Torchwood One – Nightmares

#4.03. Less Majesty ~ 10/10

◆ An Introduction

I love a good comedic episode, especially one which takes advantage of Torchwood being a more mature series to fill the runtime full of dark humour.

I hope you hadn’t planned on ordering room service… because you’ve just woken up next to the heir to the throne! That’s not the worst of it: he appears to have been murdered. Oh dear! Looks like another hectic day for the Canary Wharf gang.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

Yvonne Hartman wakes up in a reasonably nice hotel room next to a dead member of the royal family. Awkward.

◆ DISCLAIMER

It was only after pre-ordering ‘I Hate Mondays’ that I was made aware of the Islamophobic and transphobic rhetoric that Tracy-Ann Oberman continues to share on social media.

For this reason, I will not be purchasing any further releases featuring Oberman. I refuse to support someone with such despicable views.

I previously covered the first four sets for TimeScales, so will be porting those reviews over to this site: each of them will carry this disclaimer. They were all written prior to May 2023. Please remember not to take any of my comments in this review about Oberman’s performance – positive or negative – as condoning her frankly awful views.

◆ Yvonne Hartman

James Goss has written some cracking scripts in the past, but he’s saved some of his best material for Yvonne in this episode. I was laughing my backside off throughout!

‘Less Majesty’ might just include my favourite performance from Tracy-Ann Oberman. She bounces off her co-stars excellently, and does a fantastic job with this hilarious script.

Yvonne has woken up in a strange hotel room with no idea where she is. Oh, and she thinks she may have just murdered the heir to the throne! Should she “ta-dah”? She doesn’t really know what else to do. As far as she’s concerned, she had an omelette in her house and went to bed. What is Yvonne gonna tell the Queen? The Prince wasn’t exactly her favourite, but she could end up in the Tower… again. Yvonne claims she wants Tommy’s help like she wants a grope-happy dad at a wedding. Charming!

◆ Ianto Jones

Ianto is no stranger to a good comedy episode – you need only look at my review of ‘Retirement Plan’ to realise that – so I had high expectations going into this one. Goss has given him some fabulous material!

Gareth David-Lloyd puts on an exceptional performance in ‘Less Majesty’.

Ianto’s first instinct is to check the bathroom for complimentary shampoo, hoping he can steal it! He didn’t tell anyone… well, nobody except for Tommy. He tries to claim that Yvonne is wearing a dressing gown for “role-play purposes”: take that however you want to.

◆ Tommy Pierce

Sticking Tommy into a comedy setting always leads to something immensely funny, and this episode is no exception. The “Calmy Calm” scenes were absolutely priceless!

Timothy Bentinck delivers an immaculate performance in ‘Less Majesty’.

Dead bodies in bed: Tommy doesn’t really think that’s Torchwood’s gambit. It’s clear that he’s very patriotic, as he considers bowing to the royal corpse! He even had the Prince on a tea-towel. Covering up alien invasions is something he can do in his sleep, but this is something different. I love hearing Tommy turn on the melodramatics when he thinks that Yvonne is responsible for the Prince’s murder. The Institute have been overusing their supply of retcon, so Tommy has bought a sample of “Calmy Calm” with him: it’s a rapid diffusion of activated serotonin… he keeps using it on himself and his two cohorts, turning them into people drunk on sleep! Tommy hits notes like he’s shooting clay pigeons. He claims that if there is any smutty CCTV footage of Yvonne, that he wants Ianto to narrate over it like David Attenborough!

◆ Story Recap

Yvonne finds herself in a random five star hotel room: her clothes are missing, and there’s a dead body in the bed next to her. To make matters worse… it just so happens to be the heir to the throne!

◆ Fallen Prince

‘Less Majesty’ is easily one of the funniest scripts released under the Torchwood brand. It’s a dark comedy which basically involves our dynamic trio attempting to solve a murder… a murder which turns out to be completely fabricated. The whole thing is a trap: a Torchwood trap!

You might be interested to know that this episode is linked to another Goss script: they featured the same antagonist and a near identical setting. The major difference is that ‘The Red List’ was focused on being a commentary on lockdown and the Coronavirus pandemic. This was just a straight up comedy.

◆ Conclusion

“Ianto, I think I may have murdered the heir to the throne!”

Following on from two mediocre episodes, I was beginning to lose hope in this box set. Thankfully, James Goss pulls it back with a hilarious dark comedy about a murdered prince… but not really, because the body turns out to be a fake.

‘Less Majesty’ is a tour de force for Oberman, David-Lloyd and Bentinck. This trio clearly had a lot of fun recording the episode, and the “Calmy Calm” scenes will never not be hilarious! I can highly recommend this one.