John Hannah

Not many shows this year, if any, were as hilarious as Charlie Brooker's Sky1 comedy. A Touch of Cloth maintained its alarmingly high rate of jokes throughout the entire two hours, delightfully mocking the clichés of crime procedurals - littering the show with sight gags (the absolutely spot-on opening titles), silly wordplay ("Bi, Jack." "Don't leave!") and one-liners ("Sarge says to go there during the ad break").

It's a genius idea that could have backfired terribly if the execution was lacking. Fortunately, that wasn't the case, and we couldn't stop laughing. The stars - including leads John Hannah and Suranne Jones - brilliantly deadpan the whole script, while Todd Carty's unexpected and inexplicable appearance was the icing on an entertaining cake.

John Hannah interview

John Hannah on being a teenage melancholic, playing a gay man in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and doing 'the most amazing thing in the world'.

A Touch Of Cloth was heavily trailed by Sky. It seemed to be a straight cop drama with a terrible title and an over-acting John Hannah, so my pencil was already poised. Little did I know it was a deliberately bad cop drama featuring the big name in some unintentionally not-very-good ones (most notably the initial attempt at bringing Rebus to the small screen). So I was laughing before it started. Sky's drama output has improved out of sight over the past year or so but the network can still fall for something that looked and sounded this shlocky, something which won't have ­escaped the notice of the writer, Charlie Brooker.

He got a good budget (you want us to rename this tower block Peter Andre House, and that one Sally Bercow House? Sure. And you want us to park an ice-cream van in a field specifically for the one-liner 'Two 999s, please?' No problem). Most of Brooker's gags were better than that, such as DCI Jack Cloth (Hannah), rounding up the murder evidence with the comely pathologist: "What have we got between us?" ­Pathologist: "An implied but never openly referenced sexual history and the suggestion of unfinished business?" Cloth, to the man from forensics: "Any prints?" Forensics: "Only Purple Rain and Lovesexy." Pathologist again: "They handcuffed the victim to the bed and hacked him to bits." Cloth: "Some kind of sex game?" ­Pathologist: "Maybe later, when I've finished pointing at blood."

It was ludicrously gory and for a moment I wondered why. But then I thought, hang on, so was Waking The Dead. Why did I keep watching that for 179 series? And Silent Witness for all of its 132 series? It made you ask vital questions such as: who still manufactures cassettes and can this industry really be kept afloat by police interview rooms alone? And if we were questioning the whole schedule-monstering crime genre, what were the ­actors doing? Rebus was sufficiently far back in Hannah's CV but his sidekick here, Suranne Jones, is a current crime star. Perhaps she should be sending the next batch of Scott & Bailey scripts down to the labs to check for clichés.

John Hannah and Suranne Jones take an affectionate hatchet to their previous work playing detectives in Rebus and Scott & Bailey, in a deadpan spoof of overblown serial-killer mysteries.

It's very much in the style of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and is more frivolous and fun than you might expect from its creator, Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror, Dead Set).

Cloth fires a silly joke at the screen every second and, while a lot of them don't stick - sometimes it's too laborious in ticking off either cop-show clichés or jokes those American films did better - when it's funny, it's deliriously so.

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.

Sky's A Touch Of Cloth started out so well. Charlie Brooker's spoof of every cop show ever (starring John Hannah as angst-ridden breaks-the-rules DCI Cloth and Suranne Jones as ambiguous love interest and dogmatic DC Anne Oldman) is timely and silly; it initially reminded me of the late Leslie Nielsen's Police Squad in its incessant visual puns and straight-faced double entendres and that is very high praise indeed. But then it went on - and on - and on. Now, the version given to press was a turgid 90 minutes, which has thankfully now been chopped into two parts for consecutive nights. But it's the same story throughout so I think it will still be a joke stretched too far. It's a shame, because at a snappier length, this would be a hoot and a much-needed antidote to our glut of murder.

A Touch of Cloth (Sky1), was/is (there's more on Monday) too long. Charlie Brooker's crime drama spoof, in which John Hannah and Suranne Jones gamely play characters not too dissimilar from ones they play in actual cop shows, is stuffed to the rafters with jokes. Very good jokes, less good jokes, clever jokes, stupid jokes, visual jokes, knowing jokes, new jokes, old jokes, surreal jokes, puns, nods, winks. There is no let-up, it's relentless - like there's a joke machine aimed at your head, and Charlie's not letting go of the trigger. After a while I was exhausted, and began to forget what the battle was all about. The are moments of razor-sharp brilliance, but it doesn't have the dark beauty, the resonance or the relevance of Black Mirror.

Every cop cliché drama you've ever seen reports for duty in this forensically observed and daftly funny send-up by Charlie Brooker. Some of the puns are arrestable offences but terrific performances from crime-cracking duo Suranne Jones and John Hannah, who have both served time in 'proper' cop shows, keep the plot on track.

Charlie Brooker has said that the original intention of this two-part detective spoof was as a parody of Inspector Morse. What we have now is a comedy with the witty worldplay of The Naked Gun in which the lead cop is almost as screwed up as the criminal he's chasing. Clever casting ensures that the two leads, John Hannah and Suranne Jones, have TV detective series history (in Rebus and Scott & Bailey respectively) and here they play washed-up, alcoholic DCI Jack Cloth and DC Anne Oldman, who has a secret to hide and whose every instinct is inevitably proved to be wrong; there's a nice performance too from Julian Rhind-Tutt as police chief Tom Boss. With every possible joke wrung out of a storyline involving a sword-wielding serial killer there's a sense of overkill, but A Touch of Cloth is still often very funny.

Interview: John Hannah, star of A Touch of Cloth

John Hannah thought he was doomed to make an ordinary police series until he read the script and fell about laughing, writes Lisa Williams.