10 Shows That Prove BBC Three's Cancellation Is Actually A Good Thing

8. Torchwood (2006)

Torchwood wasn€™t just a Doctor Who spin-off that originally aired on BBC Three. It was very much BBC Three€™s idea of what Doctor Who should be. So instead of a largely sexless space Jehovah travelling through the fifth dimension, we had a team of generically troubled sex-bunnies investigating mildly weird things in Cardiff City Centre. In this sense, Torchwood actually had more in common with Snog Marry Avoid than the children€™s own show that adults love. In this sense, it was also terrible. The problem was that creator Russell T Davies assumed an adult version of Doctor Who meant gratuitous sex scenes and€well, more gratuitous sex scenes. Many an episode was disrupted by a pointless hook-up between protagonist Captain Jack and the Welsh one/the speccy one/the other Welsh one/the wonky mouthed one/the alien of the week (mix and match until credibility is broken). Bracing fare for a thirteen year old boy whose idea of raunch was a JPG of Jessica Alba€™s head teetering precariously atop some porno hardbody. For the rest of us, it felt like Davies was clumsily inserting naughty bits into otherwise generic, b-pile Who scripts. The move to primetime BBC One allowed RTD to nail the concept, and the six part mini-series Children of Earth felt like a properly adult take on Doctor Who€™s themes. BBC Three€™s genre output also improved immeasurably, although the sight of panto icon John Barrowman grunting his way through endless quickies didn€™t exactly set the bar high.