… Hello Torchwood Series Two!

You must have been living in a self-sufficient box since about mid-2003 to have avoided the BBC’s incessant trailers for Torchwood’s return. But with cult favourite James Marsters coming aboard, can it make the show half-decent?

The Who-iverse doesn’t have good form with me. Reviewing the last series of Doctor Who got me so annoyed with the programme that I vowed never to watch it again. But Torchwood has the trump card over me that I found the first series both ridiculous and tepid at the same time, so I can’t turn against it so much as simply continue a curmudgeonly grump about the whole affair.

We can perhaps hold some hope about the fact it has made the jump to BBC Two from the digital wilds. Let’s make clear first off that this had more to do with the fact that Beeb Two got fed up with co-funding programmes that Beebs Three and Four got to call their own, rather than Torchwood making the switch out of any virtue in its own right. But, fingers crossed, we might see a jump in quality by being a terrestrial programme.

So what can we hope to spot in the new series? Here are my biggest hopes:

– To promote his stadium tour, John Barrowman introduces a weekly musical number into the show.

– Awkward, derivative plots from rubbish monsters from the last series of Doctor Who (remember, this was a programme whose first series finale was a more rubbish version of Who’s Satan, and he was twaddle to begin with). So expect Rachnos babies, or perhaps see those rubbish pig-slaves from the Daleks in New York getting their own two-parter.

– Whatever monsters are introduced, more Angel-style attempts to show some kind of demon underworld exists in Cardiff, rather than just investigating weird shizzle happening like you were supposed to be about in the first place.

– Lots of BLOOD and SWEARING and MILD SEX because Torchwood is for grown-ups! Yeah! But this is still the BBC, so don’t expect up-to-the-elbow fisting or owt.

– All the team bar Captain Jack doing naff all of any use. Apart from probably BLEEDING and SWEARING and MILD SEXING.

– Extensive abuse of Cardiff’s layout, where they will enter one part of the city and emerge from another, just to mess with the minds of the locals (see also: psychopsychogeography). This is a reminder to the writers that I used to live in Cardiff, so don’t bother with any geography jiggery pokery, as I will be all over it like hot fudge sauce.

– Talking of Cardiff, probably fewer aerial shots of the city, because everyone took the mick out of it the first time around. Actually I’ll declare an amnesty to never use the ‘doesn’t it look like CSI:Cardiff’ joke that everyone used first time around. Even though it was quite funny.

– Loud laughter through the nation’s front rooms at the idea that Eve Myles is supposed to be somehow attractive. Look, Wales, I know you are desperate to force your own kind on the rest of the world all the time. But we can all see she’s a bit hairy, so please knock that one on the head.

Tune back tomorrow for the first of the reviews. I promise I’ll be nice about it. Well, that’s not true; but I promise I’ll watch it. Or at the very least, get the gist of it off of the internet before writing 600 generic words on sci-fi gays.