Charlie Brooker

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.

Charlie Brooker's spoof of overwrought murder dramas returns for another two-part saga. Jack Cloth (John Hannah) is off the force, sitting in his car with a whisky optic installed on the dashboard. When actor turned policeman Todd Carty (Todd Carty) is shot up in a robbery, however, Cloth returns to help his old colleague and flirting partner, Anne Oldman (Suranne Jones), catch the criminal bigwig responsible.

The show was borne of a desire to slay all the tropes of British detective shows, but the genre in-jokes - there's a line about characters who talk facing away from the screen having their dialogue dubbed in later to fix plot holes - don't provide as many big laughs as the silly visual gags and the shameless smut. Perhaps this should be a different kind of comedy altogether.

Another two-parter for Charlie Brooker's spoof crime procedural; this second run displays similar strengths and weaknesses to the first. A Touch of Cloth is clearly in thrall to the Police Squad! and Airplane! school of comedy - not necessarily a problem in itself, but gag density has to be matched by gag quality otherwise things can become a touch wearing. The endless self-referentiality becomes tiresome too - do we really need a character moaning; 'I don't have time for a subplot now'?

On the plus side, Brooker's endless familiarity with TV's past occasionally leads him to strike gold: the funeral of Todd Carty, which features Pete Beale from EastEnders and Grange Hill alumni Roland Browning and Mrs McLusky, is sure to tickle viewers of a certain age. But ultimately - and oddly, given that he remains such a funny writer on the page - it feels like Brooker might be best suited to the darker, more serious end of TV drama. Black Mirror certainly hasn't been without the odd laugh, but it's usually humour of the bleakest kind. More of that please.

The problem with Charlie Brooker's feature-length satire of cop drama cliches was, counterintuitively, the unremitting nature of its genius. It was black-hole dense with good gags, and there may be nothing quite so brilliant on British TV this year (see if they don't quote that on the DVD) but, just as if I was being strangled by a superior being (I'm Watson in this scenario to Brooker's Moriarty), I couldn't wait for the experience to end. Even if it meant my death.

Charlie Brooker: why I'm reducing my word emissions

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted I haven't been writing for a while. Roughly two people noticed its absence, until the other day when a paragraph in Private Eye claimed I'd asked Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, to switch off the reader comments underneath my articles (not true), and that he'd refused to do so (also not true), so I'd quit (not entirely true).

'The thought of Les Dawson coming back as a hologram fries my tiny mind,' was probably the weirdest sentence I heard on TV all weekend. It arrived courtesy of Russell Kane, standing in as a rented talking head on Les Dawson - An Audience With That Never Was (ITV).

I had to check that this wasn't one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror futuristic dramas because there, on the screen, was the hologrammed Dawson cracking gags as if he was still alive - he died 20 years ago at the age of 62 - while the camera kept cutting, in time-honoured Audience style, to chortling minor celebs in the present day. Debbie McGee, Lorraine Chase, you get the drift.

It was deeply odd. Dawson had been two weeks away from filming his Audience show when he died and this was a well-intentioned way of paying tribute to an old-school comedy great.

But the long-shot hologram sequences of Dawson in action felt uneasily like you were watching him cracking jokes at his own funeral. The Q&A was a belter, mind.

Charlie Brooker: Dialogue is two monologues clashing

One of the handiest screenwriting tips I've ever encountered is a quote from Russell T Davies in a book about the making of Doctor Who. "Dialogue is just two monologues clashing".

TV Review: 10 O'Clock Live

This first episode certainly seemed to suffer from stiffness and I'm not not talking about Charlie Brooker's new over-gelled, side-parted haircut.