A Touch Of Cloth

The problem with Charlie Brooker's feature-length satire of cop drama cliches was, counterintuitively, the unremitting nature of its genius. It was black-hole dense with good gags, and there may be nothing quite so brilliant on British TV this year (see if they don't quote that on the DVD) but, just as if I was being strangled by a superior being (I'm Watson in this scenario to Brooker's Moriarty), I couldn't wait for the experience to end. Even if it meant my death.

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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.

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.

A Touch of Cloth review

Surprisingly, the show maintains its thriller quality in spite of all the gags and there are plenty of red herrings during the first episode to have the audience guessing until the end.

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The British public's appetite for a weekly dose of gruesome murder has reached fever pitch which is why A Touch of Cloth is perfect for aficionados of the genre.

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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.

The first episode of Sky1's detective spoof A Touch Of Cloth had so many laugh-out-loud moments it was no surprise it ran out of steam midway through the second episode.