Or maybe they just got fed up with never qualifying for the final.

And character-driven it was. It’s typical, in science fiction TV, to look for a spectacular technological resolution to the plot, but Torchwood opted to fall back on the tried and tested ‘feed their own signal back to them, but amplified’ solution, a staple of the Star Trek franchise since Next Generation, if not earlier. Some people might have been let down by this, but the mundane nature of the solution (which had been properly set up – no deus ex machina this time) allowed the audience to concentrate on the terrible decision that Jack Harkness was forced to make: sacrificing his own grandson to save millions of children around the world.

Indeed, the theme for Harkness was one of sacrifice throughout. He compromised his integrity in 1965, and now he had to pay – first with the loss of Ianto, then with the loss of his grandson, and finally his rejection by his daughter. Little wonder that with all bar Gwen of the original Torchwood team dead Jack decided to head back out to the stars.

Ianto’s death was carefully underplayed. After the big send-off for Toshiko and Owen in season 2 this was probably wise – and anyway, the show’s not primarily about Ianto. We did, at least, get to see the Jack/Ianto relationship properly explored, without it being submerged in the frenetic pace of some of the older episodes.

Gwen (and Rhys and future baby) live to – well, what? Is the Torchwood Institute finished? We don’t know. But Gwen certainly grew as her role in the organisation developed, and she very effectively led the operation in Jack’s absence.

Everything pales into insignificance beside John Frobisher’s tragedy though. A career civil servant, he kept his head down, did his job, and saw off all the ambitious high-flyers to rise to the top of his profession. He had everything that he could have hoped for: a beautiful family, a nice home, and the prospect of retirement on a healthy pension. But the reward for his loyalty and success was to be cynically abused by the Prime Minister – to have his daughters sacrificed to the alien threat for nothing more than PR. No wonder that he opted to save the girls from the horror that he knew awaited them, shooting his entire family and then himself. And the greatest tragedy? If he had had a little less courage he and his family would have been saved.

Once again, I have to declare my admiration for Peter Capaldi’s performance. A BAFTA should follow, although as science fiction is frequently not taken seriously as drama he may miss out.

So what now for Torchwood? Jack’s gone, the Hub is a pile of rubble, and only Gwen remains – with other priorities. Will the show be reinvented or was that it’s swansong? My guess is that the BBC will look at the ratings and find a way to reboot the show. It certainly deserves it.

Has it worked? After three episodes of Torchwood: Children of Earth (and allowing for the possibility that it might all fall apart in the last two) the answer is ‘Yes’. We’re seeing a story develop slowly, with lots of time for character development and the raising of tension. The usual manic race to get to the end of the plot has been replaced by a complex web of interactions, and the result is a delight. I think I detect an element of Battlestar Galactica-style willingness to let the story tell itself, rather than being constricted by the episodic format, although it’s still a way short of the latter’s mastery of the process.

Some Russell T. Davis trademarks are in evidence: the presence of families to humanise the main characters; an ingenue (female and black); gay issues to the fore; black senior military officers; children; and people under the control of alien creatures. Some of these risk annoying the audience as unrealistic (if every top soldier is black, something much weirder than alien invasion has happened to the army), but it’s best to just skip over them and enjoy the story.

One particular delight is Peter Capaldi’s brilliant performance as civil servant John Frobisher. After his bravura display of foul-mouthed arrogance as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, the switch to the cautious, scared, amoral, buttoned-up family man who has to negotiate with the alien threat, issue assassination orders and worry about what’s happening to his children is sublime. Capaldi is so good it’s hard to believe that he’s the same actor.

The regular Torchwood cast also get the chance to spread their wings, with the treatment of Jack and Ianto’s relationship standing out. And the supporting cast are first rate.

If there’s a flaw, it lies in a lack of attention to detail at some points. Gwen and Rhys’s attempt to rescue Jack in Episode 2 was doomed, given that they were unaware that he was entombed in concrete. So the fortuitous arrival of Ianto with heavy machinery capable of carrying off the concrete sarcophagus, when he too had no idea of Jack’s predicament was a hard-to-ignore deus ex machina. And the fortunate availability of some super-high-tech contact lenses, as well as a high-bandwidth Internet connection in an abandoned factory, must be taken with rather more than a pinch of salt. But that’s pretty much the norm for Doctor Who and Torchwood.

The good heavily outweighs the bad, I’m glad to say. The new-style Torchwood stands head and shoulders ahead of its predecessors, and I’d be more than happy to see it continue in this fashion. Actually, two five-part stories per year would be ideal, but that might be asking too much.

I just hope that the resolution on Friday lives up to the excellent work so far.

“I will be watching this. It’s good to see that the future of British tennis is a Scot. Although he only gets called a Scot when he loses. He’s British when he is winning.”

The writer gives a Scottish town as his location, so I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this particular charge is being made by a man from north of the border with a chip on his shoulder. But the thing is – it’s not true.

Murray’s nationality doesn’t get mentioned all that often. And whether he’s referred to as a Brit or a Scot seems pretty random, and certainly isn’t associated with his results. Same with Chris Hoy. And oddly, also the case for English, Welsh and Irish sportsmen and women.

Looks like a kind of petty nationalism at work here. Maybe one or two people should think before they open their mouths.

Or not. What the two workers actually did was remove the broken slabs marked with a yellow cross and fill the empty space with black tarmac. Five more broken slabs, unmarked, remain in place.

I wish I could understand this, but the weather’s too hot and my mind can’t cope.

Billions of Argentinian ants now form a giant colony across the entire globe. They were transported from their native environment by Homo sapiens. Nice work humanity!

And maybe – just maybe – some of you dumb godbots out there might want to ponder on this. Ants are just as successful (probably more so) than humans. So are humans really special? Or is your god a giant ant?

When John Lennon was murdered, his records shot to the top of the charts. I wouldn’t have minded too much if they’d been any good, but his solo career was in the doldrums and Double Fantasy was full of tediously dull songs. But the man was dead, so the public turned off its critical faculties and bought whatever was available.

Elvis Presley got a similar bounce a few years earlier, but we were fortunate that (unlike Lennon) he didn’t have a new album out at the same time.

But in the Internet era, you don’t actually need any new material, and no one has to wait for their next trip to HMV to buy the music – by which time the fuss might have faded and common sense have had the chance to set in. After all, if you’ve spent 10, 15, 20 years not being prepared to spend money on someone’s music, why should that change just because the singer is dead? Did the music magically improve? Of course not.

No, when a purchase is only a click away the impulse to buy seems to be irresistible. Which presumably is why Michael Jackson’s albums (in various editions) occupy the top 14 places on Amazon UK’s sales chart less than 24 hours after his death.

The mischievous part of me almost hopes that this is all a ruse to help pay off some of Jackson’s debts, followed by a ‘miraculous’ recovery that generates even more publicity and cash. But this is undoubtedly the real deal, and goose that laid the golden egg is definitely dead. And lots of people will be left with CDs gathering dust after one or two plays, minor victims of their own inability to deal with the death of someone they never met.

Anyway – I sent them a frosty (but polite) email via their web site. If I get a reply I’ll post it.

Wimbledon – in which various undeserving British tennis players get given wild card entries to a Grand Slam tournament and mostly fail to get to Round 2. This year is no exception. Day 2 was a parade of futile pluck until Elena Baltacha found a way to beat a much higher ranked player as darkness fell.

And what did she do when she won? Dropped to her knees and celebrated as though she’d won the title!

Not  to be too critical of Baltacha, but that’s not really the right response to a first round win (well, it might be if you’ve just beaten Venus Williams). If you have serious ambitions, then you should be looking at getting to the second week at least. But Baltacha, in her own words, isn’t: ‘I will also get into the main draw in the US Open and I am not playing anything after this week’.

She (and every other Brit) should be thinking not about having a week off, but about winning the next match and finding a way into the second week. I suspect that this attitude is a big part of British tennis’s problem, and the gifting of wild card places only encourages it. So wild cards only for rising talents please – serial failures need not apply.