A Touch of Cloth

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

A new and original comedy/crime spoof that had me in stitches from start to finish . I couldn't take my eyes off the screen because as well as verbal lines of comedy you also had the visual effects which included ' datdere yute club' as a black youngster had told officers , and once they got to the club ,thats exactly what it was called. Personally ,the best lines were too many to mention but the scene in the morgue where a body was missing a tongue and the attendant mentioned that it appeared cunnilingus had taken place , 'wheres(wears) the tongue ?' the officer asked and the reply came back ,'yes it certainly does!' Genius writing mixed with great acting helped this become 1 of the funniest things i have seen for some time and i cant wait for the next episode :) If you enjoy a laugh that includes spoken and visual effects ,this is for you

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.

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.