Lost Souls (Torchwood) - Broadcast and Reception

Broadcast and Reception

Lost Souls was commissioned and broadcast as part of Radio 4's "Big Bang Day", a day of special programming commemorating the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As part of the "Big Bang Day" coverage, James Gillies, director of communications for CERN, wrote an article for Radio 4's website comparing the fictional LHC of Lost Souls with the real LHC: "The CERN of reality bears little resemblance to that of Joseph Lidster's Torchwood script. The geography is all wrong and there's no way that anyone could be in the accelerator tunnel while it's running. The cool down happens inside a long blue tube, so the tunnel itself does not get cold. I could go on, but that would be churlish. By ignoring reality, by rearranging geography and by playing with time in his own way, Lidster creates drama." Gillies added "Captain Jack displays a surprising knowledge of particle physics."

Prior to the special's broadcast, the prospect of a radio version of Torchwood yielded mixed responses from the critics. Writing in The Sunday Times, Paul Donovan celebrated the special, particularly the contributions of the "beguiling" and "sympathetic" Freema Agyeman; of the special and the rest of the Big Bang Day programming, Donovan said, "This is the sort of output we pay the licence fee for, the sort of ambitious and expensive programming no commercial radio station could ever hope to do in the present ecology of broadcasting." However, at The Times, Chris Campling lamented "a special radio episode of the terrible Dr Who spinoff Torchwood, set at CERN and involving the supernatural. It's as though Radio 4 approached the point of serious educational broadcasting — and then disappeared into the black hole of celebrity." According to John Barrowman, Lost Souls was the most downloaded radio or television that day on the BBC's iPlayer site, leading to a further three radio episodes being commissioned.