Unless I'm away, items seldom stay long on my Sky+ system: I've usually watched them and either wiped them or archived them to DVD before the week is out.

So why is last week's Torchwood still on my hard drive, unwatched? Because each time we think about watching it, my wife and I bring up the EPG description and think, "Well, maybe, not during dinner" (we tend to have dinner in front of the TV) and we end up watching, say News 24 (unless they're showing Sportsday) or Al Jazeera, or Starkey on the monarchy, or Planet Earth (the latter being worth getting HD for, all on its own - note to self: must make more money). Or, this week, our new DVD of An Inconvenient Truth (don't miss it!).

So all week we've been put off watching more than the first 30 seconds of the show because it is quite evident that it's chock full of gratuitous violence. (It's particularly evident when my colleague, a serious Russell T Davies fan, calls me up and tells me, "You can miss that one, it's chock full of gratuitous violence".) It's just never quite been what we wanted to watch, and now perhaps it'll never be.

OK, I appreciate high production values a great deal, and this show has them in spades. And I know that Torchwood isn't made for people like us: it's made for viewers an, er, fraction of our age. But I always thought that the really horrific stuff was when it was all in your mind and not on-screen, like Psycho. It takes enormous budgets and buckets of blood and gore to beat the human imagination. Or think of it as being like using loads of effects and volume on stage to make up for a rock band's lack of talent.

The previous episode was more respectable in this area, though it still relied on explicitness more than actually necessary. At least someone had done their research: Susanna Clarke and her sources would probably have recognised those fairies, if not from their looks. Writers through history agree that the world of faery is not particularly nice (albeit a good deal more enigmatic).

I know the series is all in the can, but I would just like producers to remember, for reference, that top filmmakers agree: the scariest events of all are the ones you don't see.