'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

There seems to have been a certain amount of point-missing as regards the excellent first episode of Ashes to Ashes. Even the estimable freakytigger seems to take at face value Alex Drake's assumption that it's all happening in her own comatose brain - but if she's just creating this from her own reading of Sam Tyler's file, then she wouldn't know - as we do, as Ray tells her - that Sam went back. All the evidence suggests that Gene Hunt's world is real (for a given value of the word) and persistent. And as for the fears that it will be impossible to follow through the potential weirdness of the story on a prime time, mainstream show - bear in mind that the moral of the final Life on Mars was it is better to commit suicide than live in the modern world. I had feared a lame retread with more sexual tension; instead, they seem to be making exactly the sequel they needed to make if it was to be any more than a mere franchise-stretcher. And, one which gives them a perfect excuse to go crazily OTT because we no longer need to even slightly believe this might be the 'real' version of the past era rather than some kind of policeman's Valhalla in period dress.

Elsewhere on the Beeb, Torchwood seems to be settling in to good episode/bad episode alternation this series. After an excellent episode about From Hell-style ghosts and timeslips, whose opening made me take it for the PJ Hammond contribution (who knew Helen Raynor had this in her after the New York Dalek atrocity and 'Ghost Machine', the episode so bad it almost made me drop Torchwood?), we get 'Meat'. There's a good idea at the heart of it, but it's just used as the kernel for a big frothy mass of human interest. Here's the problem with 'human interest': humans aren't very interesting. People who don't get that can sod off and watch the soaps. The Doctor is more interesting than his companions. Jack Harkness is more interesting than Gwen. But Hell, even Gwen is more interesting than her boring bloody fiance. I refuse even to use the character's name, he doesn't deserve it - but the one decent storyline to do with him was the one where Bilis Manger killed him. Now, if someone else could do the job - and properly this time - I'd be much obliged. Or Bilis could do it himself; I thought they'd maybe blown a good recurring villain too soon at the first season's end, but one of the new books, The Twilight Streets, brings him back and makes clear that he's still a viable proposition. It's a pretty good book in general; bit slashy in places, and the ending makes no sense, but even then I suspect it's the sort of nonsense which would pass fine were it being shouted on screen, rather than down on the page in black and white. And it has lots of pleasingly, infuriatingly enigmatic hints about past teams, about Archie in Glasgow and Torchwood Four, and about Jack's mysterious past (and future?). And yes, OK, it has some mentions of Gwen's idiot fiance, but he's never allowed to unbalance the story into tedious domesticity. Hell, even ITV's answer to Torchwood, the now rather patchy Primeval, gets this bit right - whenever they have a love story it gets 'Sound of Thunder'd out of the timeline, or the outsider who supposedly fancies one of the team turns out to be an evil spy, and then we get back to a very wet Hannah S Club kicking a mutant seal's face off.
While we're around the Doctor Who universe - I've often wondered if I'm being unfair when I unfavourably compare respectable literary authors to the better Who writers, particularly Lance Parkin. After all, it's not like-for-like; Parkin has an advantage just from the subject matter. Well, the Guardian helpfully published a story by the award-winning AL Kennedy whose emotional core is some stuff about Doctor Who. So now I can compare fairly, and confirm that the feted Kennedy would make a passable third-tier Doctor Who writer.