Decent Scripts May Not Be Used Where There is Life

In the shadow of Damon's review.

Torchwood: From Out of the Rain

You're at the travelling circus.  You've seen the pinheads, torso man and the chicken lady. What next?  "The Man Who Couldn't Die".  Imagine the disappointment when a man with no freak deformities other than a massive desire to be on television stands in front of you, tops himself amusingly (i.e. he smiles when he's doing it), and then you wait ten minutes before he comes round looking troubled.  Great. Give me a decent bearded lady anyday.  Or a zombie doctor who keeps forgetting he can't breathe or feel.  That'd be good.  Mind you any of those acts would be better than watching From Out of the Rain.  PJ Hammond's Sapphire and Steel still holds up very well as far as I'm concerned, and this was such a pale shadow of his earlier work that it was almost painful.  The only charitable explanation I can think of is that working on Midsomer Murders must be severely damaging to the brain and body.

I don't want to dwell on Sapphire and Steel, but it brilliantly fucked up a whole generation of children.  In the same way that in Blink Steven Moffat splendidly and gratuitously did his best to give kids an irrational fear of statues, so Hammond caused the little ones to shudder in terror at the prospect of being photographed, quail at the thought of spending time on a railway station, and above all never to trust walls made of living meat.  The outstanding thing about Hammond's writing was that you were thrown in at the deep end and never given much of an explanation as to what the hell was going on.  The central characters were unexplained.  Their motives were unclear, and while they could be quite nice sometimes, they were equally likely to sacrifice you horribly in order to keep things 'balanced'.  When they did explain what they were doing, you almost wished that they hadn't. For instance in the assignment featuring the entity that was in every photograph that had ever been taken (an obvious precursor to  From Out of the Rain) Steel explained that the creature was now trapped in a kaleidoscope that they would shortly put into a ship that was due to be sunk under an iceberg.  End of episode, and cue the young me to start whimpering and ask for a cold flannel to be applied to my feverish brow.

no-one can do anything but spout expository dialogue

But back at the circus and it seems that no-one can do anything but spout expository dialogue.  And not just that, but redundant expository dialogue.  After watching the bloke getting spooked by the film, then taking it to the cinema and getting freaked by the runaway projector, I didn't then need a scene where he recounts the exact same action, at length, to Jack and Ianto.  It could have been a couple of lines.  And Jack's repetitive lines about the Night Travellers' habit of popping up at the circus made them seem more like annoying neighbours than fearsome projections of evil.  The flipside of the recent good, scary stuff from Moffat is that everyone thinks they can write something as disturbing as "Are you my mummy" or have a threat as weird as the Weeping Angels. The frustrating thing about From Out of the Rain is that Hammond's early work was of massive importance in creating a genre of television that treated children with enough respect to feel free and give them The Fear.  In a deeply psychological and traumatic way. So it's a shame to see him reshaping his old ideas through the prism of his successors' work.  The characters manifesting themselves from within the film looked like an old-hat rip-off of Ringu, a film that reeks of PJ Hammond even if Hideo Nakata has never heard of him.  The whole sorry mess is akin to Bram Stoker writing an episode of Moonlight.   

But there was still enough to raise a wry smile.  Jack had so much expository dialogue that Ianto had to perform a very wide range of 'listening acting'.  Pursing his lips here, a slight chin stroke there, he ran the gamut of all the reaction shots that the Central can teach you.  Jack seemed to be telling him that music hall was taking its ironic revenge through cinema, the medium responsible for destroying it.  I must admit that when I watched a documentary yesterday called Auntie's War on Smut I was vaguely disconcerted by scratchy old footage of Max Miller who certainly looked like a man who wanted revenge.  He was apparently banned from the BBC for telling a joke about a man on a narrow mountain path who encountered a beautiful young woman coming towards him. “I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss myself off.”

I digress.  Much like this review, the episode was a dislocated load of mumbo-jumbo.  Trying to gum it all together with interminable scenes of old ladies trying to explain the back-story didn't work.  I'd like to blame the production team, but I suspect it was just a bad script that somehow made it past the usually impeccable and rigourous quality control unit.  In fact they probably only use PJ Hammond as a sop to old tossers like me in the hope that at least one episode will get a free pass from the ming-mongs.  But no-one in this day and age is scared by a piano playing itself.  Even ming-mongs. "They all died so suddenly" intoned a random nurse.  Some of us weren't so lucky.