So, Day Two of Torchwood’s residency in BBC1’s prime 9pm slot, and things are still looking good.  This is by far the best Torchwood I’ve seen, a fast-paced drama with a sense of real urgency that comes across like Spooks with a domestic twist.  The car chases and gun action are in the same territory as the spy drama, but there are touches like Gwen and her husband turning up at a London cafe having got there in the back of a lorry full of potatoes from Cardiff.  He is famished, and the pair of them tuck into steak pie and chips, and it’s a moment that sums up the difference between British and American science fiction.

In fact, science fiction was low on the agenda tonight.  Sure, there’s some sort of alien presence due to arrive in tomorrow’s show,which speaks through the world’s children — and that’s creepy when it happens.  But it’s cleverly undercut by the response of the kids themselves, who take their role as mouthpieces in their stride — the two daughters of a politician send up their role as heralds and ask their dad for a pony in the same style.  It’s a cute humanising beat that isn’t necessary in plot terms, but says a lot about the tone of the show: this isn’t programming for geeks, it’s something for people who enjoy soaps and want to see recognisable people on tv.

That’s the sort of point that will piss off hardcore genre fans, but it’s attention to such details that gives Dr Who its massive popular audience, while Battlestar Galactica remains fare for people who get unironically excited about spaceships and androids.  Let’s hope that Torchwood can follow in its progenitor’s footsteps: last night’s episode got 5.9 million viewers, and here’s hoping tonight’s, written by John Fay, attracted at least that many.

Torchwood has, in essence, grown up.  When it started, the show was tiresome in its supposedly shocking references to sex and drugs.  Now, there are still allusions to sexual shenanigans, but in a low key fashion that doesn’t overemphasise them in a juvenile manner.   The difference makes all the difference.

Looked at this way, Torchwood is mainstream drama with a science fiction twist, and that’s a distinctly different proposition from true genre shows.  It’s notable that two upcoming remakes, V and Alien Nation, could be described in similar fashion.  Part of me welcomes any inventive new drama to television, and I hope that describes those reinventions, but I worry if we’re losing some edgier material in the process…does the world really need another remake of Day of the Triffids?

There’s a paradox at work here.  Science fiction should be about novel concepts, but much of what reaches television screens is a rehash of tried and tested ideas.  Star Trek has undergone countless iterations now, and though the new film version is excellent, audiences have had to put up with a lot of pap while waiting.  And the fad for reinventing shows can only go so far, though I have it on good authority that an attempt has even been made to resurrect Sapphire & Steel, a show incomprehensible even to its fans.

Torchwood finally seems to have struck the right balance, assuming the rest of the week lives up to the promise laid out in the first two episodes of this five parter.  Let’s hope that the BBC decides to commission more well written and directed science fiction in the future, preferably without feeling the necessity to relate it to the touchstone of Dr Who.

Well, you’ve got to hand it to him.  Russell T Davies knows how and when to impress.  He did it abundantly with his reinvention of Dr Who, but dropped the ball somewhat with his own episodes.  Or maybe it’s just that he picked his team of writers well and was admirably outshone by some, most notably the amazing Stephen Moffat, whose contributions to the show have been outstanding.

And then there was Torchwood.  An intriguing concept for a spinoff, but which fell flat on its face in the first series, to such an extent that I didn’t follow all the episodes.  Second series was sexed up to better effect…and now we have a five part Torchwood in its premiere on BBC1.  And, wouldn’t you know it, Davies has played a blinder and done a fine job on the first episode.

It worked perfectly for people who haven’t seen the show before, and things have moved on in interesting ways for those who have followed the series.  The set-up was achieved convincingly, and Davies demonstrates how well he can write when he’s on a roll, seamlessly bringing together everyday events and emotions against a cosmic backdrop.  There’s that patented Davies sensawunda, the bit you always get in his scripts about how wonderful it is to be alive in a universe where there are aliens and love and that, and as ever it comes across as fresh and sincere, even if you’ve heard the sentiments expressed a few times by now.

The episode plays a clever game with viewers, setting up one character to be a new member of the team before revealing that he’s a plant from military intelligence, a baddy out to eek out Torchwood’s secrets.  Dastardly, huh?  But nothing compared to the trick they play on Captain Jack, opening him up to plant a bomb inside him that will destroy the team’s base.  All expertly set up, so that the tech used to do such things without a trace has already been shown in use by Captain Jack himself: an elegant display of how to give the audience information with maximum economy.

The story itself was creepy in the extreme, and a good example of how a simple concept can be used to good effect.  In this instance, all the children on the planet freeze at the same time, first for a few minutes at one point, and then again later where they all intone ‘We are coming’. Big time creepy: Midwich Cuckoos on a global rather than village scale.

It’s all brilliantly handled, and the balance of character drama with the big plot is perfect.  Gwen goes to talk with an adult mental patient who did what the kids were doing and, as well as discovering clues about something that happened to a group of kids in the 1960s, is told by him that she’s pregnant.  Captain Jack is a bit of a bastard to the daughter who looks pretty much the same age as he does, and is also dealing with being in a relationship with his colleague Ianto.  It’s that seasoning that gives Torchwood its character, and raises it above the standard of previous genre offerings such as X-Files.

Fingers crossed, this experiment in running Torchwood every night at 9 on BBC1 will prove a success.  I hope so: with each season, the series has upped its game, and it deserves a bigger audience than it’s been getting to date.  Tonight’s episode ended on a cracking cliffhanger, and I’ll be there tomorrow to see how it’s resolved.  Put it this way: I’ve not been shouting from the rooftops about Torchwood up till now for a very good reason, so if you’ve seen it before and been disappointed, give this week’s story a try — you might enjoy changing your mind.

Blunt force trauma.  There’s something great sounding about that expression.  Something authoritative.  It’s an expression you could easily put into the mouth of a pathologist character if you’ve got a dead body in a scene and need to explain to a listening cop, and the audience, how they got that way.

I collect phrases like those.  Got a little black book full of them.  I dip into it from time to time when I want to stir up the contents of my head, introduce a random element from a newspaper quote, snippet of overheard conversation, or whatever else ends up in there.  Today, I came across a coinage that had to be included in that book: the sequence ’swine flu party’.

Now, an actual swine flu party is about exposing your child to swine flu now, in the summer, so that they can be treated for the condition while the NHS is up to the task, so the theory goes.  The other part being that things will be worse by the winter, when Gordon Brown has bled the NHS off anything other than sticking plasters.  This is Daily Mail logic we’re talking: that paper may well the source of the phrase.

It’s one that’s had quite a hold on my imagination today.  I went for a very welcome swim in the afternoon, the just-chill water a beautiful contrast to the heat outside, which reduced me and everything else to the state of melted plasticine.  And as I swam, the phrase came back to me unbidden, and with it the seed of an idea.

Swine flu party.  What sort of parents send their kids to a party to get ill?  I started with that thought, but knew it wasn’t quite right for the childrens’ series I’m developing concepts for.  So: turn things round, see them from another angle.  What if a kid is isolated from his or her friends by an illness, and those friends willingly expose themselves to the same condition so they can spend time with their pal, figuring time will pass quicker if they’re all sick together?

Yes, that feels like an idea that’d work with this series.  It involves kids and adults, and the kids having a novel perspective on things that the adults don’t get.  I like that.  And I like the opportunity it presents for the kids to spend more time together than they would otherwise.  And that’s gold.  Normally, kids spend as much time with each other as the adults in their lives let them.  So they typically operate by an adult timetable, and are being pulled away from their mates.  With the shared illness, the kids get to be around each other for longer, and the fault lines start to show up.  Little resentments become the basis of bigger disagreements.  The group gets to splinter along whatever lines are most interesting, before coalescing again in a new form.

With this potential, I know there’s a good story to be had.  And it’ll be a change of pace too: the kids normally rove round a really interesting environment, but for this episode they’re confined to barracks.  Hmm, a danger of being less visually interesting, but their quarantine space can still be well designed.  And the opportunity for tension between the characters allows new story possibilities.  One of the kids is an introvert anyway: how will he cope when there is literally no space for him to be on his own?  And what if one of the kids becomes seriously ill?  What started as a prank to show solidarity with a playmate becomes an experience with much bigger consequences.  Some of the characters have experienced death in their young lives already — how will they face up to the loss of a peer, for something that suddenly seems so trivial?

At this stage I’ve got more questions than answers, and that’s fine.  All the questions are generative, and will allow me to craft an episode that will make a great contrast to the others planned.  It’s not an early episode tale — this is one to savour when the audience has got to know the characters, have their favourites, maybe half way through the run of the first series, should we be lucky enough to experience such a result.  Watch this space.