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.

This is, quite simply, one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I was chuckling, giggling, and howling with laughter throughout most of the show. When I wasn't, I was most grateful; these small pauses allowed me to breath again.

There's an abundance of visual and auditory gags in every scene, each one as funny as the last. (Very) That, combined with unnecessary stunts and scenes that are funny without needing the above makes a show that most people will watch again and again.

Overall, unless you have had a sense-of-humour bypass, I suspect that you'll be in hysterics after watching this.

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.

One of the best cop shows ever. Too many shows out there are renewed year after year even though they dont deserve a pilot in the first place. That money should instead be put into shows like this one, entertaining but smart too so that people dont keep getting dumber by the minute. Great how this pokes fun at overly dramatic tv shows and movies. Both Hannah and Jones are top notch. Great acting, great directing, great writing. More please!