Jane Espenson on Torchwood: Miracle Day
Post categories: Television
| 15:33 UK time, Thursday, 25 August 2011
Torchwood may have recently got the Hollywood treatment, with the series partly filmed and set in both America and Wales. Yet the series retains an element of its Welshness, due partly to the character of Gwen Cooper, played by the brilliant Eve Myles.
Jane Espenson is a writer on Torchwood, who has also written for shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Firefly, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones.
Torchwood's Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer), Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins), Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) and Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman)
She's written a guest post over on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã TV blog, in which she describes how getting the script right for Gwen was a challenge:
"Writing Gwen was particularly challenging, of course, because of the Welsh phrasing and syntax.
"I didn't do it very well, I think, in the first script where I wrote dialogue for her, but Russell [T Davies] fixed it, and after that I caught on.
"I loved writing for her so much. Through my eyes, she is very exotic."
Read the rest of the article on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã TV blog and watch episode seven of Torchwood: Miracle Day tonight at 9pm on Ö÷²¥´óÐã One. If you've missed any of the series so far, catch up on Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer.
Comment number 1.
At 29th Aug 2011, poshBrittain wrote:Now I’m 75 I’ll readily admit to having old-fashioned taste and values. I’m old enough to recall movie censor’s strict limits measured in seconds on the length of a screened kiss, and anything more intimate than a kiss was simply implied leaving it to the imagination of the audience; and yet somehow we cinema audiences of yester-year survived to enjoy the films.
Despite so much time given over to rescuing our Torchwood heroine’s family; fading the planet-wide miracle scenario well into the background, I was cheerfully enjoying the current Torchwood series until its excitement was interrupted and spoilt for me by what used to be called pornography. This took the form of a seemingly endless and irrelevant to the storyline, pornographic display acted out by a naked Mr Barrowman and another male actor. Unfortunately Ö÷²¥´óÐã in your search for realism everything that is in real life normally done in private by consenting adults apparently has to be displayed in nauseous detail before the viewers, as though you believe the viewers of today completely lack imagination.
Mr Barrowman is a fine actor and much admired entertainer who surely doesn’t need to be required to cause embarrassment to your viewers by being called upon to perform in this way?
PoshBrittain
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