A Touch Of Cloth spoiler-free review

A stunning spoof of TV crime drama with a strong cast, direction and script, A Touch Of Cloth is a welcome addition to the TV schedules...

A Touch of Cloth - Episode 1.2 review

The episode as a whole was a perfect successor for the first, having not deteriorate at all in script quality, nor the cast's performances. It remained as brilliant as the first, as I'm sure every viewer would concur.

A Touch of Cloth review

Overall, A Touch of Cloth should be praised for doing something different and tackling a style of comedy that usually comes US-flavoured.

'A Touch of Cloth' arrests 520,000 for Sky1 premiere

Charlie Brooker's spoof crime drama A Touch of Cloth premiered on Sky1 with decent ratings on Sunday night (August 26).

A Touch of Cloth - Episode 1.1 review

There was no subtlety - it was out-and-out funny, fast-paced and packed with gag.

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.

A Touch of Cloth - TV review

It's a great comedy, with Monty Pythonesque silliness, well aimed criticisms, and some well worked Brechtian elements too.