Tone’s
nnno’drunk…honesht. S’just…just…Thing.
Alcohol, like
fire, is a good servant, and merciless evil bastard of a master. It can help
you shut out the voice of insecurity in your head, it can lower your
inhibitions, it can make the unthinkable feel like the easiest thing in the
world. And it can steal away your borderlines, can turn you inside out, can
make that voice come roaring back, and out, and take everybody down with you.
Alcohol is
powerful, for good and for ill.
In Torchwood
– Smashed, many of the characters, and most especially Gwen Cooper, played
by Eve Myles, spend the majority of the run-time getting increasingly drunk.
Hammered. Plastered. Shitfaced. Smashed.
As a dramatic
exercise, that sounds rather like fun. But it’s the reasons…ohhh the
reasons…behind the increasing intoxication that give Smashed both its
social and political currency and the vein of darkness running right through
the centre of the funny drunk people.
Glynteg was a
town once. A community. But its heart, its soul, its reason for being and its
ability to function as a town has been stripped. Sliced. Peeled away, layer of
funding cut by layer of business closure, until Glynteg is little more than a
smudge on the map where a town used to be, and where those who can’t afford to
go anywhere else live.
Then the
frackers came. Drillpak came.
There were
refused permission to actively frack in Glynteg, but using the defunct old
refinery as a way to sluice off fracking water…surely no-one could object to
that?
Except things
are not right in Glynteg. People are oddly ill. People who’ve drunk the water
out of their own taps.
Once.
Just once.
People hear a
voice in their head, a thirsty, dark, insistence voice. And then they give in.
Or, if they
want to survive, they drink. Alcohol – when the water of Glynteg gets into your
system, you drink, or you’re done. And once you’ve begun, you have to keep
going. Once you’re drunk, you have to stay drunk, to keep the voice, and
the pain, and the change at bay.
The thing about
a James Goss script is he’s never afraid to pick elements of genuine science
and smash them together to make something new and terrifying. The reason behind
the Glynteg terror is part-fracking, part-something-else-in-the-news that
locates this story in a very modernistic era of Torchwood. What’s more, Gwen’s
being there at all, and the reason she’s investigating Drillpak is not classic
Torchwood, but rebuilding, desperate, clawing-back-from-the-brink Torchwood –
it’s a job done for the money, rather than because of the fear of alien
intervention. It’s Drillpak who are paying her to investigate the complaints of
the locals, to see what, if anything, needs to be done.
Gwen does encounter
some fairly classic enviro-disaster tropes though: a protestor who refuses to
move on and give up, Martyn (played by Omar Austin), who becomes her companion
on this adventure despite having no head for alcohol himself; obstreperous
locals who absolutely don’t have pitchforks or dire warnings about going up to
the castle, but who nevertheless add a chorus of dark foreboding to the piece;
and a smooth site manager whose reassurances are a little too slick for
comfort.
What’s
happening to the sluice-water at Glynteg? Mmmm, that would not only be telling,
it would be to rob you of the increasing heartbeat-throb of genuine fear that
invests the piece. Ultimately though, the story becomes a battle between the
ever-increasingly intoxicated Gwen, who gets louder and less coherent as she
goes on, and both the forces of the underground Other and those on the surface
who’ve succumbed to them, as well as one particular person who knows more about
what’s going on than they initially admit.
Gwen Cooper’s a
Welsh Valleys girl – she can hold her drink. But how much, and how long, before
her preventative drunkenness overwhelms her ability to save the world?
Smashed is absolutely an odd idea for a story,
but some solid performances from the principle actors, (it’s worth listening
out for Omar Austin here, he gives good companion and never falls into the
inherent plot-serving traps of such a role), as well as some truly unnerving
sound design, help turn what must have been either a hellishly complex or a
hellishly freewheeling script into something that pulses with human realism and
a creepy sense of increasing fear as control over events slips away beneath a
fog of alcohol.
Give Smashed
a listen – as Gwen says, ‘It’s like a Saturday night in Neath out there.’
Which, for the non-Welsh among us, means it’s wild, dangerous, absolutely off
its face and not without the imminent threat of danger – but fantastic fun into
the bargain.
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