More about the film on their own website or Facebook – and don’t forget to tell your friends…

Russell T. Davies’ response to them?: “If you can’t handle drama you shouldn’t watch it. Find something else. Go look at poetry. Poetry’s wonderful.” – and recommends they all go off and watch Supernatural instead.

Bless him. His excellent book/collection of emails The Writer’s Tale revealed a self-doubting writer coupled with bouts of intense confidence – like all writers – but it’s moments like this that just want to make me sit back and applaud.

The best quote I saw was when someone Twittered James to ask that he walk into the production offices and shoot the executive producer. Fan-icide, you might say.

So I wrote a short 400-word article about it for Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine – reproduced here for your slight enjoyment…

An article I wrote for Ariel

Of course, extreme acts of fandom stupidity and inaneness are not restricted to Torchwood fans, oh no… read an earlier post and the priceless comment…

Some of the shots did manage to make Cardiff look glorious and cinematic, particularly the sweeping helicopter shot of Captain Jack – so good they kept using it over and over again. Apart from anything else, what on earth *would* he be doing on the roof?

The production team also managed the neat trick of making me look at certain less salubrious parts of Cardiff and go “oooh, that looks pretty” in a way I never thought when walking back at midnight. Must walk around Cardiff more often the next time I pop down there.

The plot itself was fairly formulaic and dull – as inevitably any first episoder would be – but the story actually went in a different way to the way I thought, and had me almost at the edge of my seat by the end.

But oh dear, oh dear, oh dear … spoilers ahead

Now, I’m hardly a prude but did there have to be so many references to humans driven beyond rational thinking by sex?

If an alien device did exist that drove humans horny to the point of distraction, you couldn’t use it in a bar because you’d be shagging away on the bar before you got a chance to do anything. And making your proper first episode (ie all introductions done) a remake of Species makes it more like adolescent sci-fi drama than adult sci-fi drama. Although I suppose it gets the viewers, and not even Star Trek has been immune from this particular temptation.

Also, I hate to be uber-sensitive towards Oriental stereotypes but in a progressive show which has a bisexual leading man, a bisexual assistant and a Welsh policewoman with freckles, did the sole Japanese cast member have to take home the one geeky alien device? Forget the resurrection glove or the horny spray, she’ll take home the speed-reading device. That’s original.

But kudos to the script for not having Gwen blunder into Torchwood, and for the surprising ending. It does warrant further watching…

Spoilers live beyond here…

However, while it was a quietly impressive episode with things coming together in a sensible manner, I hated the end. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

The exposition-heavy way of introducing the whole Torchwood idea just smacked of incredibly bad script-writing. Which is one hell of a shame since the rest of the episode had fantastic elements, and was written fantastically well. But I suppose there’s no other way of introducing the Torchwood concept.

Rose and the Doctor also seem incredibly arrogant this time around. Banishment from the British Empire? Not a problem. Who cares? Apparently this may come round to bite them on the proverbial – I hope so.

What I want to know is … does Queen Vic have that werewolf alien gene? Is this a plot strand to be left for later on?

Bloody hell. Sounds like an X-Files set in modern-day Cardiff starring Captain Jack in a quasi renegade UNIT-type organisation investigating alien goings-on in Cardiff. Which seems strange since the last time we saw him, he was trapped on an Earth-bound space station in 200,000.

Still, if Cardiff is anything to go by, there’s plenty of material for him to work on!