Looking at an ugly future

TVReview: Oh whoops, it's the end of the world as we know it. In the next 20 years or so, it seems, we are facing not only denuded polar ice-caps, ravaged coastlines, the mass migration of entire populations and our SSIA-funded kitchen extensions bathing in pools of silt, but also, according to Horizon: Human v2.0, we are going to have to share our sorry planet with "artilects".

Artilects are artificial intellects (no, not the kind you used to meet in the Bailey on a Friday night, more the nanotech/robot variety that could end up swatting the human race like an irritating fly with a mere flick of one of its man-made robotic arms). Now for the science, as they say (bearing in mind that this interpretation of the facts comes from someone unable to wire a plug): robotic artificial intelligence, according to Horizon's contributors, is evolving about a million times faster than human intelligence. It is predicted by some in the scientific community that machines will become smarter than us sometime this century - and they're not talking about computers with advanced spell-checks that can also whip up an omelette, they're talking about computers with trillions upon trillions of times more brain capacity than us mere biological entities.

"God-building", they call it, and these nano-deities need data, and that data has to come from decoding the human brain. From remote-controlled rats, electrodes in their brains, dashing around a laboratory in search of hits to their pleasure centres, to massive computer banks slowly mapping our neurological landscape, scientists are in the process of making a computer that will one day store our memories and reconstruct our dreams.

Horizon, for a non-scientific sci-fi virgin like me, made for a scary bedtime story. Especially terrifying (to my Luddite outlook) is the prospect of somehow storing one's brain functions, memory and imagination in some mechanical dish or robotic body in order to achieve some kind of tortuous immortality. In a brave new world, a world that may see our grandchildren interface with "human version 2.0", however, maybe we should get used to the idea that one day our mathematically equated selves, transformed into reconstituted neurons, could be implanted in our progeny's ears, reminding them to take their wetsuits to the newly flooded park.

Perish the thought.

"Can you imagine CSI in Cardiff? We'd be measuring the velocity of a kebab." Russell T Davies's zany, absurd and mildly hallucinogenic post-watershed sci-fi adventure series was unveiled on BBC this week. The much-anticipated anagrammatic spin-off from Davies's successful stint writing Doctor Who, Torchwood follows a team of renegade alien investigators working out of a Frankenstein-esque basement beneath Cardiff's Millennium Centre. Davies throws a great party and his flat-nosed, grizzly, carnivorous aliens - despite, or perhaps because of, their propensity to create mayhem in Wales of all places (time/space rift running through Cardiff, don't you know? Alien flotsam and jetsam all over the gaff) - are far more fun than the po-faced, metallic demi-gods on Horizon.

In the opening episode, a young beat copper, Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), happens upon the Torchwood team - led by the mysterious, apparently immortal and boyishly bonny Capt Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) - as they are reincarnating a corpse. Before you can say "shut that pterodactyl up, there are weevils in the sewers", Gwen is part of the team, a position that necessitates snogging a teenage girl prisoner who happens to be hosting a parasitic aphrodisiacal sperm-vaporising alien in her gut. This is Queer as Folk meets B-movie zombie-ville, and Davies, freed from the constraints of homemade Daleks and the sensibilities of the under-eights, is able to indulge his more playful instincts. But for all the snappy dialogue, great blood-bursting prosthetics and the usual cat-and-mouse "will she won't she sleep with her attractive and ambisexual new boss", this is pretty shallow stuff that will surely wear a little thin over the course of its 13 episodes.

It's funny though. "He just came and went," remarked Capt Jack, fingering the powdered remains of the sexual ecstasy-craving alien's latest victim.

Doubtless Torchwood will follow the same trajectory, eventually.

"EVIL CAN BE a spiritual experience too," said a balding and emphysemic Myra Hindley, compellingly portrayed by Samantha Morton to a yellowing and frail Lord Longford (Jim Broadbent), a man at the end of his singularly driven life, still clinging to a belief in the redemptive power of repentance.

Challenging and relentless, Longford, the second of two Channel 4 dramas to mark the 40th anniversary of the trial of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, was about as far from rubber aliens as one could get this week. Lord Longford, committed Christian and tireless prison visitor from the 1930s until his death in 2001, whose work will forever be synonymous with his campaign to have Hindley paroled, was played with aching credulity by the superb Broadbent, a performance the calibre of which I have not seen equalled in this television year.

By examining our own notional humanity in the light of horrific cruelty, by exploring our sense of outrage and our instinct for revenge, the drama brilliantly captured the complexity of Longford, a man who swam against the tide of public opinion. Forgiveness, a dusty old concept in our bellicose age, was the cornerstone of Longford's faith. Egotistical, sensitive, ridiculed for his creed that one should love the sinner but hate the sin, he ultimately found his entire career overshadowed by his relationship with Hindley.

Using archive footage of the search for bodies on Saddleworth Moor, and including a dramatic recreation of the tape which recorded the torture and death of one of Hindley and Brady's victims, Longford never allowed the viewer to forget what Hindley was imprisoned for, but did pose the question why, when male child murderers were entitled to apply for parole, that possibility was never open to Hindley.

"Stay clear of Myra, she will destroy you," said a mesmeric and demonic Ian Brady, powerfully played by Andy Serkis, to Longford, describing his former lover as an hysteric, capable of reflecting back to others what they most wanted to see. For Longford, she could be a sinner in search of repentance; for Brady, a brutal, sadistic and remorseless killer.

Difficult, depressing but intriguing,this story of wasted, sorrowful lives was unmissable viewing.

IF I WAS an artilect (keep up, you biological dinosaurs at the back), I would instantly "exterminate, exterminate" The Ex-Files (although I would spare the woeful show's ballsy presenter, Lucy Kennedy). The dating game show is in its second series and the unchanged format sees a contestant go for a date and dinner with three exes (not simultaneously, you understand, which would be much more fun) and then decide which one to invite on vacation. The chosen ex can decide either to go on the holiday or to pick up three grand, in which case the woebegone contestant is left looking, as this week's victim so aptly put it, "like a spoon".

This week's "spoon" was yet another hulk of twentysomething male- chromosome mediocrity, going through the asinine motions with a trio of largely vacant former girlfriends (the last of whom, the one with shinier hair and more savvy, departed with the cash).

"Anyone who is a girl, I like," he helpfully told us before belching his way through dinner in the lovely and utterly wasted Tinakilly House. "I burp so badly all the time," he later confided.

The problem with the show - which Kennedy, like a younger, funnier and more dynamic Davina McCall, almost saves from oblivion - is that the participants have as much life experience as a mayfly. Their significant exes amount to someone they snogged on the basketball court or scored with as a result of half a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a squeeze of cocoa-butter-flavoured after-sun on the beaches of Ayia Napa. In these glory days of the pre-nup, the messy divorce, the credit card and the Tír na nÓg scalpel, and before we all get annihilated by a bloody super- robot, why not bring some grown-ups out to play? Really, we could do with a laugh.