede's leadership was called into question after a year of doing nothing; and Mr DAVID Millipede's "leader's speech" was leaked to the press by persons unknown (aka Mr David Millipede) furthering rumours of a poisonous fraternal rift. Or, since this is the party of Lord Blairimort and Mr Frown, ANOTHER poisonous fraternal rift.

The REAL cause of Hard Labour's apparently-sudden crack-up is the dawning realisation in the media that they are in fact IRRELEVANT. Any SERIOUS debate about policy is between the Conservatories and the Liberal Democrats. Hard Labour have NOTHING to say!

Apparently Mr Potato Ed has been complaining that no one pays attention to his speeches. Well, in if he wants people to LISTEN, he ought to have SOMETHING to SAY.

(Take this DRIVEL about Labour "being seen to be the party of bankers and scroungers"… when he talked about the SQUEEZED MIDDLE who'd have guessed that he meant to blame the recession on the rich AND the poor!)

So Mr Bully Balls, a NINJA of the black arts of spin, was after a quick headline-grabbing stunt to hastily re-establish the cover-up and make it LOOK like they are contributing to the national conversation. When the truth is, for the moment at least, they are full of sound and fury. And signify NOTHING.

Workings

*1: according to Mr Potato Ed's claim that average families would be £7.50 a week worse off

*2: a £1000 increase in the personal allowance is worth £200 a year to a taxpayer on the basic 20% rate

*3: based on average earnings of £26,000, a 1% rise in National Insurance costs you £188

NB: NOT comparing like with like – Mr Millipede was taking about HOUSEHOLDS; the other figures are based on INDIVIDUALS. Adjust your thinking accordingly.
.