Review: Torchwood’s BBC Radio 4 Play, “The Dead Line”
I have a deep antipathy for Torchwood. You see, Doctor Who was my introduction to Science Fiction. I mean the old-school Target book series, which were novelisations of the broadcast episodes, unrestrained by budgetary considerations. A deep space station can only be written in a way that it appears in deep space, whereas careful financial planning might make a televisual space station appear a bit like a collection of washing up bottles painted grey. And let’s not even start on the aliens, huh?
Use a tissue next time, okay buddy?
When the TV show finished the books continued the story of the Doctor’s travels in space and time. Except that the authors didn’t need to worry about budget constraints, leading to a fantastic series of stories from authors such as Lance Parkin, who recreated the Time Lords was a species locked in a perpetual war across time, using regeneration to create creatures bred for war. Parkin, and other authors working in this period, used the long attention spans needed to read a book to create an amazing back-story.
When Doctor Who returned to TV, it was assumed that the attention span of anyone watching it was tiny, and the majority of the back-story was scribbled out. Each episode was as self-contained as possible, with only the existence of the Doctor character linking the events happening within the story to a larger, scifi-tinged universe. Torchwood removes the need for that link, and instead gives us lowest-common-denominator storytelling.
This radio play, “The Dead Line”, uses the idea of a malicious phone signal that makes people’s brain stop working – like a computer virus for brains. Thankfully, after forty-five minutes of pissing around, the Torchwood posse decided that the computer virus metaphor meant that they could just zap the brains of the affected with electromagnetic waves and reset everybody.
(Thanks, Roy. Your Torchwood invite pack is in the post.)
Of course, no concern was given that this freaky brain-wipe via telephone behaviour came from a lightening storm that hit an office building, nor that there’s been a bunch of people incapacitated with the same symptoms since 1974 (or something) and nobody in super-elite Torchwood noticed. Mind you, they are a state department, and therefore need to uphold that level of efficiency that we expect from government workers. Don’t expect a work-related bonus this year, Jack.
The notion of phones being an attack vector for something is insidiously scary. Stephen King broached it in Cell, and there’s a film based around the same idea called The Signal, which I’ve not seen. This is because I’m a big wuss and don’t like watching horror movies, and the basic premise of the The Signal is that the ‘infected’ lose the niceties of civilisation and start acting crazy.
This is the sort of adult-themed entertainment that media representation of Torchwood would lead me to expect. However, I’m always disappointed by the Torchwood show. Yes, Ianto loves Jack, and they’re both men – so what? I really hope that the mention of a same-sex relationship isn’t the only passport to mature that Torchwood has, as that expired sometime around 1994 with the use of lesbians in Brookside.
We don’t get crazy zombie behaviour from this rogue noise in “Dead Line”, instead the victims fall into a coma. This is another missed opportunity for radio, as we could have a great monologue from any of the victims as to the scary nature of being locked into your own body, like in Metallica’s video for One. And, of course, there is the scary sound, which sounded a bit like a bucket with a mobile phone in it. Whatever happened to the Radiophonic workshop?
At a time when British SF is harder, leaner, and more popular than ever, I don’t understand why we get this sort of dumbed-down shit from the British Broadcasting Corporation. The public can cope with far more than this simple children’s tale, and although the voice acting from the principles was pretty good, unless they are given some real stories to tell, we’ll never see anything particularly good come from the Cardiff Torchwood team – as this radio play proved. The talent is there, just not the stories, and I don’t see commissioning editors changing their tactics anytime soon.
