A Touch of Cloth

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.

I really don't know how the actors kept a straight face through this. We would love to see the outtakes.

Double entendres & puns abound! Kind of Monty Python in a cop show. We love it.

It makes Inspector Clouseau look serious!

All of the negative reviews of the show centre around repeatedly stating the fact that this is not Black Mirror or it's like Airplane, it isn't Blsck Mirror get over it, it is like Airplane that was the intention get over it.

I watched an interview with Charlie Brooker before seeing this so maybe the fact that I knew what to expect before watching helped.

The show was brilliant from beginning to end, the jokes were well timed and numerous holding me between a smirk and out loud laughter all the way through.

The only reason I gave it 9 and not 10 is because there's always room for improvement.

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.