As I type this, we are about 24 hours away from the first run of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, this is a 27 kilometer high-energy particle accelerator designed to send protons whizzing around at close to the speed of light, so that they smash into one another and the resulting bits which fly out can be recorded and identified. It is searching for an elusive, fundamental particle known as the Higgs boson. The project was begun ten years ago and has cost many millions of euros.

Many commentators have remarked that this is an awfully expensive and lengthy method of finding a particle. But having spent many, many hours trying to locate my front door keys, I can sympathise with the LHC approach. I’ve probably spent almost as long trying to train my dog to find the TV remote, only to discover that it has disappeared down the back of the sofa (the remote, not the dog). That’s the trouble with theoretical particles - they’re never where you left them.

The other gripe about the LHC is that there is a tiny theoretical risk that it could spontaneously create a black hole which would gobble up the Earth and surrounding solar system. There have even been death threats to the scientists and litigation to try to prevent the LHC firing up. Clearly the end of the world would not be a good thing but we are faced with a more immediate danger. As part of the BBC’s day-long coverage on R4, a new menace comes over the horizon. Torchwood. Not content with this programme swamping the TV (the adverts for each new series seem to start three months in advance) is has now lurched onto the radio. This is a worrying development. Soon there will be no escaping it.

Torchwood was one of those series which sounded like a really good idea before you saw it. A spin-off from Dr Who, featuring the charismatic Captain Jack and a team who hunt down aliens and weird phenomena. Science fiction for grown ups. Ha. The grown up element turned out to be unwarranted amounts of blood, gore, swearing and Captain Jack boffing anything that wasn’t bolted down. There hasn’t been a more disreputable bunch of childish, unprofessional and socially inept misfits to hit the screen since - oh, Top Gear. Suddenly science fiction for grown ups gets a bad name. I manage the first series but gave up halfway through the second, realising that I was starting to feel vaguely soiled every time I watched it.

It’s strange. The Americans have been good at doing grown up S-F for decades. One of the latest, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, gets plaudits as pure drama, irrespective of its S-F roots. So here’s a suggestion. Instead of another series of Torchwood, perhaps the BBC could buy in an occasional, decent US import instead. The money they save could be donated to the Large Hadron Collider to help track down my car keys.

Colin Shelbourn