Last week I watched a 5 episode BBC mini-series, Torchwood. It was a crushing bore but it had little competition in this period of summer reruns and low budget off season fare. There were multiple showings per day and repeats of earlier days as well so it didn't take much effort to see all of the episodes, making the mild interest in seeing what happens next sufficient.

The intent of the series - it's message - seemed to be faint praise for the British bureaucracy as being marginally better than British politicians, though none were very admirable. The plot was dreary, the dialog idiotic, and the characters were unlikeable.

It would have been less tedious had it been a normal made-for-TV movie. Puffing it up to run for 3 times as long and splitting it into 5 segments made no cinema sense, but it may be explained as a production by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats, making tediousness a virtue. Gray tedium is their meat.

When it was over I finally grasped that it was a remake of the 1996 comedy Mars Attacks but played as a tragedy - implacable, omnipotent, murderous aliens attack but are defeated in the end by the noises of innocents which make the aliens' heads explode. It was better as a comedy.