Written by Dan Abnett (who also gave us the Torchwood novel, BORDER PRINCES), and read by Owen Harper's Burn Gorman, EVERYONE SAYS HELLO is my favourite Torchwood audio so far, despite some serious reservations.

I loved the set up and it starts really well, but it falls apart in the third act. The premise is simple: an alien communications field is making people initiate conversations with each other at random. This soon turns Cardiff into a shambles resembling DAWN OF THE DEAD and (surprisingly) the last QUATERMASS teleseries (the one with the 'Planet People').

The citizens of Cardiff soon fall into two types: the borderline-zombie-like folk who keep introducing themselves and an elite group, dubbed Heralds by the alien device, who retain a degree of lucidity and are supposed to support its work (not unlike Tom Cruise and his relationship with Scientology). The Torchwood team wear jamming devices to prevent them falling under the influence of the alien signal, which is fine until Jack breaks his and finds himself having to pretend to be a Herald while the team struggle to survive the chaos and find a way to stop the signal.

The story is told in part as a series of vignettes intended to convey the progress of the take-over and these are generally well done. One character, Vic Royce, a thuggish cabbie, becomes an equally violent convert to the apparently genial signal and Gorman conveys Vic's brand of brainless menace with conviction. Other zombie-convert moments are presented in some quite splendid cameos: the stand-out is the class full of kids that keep greeting their teacher, over and over again ("Hello, Mr Kennedy!").

The twist is that the signal is purely automatic and so this is another story based on an AI going through the motions. We've seen this before in STAR TREK and dozens of other science fantasy stories. To make things worse, Abnett goes for the saddest of clichés for the resolution: swamping the AI with garbage data in order to get it to shut down. This is a cop-out suggestive of writers block. It's the equivalent of making a computer blow up by asking it to resolve a conundrum with no practical resolution: modern AIs, when faced with a problem they cannot resolve, will simply discard it and return to their primary functions; therefore, one would expect alien technology possessing the sophistication to control the local population to also have the capacity to dismiss attempts to confuse it with nonsense.

There is one stylistic miss-step which I must point out. When Gwen is being pursued by Vic, Abnett writes "The shaven-headed thug in the Man City shirt was right on her ar*e." I'm sorry, but we're in "Oo-er, missus" territory, here, chaps! Where was his editor when he scribbled this??

Gorman's reading is spot-on, as he drives the narrative with voice changes and emotional intensity that it really needs! His portrayal of Owen's desperate attempt to pose as a shiny, happy convert is splendid: "I'm Owen Harper. I like puppies and all kinds of sh*t".

His performance justifies buying this release if you're a fan