Leslie Nielsen

My comedy hero: Phil Wang

Rising stand-up and member of acclaimed sketch group Daphne picks The Naked Gun and Airplane! comedy actor Leslie Nielsen as his idol.

TV review: Top Coppers

Not many series could go toe-to-toe with Leslie Nielsen's mighty Police Squad!, but this spoof of crime procedurals showed an attention to detail and mastery of sheer silliness to make even Frank Drebin crack a smile. Four stars.

The James Nesbitt of Babylon is different [from The Missing]. It's a strange hybrid of a show, being an actual police drama in which the cops are ridiculed with the kind of humour that wouldn't be amiss in Airplane. But Nesbitt, as Metropolitan Police Commissioner Richard Miller, doesn't do a Leslie Nielsen. He unleashes his 1,000-yard stare and plays his hand with unabashed aggression. Without Nesbitt the uncertainty of tone that keeps Babylon on the edge of farce would overwhelm it. Nesbitt's role is to glower and grimace and to issue volcanic eruptions of poetic swearing. Forget Doctor Who, Nesbitt's Miller is the new Malcolm Tucker.

Observe his dismissal of a proposal for a sponsored police news network, The Metwork: "This kettling was brought to you by Morphy Richards." Or the way he orders the deletion of some potentially embarrassing emails. "I don't want it to happen. I just want it to have happened." Obviously nothing like that would ever occur in the Met, but the scene in which a copper was required to eat 100 chicken nuggets on his last day had the ring of truth.

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.