Circus Season: From Out of the Rain (Torchwood)

Continuing a series of posts about TV episodes related to the circus.

In my last post, about the circus which comes to Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen, we met the feared side of the circus. You don't want to be taken by all those freaks. Of course, in that instance the town was too freaky even for Papa Lazarou to face.

Here, however a circus invades reality in, in many ways, a much more scary way. Side show characters from an old film of a circus are managing to escape from the celluloid and trying to take people's souls, so that they can continue performing as they did in the past.

As regular readers know I usually read round on the internet before writing a blog post, because this blog has from the start been animated by the desire to avoid the endless description and repetition on the internet, and try to say something different. I was surprised, when I started reading about this show, to find that despite being one of my favourite Torchwood episodes, it really isn't at all popular online. I'm honestly surprised by this: I have always loved this episode. 

Therefore, as so often, I find myself leaping to the defence of an unpopular episode of a TV show. Sigh. Welcome to another completely biased and opinionated blog post.

The reason for its unpopularity isn't hard to find, in fact it's explicitly stated in a lot of the reviews. It is that it isn't actually a Torchwood episode. It's about time, history, rifts in time, people escaping from their history and the film which traps them, whereas Torchwood is about, well you all know what Torchwood is about. 

In fact it's a great pity that it isn't more popular because it's got simulated old film of the circus, an abandoned swimming pool, and it's even set in an old cinema, for God (of your own understanding)'s sake. These things are rather hard to go wrong with. We all know and love a show which uses emotive settings for its historical fantasies about time and what happens when it goes wrong.

Of course everyone reading this blog will immediately know what this episode really is, even if they've never seen From Out of the Rain: what this really is is a Sapphire and Steel. It's even written by PJ Hammond, our hero who mystified us through most of Sapphire and Steel and left so much to our imagination. It's as if a Sapphire and Steel plot somehow escaped from the 1970s (see what I did there?) and ended up in the world of Torchwood. Nothing wrong with Torchwood in any way, but when you go head to head with an absolutely legendary series like Sapphire and Steel, you will always lose. So the problem is that this show manages to dissatisfy both the Torchwood fans and the Sapphire and Steel fans. Except me, but then I even like the Sapphire and Steel audio mysteries, which I gather not everyone does by any stretch of the imagination.

There's another reason it's unpopular. You have to have a certain understanding to get your head round PJ Hammond's drama - you understand that he expects you to do the work, doesn't come up with pat answers and you're going to be left with more questions at the end than you had to start with. This is, of course, top level drama. Again, I should stress that there's nothing wrong with Torchwood as such, in my opinion, but you don't find that approach in Torchwood, which means people are bound to be unhappy if they're suddenly confronted with PJ Hammond's complete refusal to spoon feed anyone or tell you what's going on.

I don't like writing these blog posts where I'm backed into a corner defending a show which I think is unfairly maligned, especially if it's one which has just wandered out of its own time stream. I think that essentially if you are the sort of person who likes the Tv I go on about here you would definitely like From Out of the Rain; however if you are a fan of more recent TV, even Torchwood or Doctor Who, there is no guarantee that you would. I can have no objection to the show or the script, but I just think putting the two together with its target audience may have been a mistake.

There are possible criticisms of this show, even from a fanatical fundamentalist PJ Hammond fan like me. The main ones are that the plot is too much for a single episode of Torchwood: it could easily have been expanded to a four-part S and S; and then I simply cannot believe that the fact Jack appeared in the circus depicted in the old film wasn't expanded more than it was. It's used to establish his knowledge of the entities involved in stealing souls, but it could have been used much further to integrate the events of this episode into Jack's life and even Torchwood.

I keep trying to think about how I would rather have had the show done and I think that I would have tried to insert an alien element, as per the other Series 1 and 2 Torchwood episodes, into it. The escaped circus people could have actually been aliens. I would have left Jack out of the circus completely or if he had to be in it, the purpose of the aliens breaking through the rift could have been to settle an old score with Jack.

I think the absolutely best feature is the room at the derelict swimming pool full of abducted people: it's wonderfully creepy.

So despite this episode being considerably hamstrung I definitely think you should watch it and enjoy it, whether you're into Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel, circuses, old cinemas, or any old weird shit.

Actually perhaps it would be neglectful of me not to say, in this week that Uxbridge and South Ruislip are celebrating the resignation of Boris Johnson (and I just know you'll do us all proud by electing an MP who isn't a toiraidhe) - isn't it obvious what comes to your door and sucks the life out of you for selfish reasons?