Daily Archives: Saturday, 4th November 2006
There’s no way out!
Acording to a BBC News report, a roundabout in Coventry has been transformed into one of the inner circles of Dante’s Inferno. Or the Hotel California, perhaps. Because once anyone drives onto the thing, signs forbid them from leaving…
It seems that when traffic lights were added, helpful “no left turn” signs were attached to them pointing out that attempting to leave by an entry road would be a wee bit naughty, not to mention dangerous. So far, so normal. But in an unusual twist, the signs are also attached to all the exit roads, meaning that to leave the roundabout, drivers have to ignore a road sign, which is ever so slightly illegal. The local council’s statement on the matter is a masterpiece in the art of not saying “oops”:
The current advice on the installation of traffic signals at roundabouts does suggest that where the entry and exits are separate that No Left Turn signs are installed to advise drivers not to drive down the entry arm of the roundabout, however the advice is not always relevant.
In response to the concerns that have been raised, the city council is proposing to cover the signs in the short term and eventually remove them.
I think that’s officialese for:
We’re morons. We put the signs in the wrong place. We’re going to sort it out as soon as we run out of excuses for not doing it.
Torchwood – Ghost Machine
The third episode of Torchwood started with Gwen and Owen chasing a suspect through the night streets of Cardiff. They’re being guided from HQ by Toshiko, whose scanners can detect alien technology[1]. The suspect just gets away from Gwen at the station, but Gwen’s left holding his jacket which contains the alien device.
Almost unconsciously, Gwen presses a button on the device, and everything around her changes. All the people have gone. Then a small figure appears from the station entrance – a young boy who looks suspiciously like a World War II evacuee. Gwen seems to hear his thoughts and feel his fear. She comes back to reality just as Owen and Jack arrive.
The team identify the boy from his name tag – he’s alive and well and living in Cardiff. He really was that scared little boy…
Later, Owen has a more sinister experience with the device, where he sees a teenage girl being terrorised by a young man with a knife. He feels her terror. Later, they find out the girl was raped and murdered, and that nobody was ever charged with the crime. Owen, acting without authority tracks down the man and finds Ed Morgan, who’s a paranoid old man (played by Gareth Thomas – yes, Blake from Blakes Seven!).
When it turns out that there is another part of the device, things start to get a lot nastier. When she holds the joined device, Gwen sees a vision of the future: her future. She sees herself with blood dripping from her hands.
It all comes to a suitable conclusion. And for the geek audience, there is a delicious moment, as Gareth Thomas’s last words are
I knew you’d come for me
which might be familiar to Blakes Seven fans. 
Quite apart from the usual mix of thrills, technobabble and flirting, there was actually a good solid idea at the heart of this story. The device, which like so much else has dropped through the temporal rift that runs through Cardiff[2], seems to have a benign purpose – some sort of communicator, translating the energy of emotion into a signal. But when humans got hold of it, it had lethal results. Now this is the kind of thing that pops up in actual written sf – I was reminded of Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which takes that concept a lot further – but to see it being handled on TV makes a wee bit of a change.
So, three episodes in and it’s still both thumbs up for Torchwood. And tomorrow night’s episode looks like being even more fun. For an arbitrarily scary value of “fun”, that is…
[1] Whether this is alien technology in general, or specific kinds of technology remains to be seen 
[2] This accounts for a lot, actually 
