John Hannah

Radio Times review

A third outing for Charlie Brooker's Naked Gun-style cop spoof, although the comparison's becoming fainter and fainter. This is the strongest instalment yet, because the show's built up its own armoury of bad puns, ridiculous direction and smashed fourth walls. It no longer needs to bother about specifically spoofing individual crime dramas, either.

The story, as if that's important, concerns a serial killer who seems to be linked to a sinister therapy spa. Adrian Dunbar plays its powerful owner, doing a particularly good maniacal laugh that goes on for much too long. Karen Gillan is a bit underused as the squad's naive new flibbertigibbet, but that's fine because regular stars John Hannah and Suranne Jones are better than ever at straight-faced, dignity-shredding baloney. Keep looking out for the signs on the wall behind them.

Prepare for more puerile police procedural parody, as this hilarious spoof detective drama returns to our screens.

Shamelessly sending up crime investigation shows such as Luther, Cracker and A Touch Of Frost, odd couple cops DCI Jack Cloth (John Hannah) and DI Anne Oldman (Suranne Jones) once again take on another gruesome case - this time the murder of Cloth's estranged brother. But, as ever, the plot is secondary to all manner of tongue-in-cheek gags and side-splitting visual jokes.

"The humour in this is essentially just silliness," laughs Suranne, 35. "It's just perfect fodder for mickey taking. I'm still doing Scott & Bailey, so I've now got a 'cliché monitor' in my head. Whenever I spot something, it makes me chuckle in honour of A Touch Of Cloth."

Joining the cast is former Doctor Who companion Karen Gillan. Playing rookie recruit Kerry Newblood, she finds herself the victim of an ambush by a gorilla!

As a veteran of cop shows such as Rebus, John Hannah feels the genre is ripe for ridicule. "Anyone who watches TV will get the jokes in A Touch Of Cloth," claims John, 52. "I'm so sick of police shows where you know exactly what it's going to be like."

John Hannah interview

John Hannah talks about the third Touch Of Cloth show.

John Hannah brings the cheeky wit and mildly pervy grin he displayed in Spartacus and A Touch Of Cloth to bear as he acts as guest host to the opening round of the 27th series of the pop quiz institution. Yes, that's 27 series of impossible-to- guess hummed intros, impossible-to-identify crinkly looking drummers from 1980s one-hit wonders and impossibly lame jokes from Phill Jupitus. Who probably hasn't been in it from the start but, who knows, we're darned if we can remember that far back. Tonight, Aluna Francis of electro-pop duo AlunaGeorge, dance duo Basement Jaxx and comedian James Acaster are effortlessly upstaged by Noel Fielding.

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.

John Hannah: TOC role is killing my career

John Hannah fears his outrageous antics as DI Jack Cloth may have finished his serious acting career.

Video: John Hannah on new 'Touch of Cloth'

John Hannah has spoken to Digital Spy about the new A Touch of Cloth.

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.