Waiting for the Out is a rare drama that allows you to think

Philip Cunnington on Waiting for the Out

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Modern life is rubbish really, helter-skelter, pell-mell, 100 miles an hour. It leaves you no time to think, does it?

As Waiting for the Out (BBC1, Sat, 9.30pm) illustrates, prison perhaps gives you too much time to think, to dwell on things, to worry away out them until you gnaw out the inside of your head - what brought me here, could I have escaped it, what makes me, me?

And it's not just the prisoners - philosophy teacher Dan (Josh Finan) is also wondering what brought him to this point, teaching Cartesian thinking and the theories of John Locke to a group of cons.

Dan has a problem from his past, you see - his dad, the sort of man with a hair-trigger temper and a view of masculinity that we might call problematic these days, is a jailbird who walked out on Dan, his mum and his brother Lee 25 years earlier.