Dan Maier

Review: Sky Summer Shorts - Andrew Flintoff's Summer

Andrew Flintoff is already a star on Sky thanks to his antics on A League Of Their Own and now he plays a romantic lead - no pun intended - in Pacino & Bert, this short film about a dreamy dog walker written by Daniel Maier.

Chris (Daniel Rigby) is an undercover policeman, currently on a mission to ingratiate himself into a violent Armenian family and gain evidence of their criminal dealings. A mild cop show spoof at times borrowing the mock-dramatic pacing of Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier's police procedural parody A Touch Of Cloth - but not, sadly, the jokes - what this feels most like is a comedy vehicle for Rigby, otherwise known as the awkward one from the BT adverts. Which would be no bad thing if it weren't such a feeble effort.

It's co-written by Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier, whose writing credits include Harry Hill's TV Burp, and there's a lot of Burp in both the affectionate spoofing of British television conventions and the relentless onslaught of silliness. The convoluted plots of police procedurals usually require some viewer concentration, but here it's the gags that have you reaching for rewind on the TiVo remote. There are so many of them - visual, verbal, saucy and slapstick - that to watch A Touch of Cloth is to be constantly plagued by the fear that you've missed something brilliant.

Casting John Hannah as DI Jack Frost and Suranne Jones as DC Anne Oldman (pronounced "an old man") is a particular joy, given both of them have often appeared in exactly the kind of series ridiculed here. It wouldn't be half as much fun to have a comedian deliver lines like, "You never get used to the way you get used to it and that takes some getting used to" and keep a straight face.

This season there's also new blood in the shape of Doctor Who's Karen Gillan as... er... Kerry Newblood. It's an opportunity to send up all those clichés pertaining to rookies, of which there are plenty. Not that there's any danger of the writers running out of material. As long as TV's obsession with grisly murders and maverick cops continues, there'll always be a case for DCI Cloth to solve.

Easy to mock the cliches of crime dramas in, say, a sketch show; much harder to do it at full length. Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier managed triumphantly, writing the kind of extended, fizzing spoof that brought back happy memories of the Naked Gun films. It didn't hurt that the cast had form in the genre - leads John Hannah and Suranne Jones have both played detectives in straight dramas and proved just as good at po-faced parody. Plus there were enough throwaway visual gags to make it a DVD banker.

Police Squad! was a thing of such shimmering perfection, it's no surprise that the only people to have come close to matching it have been the makers themselves. But Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier's Anglicised take on the quickfire nonsense-com is a bold and largely successful effort - pairing Suranne Jones's jobsworth and John Hannah's drunkard as incompetent cops hunting a crazed killer. The plot is more or less irrelevant. This is all about the gags, of which there are probably hundreds. The hit-rate is respectable - that you can see most of them coming a mile off doesn't detract from the enjoyment - while absurd cameos keep things lively. Subtler chuckles come from sly references to everything from Neil Young to Marathon Man.

Brooker & Maier build the perfect TV detective

Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier, the writers of A Touch of Cloth, dissect the anatomy of Jack Cloth, their new satirical cop show star.