Dr Who Spin-off??

The BBC has commissioned the Doctor Who scriptwriter Russell T Davies to make an adult post-watershed spin-off of its most famous sci-fi show.

The new programme will be called Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who) and will follow a crack team investigating alien activities and crime in modern-day Britain.

It will feature in its starring role John Barrowman, who played Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and who will play the same character in Torchwood.

Like the latest version of Doctor Who, which the BBC successfully relaunched this year, Torchwood will be based in Cardiff. Davies, who has just begun writing Torchwood, said the new programme would be aimed at adult audiences and would "have its own, unique identity". He said: "Torchwood will be a dark, clever, wild, sexy, British crime/sci-fi paranoid thriller cop show with a sense of humour - the X Files meets This Life," the latter a reference to the groundbreaking Nineties BBC drama about a group of young lawyers in Bristol.

Torchwood will be shown next summer on BBC3 in 13 episodes, each lasting 45 minutes. Alert viewers of the forthcoming Doctor Who Christmas special will hear a reference to the Torchwood unit and further mentions will be made in the new series in the spring.

Stuart Murphy, the controller of BBC3, described Davies as an "absolute genius" and described Torchwood as "a massive coup".

He said: "We had never done sci fi before and it is a genre which people treat in a certain way. You look at what he has done with Dr Who and we said to Russell what would you do with a post-watershed sci fi?"

Mr Murphy said he hoped that Davies...

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I have only one question, what the heck is "post-watershed" scifi?

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I have only one question, what the heck is "post-watershed" scifi?

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I guess it would be similar to stuff that's shown on cable channels (like HBO I think?). Stuff like Jeremiah or Odyssey 5, which had lots of gratuitous swearing and topless ladies.



Not quite as overt / gratuitous as that, perhaps, but yeah - swearing/sex/drug use/other adult themes, I'd guess.

VB

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In English, the noun shed is the English equivalent of the German scheide, both of which have come down to us from the same Old German root. The English noun derives from the verb to shed. It’s an old word for a division, split or separation—a shed could be a hair parting, for example, and could also be used for a ridge of land separating two areas of lower country, a divide. (These days a shed is usually a simple building for shelter or storage; this is an altered form of shade, and so has no link to this other sense of the word.)

In North America, the word watershed often means not the dividing line, but the river catchment areas on either side of the ridge, the whole land area that drains into a particular river. How the sense shifted isn’t clear. It came into use only around the 1870s, and may have been a misunderstanding.

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