New Torchwood looks terrible - shock! You can't and shouldn't judge anything before you've seen it. All the same, the list of wrong is epic and horrible.

Everyone seems to be nitpicking: the Old Guard are complaining they're just like Owen and Tosh, Racefailers are marvelling that there are only two races - caucasian, and "non caucasian", bastions of good taste wondering whether Oswald The Paedophile is really a good idea

For my part, I'm more annoyed that one of Esther's defining characteristics is that she's deeply and secretly in love with Rex. Problems:

• No men and women are ever just friends ever!
  
• Rex Matheson is so thrilling and funny - how could anyone resist!
  
• That's Esther's only personality trait!
  
• Straight people? In Torchwood?!
• Have we really never seen a buddy procedural drama before with the two leads in love? (i.e. X-files, Fringe, Bones, Ashes to Ashes, Torchwood S1, Dempsey & Makepeace, Alias, Johnathan Creek...Supernatural :p)

But that's not to say that it can't work. If anything, my cynicism is rooted in how much I disliked Torchwood pre-Children of Earth. I've rewatched some recently and softened a bit - it's not uniformly terrible - but still, to my mind, crude and obvious.

Of course, in my head the greatest police buddy drama that never existed is "McGoohan and Darrow Investigate...". Patrick McGoohan is older, world-weary and sarcastic - Paul Darrow is charming, reckless and sarcastic. They fight crime. They demolish crims with their cut-glass accents, they wither would-be mob bosses with their irrepressable Britishness, they devastate women with their wit - would have been made in the 70s, so it could have been outrageously mysoginistic and everything. What's not to like?



I have discovered The Caretaker. It's all over the internet, legally, so there's no excuse for you not to look him up. His first album was aptly entitled "Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom" - nowadays, he's interested in amnesia. The result is swirly, creepy music-of-the-lost that adequately fufils my love of old music boxes and my sense of Haunted Mansion loss without scaring me too badly (this song, which I adore, has prevented me from sleeping)

I can't get enough of it - "Von Restorff Experiment" is my new favourite, possibly because the song it rehacks is one I already enjoy. One of my chief motivators in seeing movies is, believe it or not, music - I probably go for musicians I enjoy over actors. Turns out the Caretaker was sparked by The Shining. Lol....that movie has already given me nightmares, and I haven't even seen it - I've promised myself not to. Something about Stephen King's imagery just sparks off my terror circuits quicker than anything. Still, now I've got this itch to see it, a mad idea I really shouldn't act on. Silly me...

Anyone who lives in the world should bookmark this site: http://contexts.org/socimages/
Unlike most websites I like, it updates as frequently as I check it - almost daily - and effectively concerns everyday imagery which reinforces stereotypes. If you are a person - and if you're reading my blog, then you probably are, then you'll find something to entertain you on Sociological Images.