Charlie Brooker

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker turns his satirical eye on the week's media output for a second series of swipes at whatever tickles his darkly comic fancy across all manner of technological platforms.

Indulging his passion for the spoken word, Brooker twists his tongue around anything and everything that gets his goat. With contributions from Brooker's regular US-watcher, comedian Doug Stanhope, and guests including jokers Jake Yapp and Brian 'Limmy' Limond.

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That thin line between stupid and clever isn't always a funny one. The concluding part of Charlie Brooker's would-be non-stop laughfest gets becalmed between metatextual policier spoofing and jokes about bumming. The inventive sight gags that distinguished our first stint with Jack Cloth (John Hannah) and Anne Oldman (Suranne Jones) have been largely sacrificed in favour of exhausting single entendres, while the repetition that begins as part of the joke ends up being plain repetitive.

Which is a shame, as it's always fun watching serious actors (in this case, gnarled mobster Stephen Dillane and uppity politician Anna Chancellor) being very silly. The understandably threadbare plot, by the way, sees Cloth's cover blown and Goodgirl (Chancellor) locking horns with Boss (Julian Rhind-Tutt) over whose running the city of Town. Rather more miss than hit; perhaps Karen Gillan and Adrian Dunbar, lined up for the imminent third series, can revive a concept that's run out of steam rather quicker than we might have hoped.

The spoof policer A Touch of Cloth is still finding send-up potential in the flickering grisly grey wallpaper of our lives. (And what would the wallpaper be called on a poncey shadecard? "Maverick").

John Hannah is still maverick, still brilliant, still boozed-up. In the opening scene he was pouring himself a double from the optic on his car dashboard. The camera pulled back to reveal the car was a taxi. Aha, maybe he's now an ex-maverick! And maybe the force wants him back in spite of all his maverickness because only he can crack the case! How well we know this genre, how dreary our existences.

Back in the incident-room, back in the old routine, DI Cloth (Hannah) demanded of his team they left no turn unstoned in the hunt for the suspect, and he did this in rhyme: "Who's his mother, who's his dad?/Has he read Beevor's Stalingrad? What's his height, what's his weight?/How often does he masturbate?" The team includes Suranne Jones, one of my favourite actresses and, I'm sure, one of Cloth creator Charlie Brooker's, too. Enduring so much bad telly for a living, as Brooker used to do, he must have fantasised about getting hard-worked actresses to say ridiculous, and rude, things.

Her character Anne Oldman and Cloth have a history, or a History. It's a big, deep, throbbing history like Beevor's Stalingrad. For back-up there's Adrian Bower and Navin Chowdhry who must come as a double-act because they were in Teachers together. Great show, Teachers, and remarkably it wasn't a crime drama. Chowdhry's copper seems to know everything about everyone, eg: "Likes: Homes Under The Hammer and Steely Dan." Don't we all (the Dan I mean)? Maybe not every gag is a zinger but similar to buses and girls though sadly not Steely Dan albums there's always another one coming round the corner.