Clown Car For Five

Dishonest John twirls
His moustache to the tune of
"Bob Clampett cartoon".

Torchwood: From Out Of The Rain

In the Captain Scarlet episode 'Winged Assassin' (only the second episode broadcast, take note), the Mysterons replicate a large passenger jet, and send it barreling down the runway towards the plane of the foreign president whom Spectrum have been assigned to protect. There's no time to safely avert a collision between the two, so Captain Scarlet does the only thing he can; he attempts to drive the jet off the runway by rubbing his Pursuit Vehicle against the tyres, blowing out the undercarriage and causing the jet to overturn. He succeeds, but the effort also causes him to lose control of the SPV, costing him his life for the second time. Then, on taking off, the President's plane just about fails to gain enough height, clips the erect tail rudder of the downed jet, and plunges to the ground in a colossal explosion.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to properly script a catastrophic 'well, fuck' ending and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Not even Dick Cheney could pass that one off as a triumph.

When I was a kid, I didn't know dick about sartorial elegance (and still don't). My mother, in one of her more lucidly sociopathic trains of thought, would pick out her new clothes on the basis that if I didn't like them, they had to be good. You get kind of blase about this after thirty-eight years, so it's with nary a sigh and a shrug that I greet the stark fact of being the odd man out over From Out Of The Rain. Because I enjoyed it this week. Quit looking at me like that.

From Out Of The Rain is nearly brilliant. Nearly. You know the narrow borderline between madness and genius? That kind of 'nearly'. All the basic ingredients are in their own way sublime, they just happen to be hopelessly and utterly wrong. It's a slick Nigel Kneale ghost story - the problem is that nobody had the guts to tell PJ Hammond it wasn't supposed to be one, or drag him out of the videotape of the space-trap service station he's been stuck in since his own series folded in 1982. But nobody can say that Hammond isn't also a master of the high concept (albeit the same ones have worked for him dozens of times before); so either it's a gourmet souffle made with only the finest quality fish heads, or else unlike my esteemed colleagues, I lack the necessary background in Sapphire & Steel to see For Out Of The Rain for what it really is. It's hard to tell.

"A gourmet souffle made with only the finest quality fish heads"

What's much easier to get a handle on is that if you still expect Torchwood the series to resemble something approaching honest-to-God science fiction (and for heaven's sake, why would you be after blowfish in sports cars, undead angst and marital disunity?), it's a given that you're going to have really, really, really, really, really hated this one. To you, it's PJ Hammond waving his wrinkled nob and going 'Woooo! Spooky! Wooooooooooooooo!' in your face. The impeccable atmosphere, helped hugely by an evocative background mix of Brian Hodgson and Mark Snow, won't do a single thing for you if all you can see is a virtual retread of Small Worlds in style and structure, where absolutely nothing is properly explained or rationalised - great for Sapphire & Steel, not so hot for proper sequential drama. There's also no getting around that From Out Of The Rain is the living embodiment of the term 'spooky-do', almost all set-up with very little payoff. It even takes place in the site of an abandoned fairground, for Christ's sake. With a comedy chase scene. All it needs now is the maze of doors for everyone to run in and out of, while Catatonia belts out a bouncy bubblegum version of Mulder & Scully behind them. Meanwhile, in one the obvious script-edited bits which Hammond didn't write, Owen's mystical dead powers, which they could have done much more with as a plot device this week, are briefly and ineptly trucked out as an unsubtle boxing-glove reminder for viewers too addled by alcohol to remember seven days ago (and they'll have their work cut out for them now that the show has moved to Friday nights), and Tosh is given precious little to do again but stay home and stick virtual letter-shaped fridge magnets on her computer screen. Can you buy those on Second Life?

Jack's own existence as one of the two people still living who can remember the Night Travellers first hand also flatly contradicts the basic 'memories captured on film' premise of the episode. I've had all sorts of apologetic excuses for this thrown at me; that Jack was an infiltrating agent, he wasn't one of them, and wasn't even part of the same show since the film reel was a compilation of different footage (and let's throw that one under the bus right now; can you see Vorg and Shima from Carnival Of Monsters wanting to go anywhere near a man who blows his own brains out on an daily basis? Robert Holmes wasn't that morbid). I'm not buying a word of it, and if Hammond's script insists upon leaving the explanations up to the viewer, then it's got to expect this shit. What about all the parish records on the Travellers and newspaper clippings about the disappearances in their wake? Do these not count? The info-nerd phenomenon didn't start with the digital age, so are you also saying that nobody has ever kept a diary and written them down? Or taken photographs of the show? You know, on film? Besides, since the Travellers have been reduced to creatures of light and shadow, then why shouldn't they be able to step out of Jack's head?

In actual fact though, the biggest inspiration of all behind this episode may not be The Stone Tapes or PJ Hammond's own cult following, but Disney's Pinocchio, of which I won't be at all surprised if PJ turns out to have been traumatised by it as a child. I hereby cite the sideshow Italian named Stromboli as further proof. But even though I can expect a long wooden nose if I deny that I happened to like From Out Of The Rain, the only thing that's going to turn into a donkey is PJ Hammond's reputation if he tries anything like this again.

No mum, those pink crocs look really good on you. Bitch.