Charlie Brooker

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.

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.

A gaggle of familiar faces jostle for screen space as the topical news satire returns to take a pop at the week's headlines. While it's never quite matched the casual wit of Have I Got News For You or the US chutzpah of The Daily Show, there's always the chance one of the TV regulars - including Screenwipe's Charlie Brooker, Peep Show's David Mitchell and music pundit Lauren Laverne - will hit a funny bone when you're least expecting it.

The comic current affairs show returns with David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Lauren Laverne and Jimmy Carr sinking satirical claws into the week. Late-night political satire is a fixture of US television and if they got it right here, it could be a buzzy alternative to Question Time. So far 10 O'Clock Live has only shown flashes of that, but Mitchell is a better interviewer than you'd expect and his longer pieces, along with Brooker's Screenwipe-ish rants, mean the show is always good in parts.

A strange one, this. Without ever quite feeling the sum of its talented parts, this satirical current affairs show has made it to a third series. Last time around, certain problems still bedevilled 10 O'Clock Live. The tone remained unsure and Lauren Laverne still felt a tad underemployed. And yet it continued to be watchable - David Mitchell proved to be a reasonably penetrating interviewer and Charlie Brooker's world-weary plaints are always good value. Plus, any show that has James Delingpole up in arms is all right by us.

This time around, it's probably make or break. 10 O'Clock Live could establish itself as an irreverent but still sentient alternative to Newsnight (we'd suggest at least one lengthier and slightly more serious news piece per show), or it could drift off towards irrelevance and self-indulgence. For what it's worth, we'd like it to work and there's no reason why it can't.

Charlie Brooker: That's yer Thatcher Ding Dong

Maggie Thatcher died. Git-haired One Direction sex minnow Harry Styles hastily tweeted an RIP, prompting many of his fans to wonder aloud just who this "Thatcher" person was, much to the amusement of onlookers not quite smart enough to understand how time works.