Tuesday 7 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two

Treason on Tuesday

Unearthly Children, Episode 2
Sunday 22 March 2026

The 456 said they’d drop round some time this evening, so while they wait, Simon and Nathan chat with Johnny Spandrell and Melvin Peña about villains, childlessness, the Home Office onboarding process, how great Eve Myles is, and whether Torchwood really is appropriate viewing for grownups.

Notes and links

The Big Finish Torchwood range started in 2015 with Torchwood: The Conspiracy, and it will conclude in May 2026 with its 100th monthly release, Joe Lidster’s Fare Well.

The latest iteration of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, is also concerned acout children and the world that we have created for them to grow up in. You can hear Joe and Nathan discussing the pilot on Untitled Star Trek Project Episode 180.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, Earth receives an alien message containing 30,000 pages of schematics for a Machine which can transport people across the galaxy. In Children of Earth a far more basic group of aliens order us to build a tank.

Just over a week before Children of Earth was broadcast, John Barrowman complained in the paper that Torchwood had been punished for its success by being given a reduced episode order.

Simon mentions the TV event miniseries of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these is probably Roots (1977), a generational story about an enslaved man, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) who is kidnapped from West Africa. Over eight consecutive nights, we follow his family history until his descendants are liberated after the Civil War. We also mention V (1983), in which lizard aliens camply invade and occupy Earth over two consecutive nights, and The Thorn Birds (1983), in which over four consecutive nights, Richard Chamberlain plays a heterosexual Australian priest with varying results; Bryan Brown also features, playing his customary block of wood.

In May 2021, John Barrowman’s behaviour on the set of both Doctor Who and Torchwood came into question after Noel Clarke was accused by several people of bullying and sexual harassment on set. Barrowman had previously apologised in 2008 for inappropriate behaviour during a live broadcast on BBC Radio 1.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore, Melvin is @melvinpena and Johnny is @johnnyspandrell. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll drive up to your house in a forklift and make off with your gazebo.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

The lads at The Three-Handed Game have just released their latest episode — the first part of an interview with prolific Australian actor Annette Andre, who plays Judy in an episode of The Avengers called Mandrake and Suzy Miller in an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards. She had a massive career in British TV throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. You might know her from her role as Jeannie Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but she appears in all of our favourites — The Saint, The Prisoner, The Persuaders! and The Return of the Saint. (And, for us Australians, Taurus Rising, Cop Shop and Prisoner.)

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford said farewell to a surprisingly complex and beautiful kids’ show iteration of Star Trek — Star Trek: Prodigy, whose two-part finale Ouroboros aired in 2024 and which vanished from streaming just a year or so later.