Daniel Martin has listed his five favourite - and five worst - Doctor Who companions. In doing so he exposes himself as a member of that odd bunch of people: Doctor Who fans who liked Ace.

There’s a lot of them, but I’d love to know why. As an attempt to make the companion a central part of the series, prefiguring Rose Tyler, I suppose it was a noble effort. But, seriously. The bomber jacket. The ‘attitude’. The bombs. At least K9 was knowingly stupid.

And Brian Cant was better on Playbus as well.

I noticed this link on the BBC News page, which all looks terribly fun but I’d have liked to have seen the final interview (one surmises it was on Newsround, which on the odd occasion that I’ve watched it recently impressed me quite a bit).

If you follow the link, you’ll also find another school preparing for their interview with Cameron. Is it me or do they all look and sound a bit, well, posh? Ming’s bunch appeared to be much more fun.

The BBC have truly lost it. Druggie presenters is one thing. Cynical competitive parents buying Blue Peter badges on eBay is quite another. But for Blue Peter to be involved in fixing a competition is, well, tantamount to defecating over the UK’s collective childhood experience.

An apology is not nearly enough. The entire production team and current presenters should be sacked. “Just following orders” cannot be accepted as a legitimate excuse. They should have taken a stand. After this, anything is possible. Konnie Huq modelling the latest in tweenie fetish wear? Some other presenter (I’ve only heard of Konnie Huq) showing kids how to make their own crackpipe out of bits of sticky backed plastic and a washing up liquid bottle? You name it.

The rot has got to be stopped!!!

Seriously, what sort of message does it send out to children if this sort of thing can be just glossed over? The message the BBC is sending out here is corruption is fine, so long as you apologise. Lord Reith must be spinning in his grave.

They have to pay a blood price.

Okay, okay, I have to admit that it is too sad for words that the first thing I thought when reading this piece by Nick Assinder, remarking on how David Cameron looks like Data from Star Trek, was: “Amateurs. Anyone can see that is clearly a photo of Lore.”

I know. I’m ashamed.

According to the Today programme this morning, in the US there is a new TV reality show about the lengths parents will go to big up their child’s coming-of-age birthday party called My Super Sweet Sixteen. For some reason, calling the show “Pimp My Teenager” was deemed inappropriate, it would seem.

Terrible news! According to Mark Thompson, the BBC’s appalling 3% license fee rise will lead to an abandonment of reality TV and cheap imports and an increase of quality output (in an article in the print edition of the Guardian that doesn’t appear to be online).

Apparently, “big pieces” such as the excellent Planet Earth “will have to get bigger.” Meanwhile, “factories of creative excellence” such as the team behind Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures will have to be encouraged more. Disaster!

For the record, I don’t full endorse the government’s hard stance against the BBC. I certainly don’t agree that the license fee should be used to pay for the digital switchover, which fundamentally misunderstands the whole argument for a license fee in the first place (even if we put aside the argument over whether we should have one at all aside for one moment). But this reaction simply affirms what some of us have been saying all along: most quality TV is commercial, and the dominance of the Beeb in the market distorts it, in the same way that the CAP distorts the global agribusiness. There is a place for the Beeb and public subsidy of the media, but that place is not attempting to be all things to all people.

So that was Torchwood Season One, then. Hmmm… It certainly had its moments, but overall I think it was a serious misfire from a team that, up until this point, has provided some cracking telly over the past 18 months. So what was the problem? As far as I can see there a several main issues:

It’s Buffy Season Six
Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is known as the dark season. It’s the one where Buffy gets yanked out of paradise by her friends to resume her slaying career, shags Spike, alienates everyone else and the main villains are a bunch of inept losers. Derided by many Buffy fans, there’s a actually a lot to like in this season, such as the musical episode Once More With Feeling, Normal Again (the episode where Buffy finds herself in a mental institution and discovers that the last 6 years have been nothing more than a paranoid delusion) and the obligatorily apocalyptic season finale, but people disliked the unremittingly depressing tone of the season.

If that went down like a lead balloon in a well established series, Torchwood Season One is a good example of what happens if you try the same tone for a completely new series. For you to have sympathy for a character behaving in a thoroughly dislikable way, you have to get to know them well. Otherwise, you tend to just think of them as a bunch of shallow gits.

Ugly Sex
In order to establish itself as a ‘mature’ show, the makers of Torchwood felt it was necessary to stuff it as full of sex and violence as the budgets would allow. In fact, violence is quite expensive to film well, so in the event it was relatively infrequent and quite derivative (I have to guffaw when I watched the Combat episode of Torchwood Declassified to hear them all going on about how ‘realistic’ the violence was), but sex is cheap. You don’t even need any costumes.

The problem is, much of the sex in this series seemed to be there for no better reason than to fill precious airtime. It was rarely used for dramatic reasons. And it all tended to look very staged, very uncomfortable (all the characters seem to have a look of horror on their faces mid-coitus) and very dispassionate. And worst of all, most of it seemed to involve Burn Gorman.

Now I liked Burn Gorman in Bleak House. He made a great Guppy. But that was because he looks so much like, well, a guppy. My idea of a great Sunday night in is not watching a fish-faced unlikeable twerp getting his freak on. Especially when it involves someone as undeniably attractive as Louise Delamere. Twice.

But he wasn’t the only problem. Take last night’s episode, Captain Jack Harkness for instance. At the end of this episode, the two eponymous captains snog in front of the doomed 1941 version’s colleagues. This presumably struck the makers as being incredibly daring and right on, given the views of homosexuality in the forties, yet it had no dramatic impact (the episode wasn’t about Harkness being gay, repressed or otherwise, it was about meeting a guy who you stole your identity from, 24 hours before he died) and didn’t make any sense. It was completely gratuitous and cheapened an otherwise quite good episode.

Stupid characters incapable of growth
Leaving aside the fact that they never explain why they leave such a small band of five disparate individuals in charge of something as potentially world-threatening as the Rift without supervision. The real issue is why they are such stunted idiots.

Take Gwen, for example. In Ghost Machine, she learns all about the tricksy nature of looking into the future, and how it can become self-fulfilling prophecy, or worse. So what does she do in End of Days? Make exactly the same mistake all over again, without even pausing for thought, or questioning why the clearly dodgy bloke who can walk through time is showing her this.

Indeed, all the characters, with the possible exception of Jack, fall apart during the smallest of crises, fail to resist the temptation to play with alien tech, never think about the consequences of their actions and throw tantrums like spoiled three year olds.

The question that Russell T Davies et al need to answer in Season Two is why should we like these dangerous arseholes?

In fact, the only character that has grown on me as the series has progressed is Tosh, yet she is the one who has had the least screen time. In the one episode where she got the spotlight, Greeks Bearing Gifts, she switches from being a boring backroom character to an actual human one. Of the four, she seems to be the least prone to falling apart and her fears tend to be the most well founded. Yet Jack seems to invest all his trust in stupid, wailing Gwen.

No Metaplot
In short, what is Torchwood about? We know there’s this nasty Rift thing they have to keep an eye on, but who is the baddie? What’s the threat?

Most superior TV series establish this pretty early on, or in the case of Doctor Who and classic Trek, establish a format that renders such a thing unneccessary. Torchwood has been screaming out for a metaplot, but it has failed to deliver.

That’s not strictly accurate. In They Keep Killing Suzie, we learn there is a big, nasty Thing Out There; in Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness, we learn that the Rift is increasing in activity and causing links across time; Bilis Manger emerges as a recurring villain (in two episodes at least), and we finally get to meet the Big Bad, in the shape of Abaddon.

Except that all of that has been very disjointed, too late in the series in coming, and have just been events that the main cast have reacted to. There’s been absolutely no sense of them mounting a counter offensive or a sense that they have any idea what is actually going on.

A lot of this has been down to a refusal by the makers to give the characters any help. By the end of Season One you would expect the rest of the team to at least know as much about Captain Jack as we do: namely that he is a former Time Agent from the future gone freelance. Jack’s refusal to answer any questions about his past (future) smacks more of lazy writing than any real determination to keep things mysterious. After all, every small titbit of information would surely pose as many questions as it answers. One gets a sense that the real reason we haven’t learnt anything is that the writers don’t know either. I get a sense that much of his backstory will be revealed in the next series of Doctor Who, which is great from the POV of the flagship programme, but sells Captain Jack’s own series somewhat short - is Davies truly committed to Torchwood?

Chris Chibnell
In my view, the standout worst episodes have been Day One, Cyberwoman, Countrycide and End of Days. Only after establishing this did I learn they were all written by the same person: Chris Chibnell.

I have no idea who this guy is, but his episodes have characteristically lacked any subtlety, with Countrycide doing for violence what Day One and Cyberwoman did for sex, are full of examples of the ‘team’ running around like headless chickens, have poor characterisiation and make little sense.

For example, in the last episode, it turns out that Jack can kill Abaddon by standing under his shadow (although it ends up killing him as well, albeit temporarily). Why not simply walk out of the way then, and get on with killing everyone else? And if he is the Big Bad alluded to by Suzie, then you’d think he’d have thought about this vulnerability first? In any case, after meeting the Devil himself in Doctor Who’s Satan Pit, this version comes across as a bit of a wet blanket.

The main writer of a series doesn’t have to be best, although Joss Whedon, Chris Carter and Aaron Sorkin all give a good run for their money. He or she however should not under circumstances be the worst. Having had four shots, more than anyone else, I would suggest his P45 should be in the post.

***

The most damning indictment to Torchwood is that I’m looking much more to the Sarah Jane Adventures than the second season. Sex and violence free, featuring a character who is determined to solve problems with brains rather than brawn, SJA is everything Torchwood is not. Explicitly aimed at children (anyone with a day job will have to record it), the pilot episode of SJA was far more intelligent and grown up than whole series of Torchwood put together. To be fair however, Torchwood was still better than most brainless sci-fi on TV. Let’s hope they learn from their mistakes in Season Two.

UPDATE: One suggestion just made to me is to make Lembit Opik a consultant for the show, given that he is an authority on Wales, intergalactic phenomena and sex with odd-looking aliens.

I watched More 4’s Death of a President last night and, to be honest, I rather wish I hadn’t wasted 2 hours of my life.

I don’t have a problem in principle with either mockumentories or a drama speculating what would happen if Bush was assassinated. I enjoyed the BBC’s If… series as well as their one-offs about smallpox and transport system collapsing. But most of these had something in common: they either explored how a supposedly unlikely to terrible event might conceivably happen, or they explore (rather more speculatively) what would happen in such a situation.

Death of a President did neither of these things. What we got instead was a rather feeble story padded out by use of the mockumentory style (authentic looking footage, lots of talking heads going over the same incident from several different angles…). It wasn’t making any serious claims about weaknesses in the Secret Service’s methods, it didn’t say anything really about the War on Terror or the civil liberty implications of the Patriot Act. The only thing it had to say was that a lot of people don’t like George Bush very much. Well, duh.

Worse, it ticked the box of every leftist prejudice going. The main suspect was a Syrian man who trained at an Al Qaeda camp. Therefore, he must be innocent. Instead, the murderer turns out to be an ex-US soldier, driven to do it because his son was killed in Iraq. In fact, far from being presented as a lunatic (who, let us not forget, inflicts President Cheney on the world for God’s sake), it actually portrayed as a tragic hero. The “villain” of the piece is clearly made out to be the Intelligence Community who lock up an innocent man, and Cheney, who nearly declares war on Syria despite having no evidence of their involvement.

Either this film has a message - in which case it stinks - or it doesn’t - in which case it is utterly pointless. I happen to think it is the latter. If instead of concocting some silly whodunnit the programme had explored the national and global consequences of what happens when the world’s most powerful man gets wiped out, it might have been more interesting, but even then I suppose it would inevitably have been politically loaded.

But at least it would have been better than the lazy nonsense I had to sit through last night.

Unfortunately, I missed the Amazing Mrs Pritchard last night. I say unfortunately, but by all accounts I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I really wanted ot watch it to see if it was really as bad as it looked.

Richard Huzzey confirms my worst fears:

Having opened up a critique of the modern party system, and suggested that it had become a contest of image, rivalry and management pitches, Mrs. Pritchard then misses the target. Where is the pitch to idealism? If it had been a drama about principle triumphing over pragmatism, it may have been high-skies dreaming, but at least it would have been inspirational. We should be demanding from our politics. Instead, we were given the absence of principles as an ideal, that made her pure. A blank canvass was apparently the best thing for a new sort of politician. Her lack of interest in politics is her strongest virtue.

Of course, this is exactly the approach of Blair, Cameron and, post-2001, Charles Kennedy. Yet, unlike in the drama, it hasn’t inspired anyone. One hopes that during the rest of the series, the Annoying Mrs Pritchard will get her comeuppance, but somehow I suspect that even if the series does acknowledge some weaknesses in her approach, Mrs Pritchard herself will remain a sympathetic character.

It isn’t really fair to comment on something I haven’t seen, but that’s another issue that irritates me. The BBC’s website won’t tell me when the programme is going to be repeated, if at all. This is in common with most of the BBC’s original programming. Despite the fact the world has changed immeasurably since the BBC started in the 30s, they still slavishly follow the principle that their programming is all about the nation coming together at a specific date and time to watch the same TV. People frequently complain about there being too many repeats on TV, but in my experience the opposite is the case. Put simply, while the BBC chooses to repeat certain low grade pap that it can’t make money out of any other way ad infinitum (Dad’s Army, Two Pints of Vomit and a Packet of Genital Warts, etc.), most new programming is repeated as little as possible with the specific aim of maximising profit.

The truth is, most “quality” BBC programmes aren’t paid out of our license fee, but make a profit. They don’t even take on the whole risk themselves and almost all of it is a co-production between, for example, Discovery (most nature documentaries and Horizon), HBO (Rome) and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Doctor Who). This stuff they then go on to sell on DVD (the prices of which are kept ridiculously high compared to other DVDs), repeats channels such as UK Gold and of course on the global market. What you pay for out of your license fee is the uncommercial stuff, which with the exception of things such as educational programming and news, normally means low grade crap such as soap operas and reality TV. This sort of stuff would of course be perfectly commercial if it was paid for out by allowing adverts, but we are told that would damage the “quality” of shows like Animal Hospital and Eastenders.

I’m struggling, really struggling, to justify the license fee these days. All my leftish prejudices tell me that I should, but then I see how the BBC has distorted commercial television to the extent that all there is to watch after 9pm is wall-to-wall phone-in quiz shows and shopping channels and wonder if there isn’t, surely, a better way to ensure a high standard in public service television. No one would dream of trying to set up a UK version of HBO, precisely because of the BBC. Yet people are being put in prison on a daily basis for refusing to fund it. There’s something profoundly wrong going on.

For this reason, I welcome the fact that Blair and Brown are reportedly blocking the BBC’s request for a massive hike in the license fee, but I do feel we need a more radical long term solution. Yet if anything qualifies as a “third rail” issue in British politics, it is questioning the status quo over the BBC.

One of the truly awful things about conference this week was music used for the video photomontages - all three of them - that they insisted on playing before the leader’s speech, all three of which were to the tune of the most vein-opening soft rock I’ve ever come across. Personally, I’d never heard of the first piece they played, although it did sound suspiciously like the sort of thing to be found on the soundtrack to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (which I’m ashamed to admit to owning). The second piece however was much easier to place: it is the theme tune to Star Trek: Enterprise.

My understanding is that this music was selected by Ming’s image consultant Gavin Grant. The question one has to ask is, what next? I confidently predict that at the next conference, all MPs will be forced to wear Starfleet uniform, colour coded according to what policy team they are in. Evan Harris will of course be forced to wear a red shirt. It would be nice to think that our “Lib Dem lovelies” ([c] The Sun) will be wearing 1960’s style Star Trek uniform (i.e. miniskirts so small you need an electron microscope to detect them) but we simply can’t be that lucky. The Liberator crew will be forced to wear Klingon costumes.

More worrying still is what this says about the direction our foreign policy may be going in. Star Trek has always at least flirted with what we now call neoconservativism - in the Next Generation the Prime Directive was always name checked, but most episodes were focussed on how the Enterprise crew found ways to get around it. The original series didn’t bother with such niceties: “we come in peace (shoot to kill)!”.

But Enterprise was a different beast altogether. Very much a product of its era, Scott Bakula even looks like George Dubya Bush. The third series - during which I pretty much lost the will to live (or at least continue bothering with it) - was concerned with the Enterprise going off on a dangerous and uncertain military adventure to find weapons of mass destruction following from a transparently obvious 9/11 type incident. United Federation of Planets? Who needs it?

Before we go around embracing its theme tune, Gavin should note that it was possibly the most reviled aspect of a most reviled TV series, which ended in miserable failure only four series. The omens do not look good.