A Touch of Cloth

Very enjoyable send-up of your standard police procedural. Some of the clichés used like: "Come and have a look at this, Guv" and "I heard it from the boys down the station" are so familiar that I laughed out loud.

I notice a couple of reviewers had trouble seeing the funny side of this show and compared it with others like Naked Gun. I liked the Naked Gun movies, but they also had some flat moments, especially in the later entries. Not everything works, it's just what you get out of it overall, and I found a Touch of Cloth an amusing diversion.

I've always thought comedy is the most difficult genre. Not everyone can laugh at a pie in the face, nor can they laugh at a long self-deprecating monologue. It's what strikes your fancy that works and this one struck mine.

When you think of something different how different do you want it. The usual expectations fall short every time things should be predictable and a new gag is ready. At times not so easy to understand but just review the scene. Nothing is sacred for the writers of the show, anything is worth a laugh. I laughed my head off when the double in the sex scene is not the usual beauty but a bad looking man that doubles a woman. The over the top effects remind us of how we take for granted the language and the standards in movies that are in fact more than real. The English are great at inventing satire from zero and making the obvious seem new. If you want to laugh at all levels of intelligence you can take a chance at ''A touch of cloth'' it will not let you down.

Procedural police shows finally get the parody they have been long asking for in this occasionally hilarious and frequently amusing offering from Charlie Brooker. Cloth, the eponymous protagonist, portrayed with a knowing degree of over-acting by the fabulous John Hannah, is that favourite genre trope: a damaged, veteran officer, called in to resolve the 100th annual murder on the unfortunately named Rundowne Estate.

Wordplay and smart exchanges between the chief characters abounds as Cloth and his "Modern Lesbian" DC, Anne Oldman (say it out loud), pun their way through a series of grisly murder scenes. Ably assisting the satire are a slew of other familiar faces portraying similarly cookie-out characters, most memorably Julian Rhind-Tutt as the authoritarian, disapproving Boss.

Where A Touch of Cloth distinguishes itself from other, less effective parodies is that no aspect of the gritty Crime drama TV is safe from its mocking barbs. Direction, sound-editing and pacing are subtly (and, on occasion, not so subtly) exposed to criticism. Cameras follow characters as they do pointless circuits around rooms, mulling over exposition, scenes of violence are repeatedly and unnecessarily revisited with the same sound effects repeating themselves over and over again.

However, in one respect A Touch of Cloth does let itself and its otherwise highly intelligent script down, and that is the sexual humour. While not averse to the odd sex-related gag, and fully aware that this is the 21st Century, these felt out of place and really did not add anything to what is otherwise the finest spoof of procedural police dramas since The Naked Gun.

Charlie Brooker basically doing for dour British police procedural what Airplane did for hysterical disaster movies. In fact this is so closely modeled on the Zucker spoof principals means that in some ways this is more of a tribute to them than it is to the UK crime shows. It's so niche a tonal combination that it alienated many at the time and it has been consigned to the cult bin. Good. I live in there.

This takes the form of three "series" composed of a single plot each - much like the ITV Britcop dramas it lampoons - John Hannah and the great Suranne Jones are magnificent as the "straight-faced" leads although Rhind-Tutt's camply pompous Tom Boss never quite works. The wider cast is a minor who's who of British character actors like Brian Cox, Stephen Dillane and Adrian Dunbar and in the last series you even get a pre-Hollywood Karen Gillan which feels genuinely insane. The first and second are notably stronger than the third but I'm secretly quite glad it didn't get the twelve episodes it was initially mooted to have (!)

The style is a heady cocktail of overwhelmingly relentless sight-gags, puns, format parodies, background jokes, wrong-footers, double entendres - you name it. It's a breathless whirligig of humour - not all of it lands, some of it is dated already, or childishly scatological, or incredibly clever, or baldly hilarious, or absolutely brilliant. It rewards repeated viewings, it's tremendously fun and it's almost exactly my sort of thing so fair play to it for that and it's the sort of thing I'm nearly daily reminded how glad I am that it even got made in the first place.

If you love "Airplane", "Naked Gun" and "Top Secret" you will love this too. Please make more episodes.