City of Town Constabulary

The bodies keep washing up. Washing up, Cloth!

A city being called ‘Town’ undoubtedly looks ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point. How could it not in a programme named after the need to go to the toilet? It’s located in the county of Placefordshire, as well. A name apparently thought up on the spot by Charlie Brooker when pressed on it by the Sky legal team.

Pitched as Britain’s answer to Airplane and / or The Naked Gun slash Police Squad!, A Touch of Cloth has it all: satire, one-liners, wordplay, slapstick and fourth wall-breaking all over the shop. It comes so thick and fast it’s difficult to keep up with and difficult to extract anything from. So this logo does feature briefly, blurry and in the background at a press conference. Even that has a visual gag in it – the police helmet at the top features the same emblem it itself is part of. So it’s a neverending, recursive design, with helmet inside insiginia inside helmet inside insignia forever (though I only managed it three times here).

In amongst the disposable knob gags, there is some more slow burning fare and some great callbacks – a couple of my favourites being DI Anne Oldman’s ringtones changing (from Constant Craving to I Kissed a Girl via All the Things She Said) due to her being in a relationship with a woman and DS Des Hairihan’s constant exclaims of ‘Guv, you might wanna see this’, before revealing a nude calendar, a woman getting undressed at a window or a pornographic website.

Which, yes, does seem puerile but that’s the nature of the beast. Not everything lands, but when it does, it really does. With the sheer volume of stuff on offer, you can quickly forget the bits you don’t like and move onto the next thing. There’s something for everyone. Unless you hate that type of thing, of course.

In a parallel universe, John Hannah (DI Cloth himself) plays a similarly broken, Scottish functionaing alcoholic in Black Mirror‘s Loch Henry. Not so big on laughs, that one.