Jill Halfpenny on her role in Babylon

'It's refreshing to play a no-nonsense police officer'

Babylon: Danny Boyle's police comedy returns

Police-procedural comedy-drama thingyBabylon has pluck in spades, though which side of the 'do not cross' tape it's on is less clear.

Bertie Carvel interview

Bertie Carvel's role-playing childhood was ideal preparation for a varied acting career, from Miss Trunchbull in Matilda to a smooth press officer in Danny Boyle's Babylon.

Babylon's back

A report from the set of the returning satire about London's police force, where they are staging a riot and filming it on iPhones.

Can Bain & Armstrong strike gold with Babylon?

"Most cop shows have detectives at the heart of them which is why we don't have any... it's just people above or below that band," says Bain, who was approached with the idea of making a comedy drama ("definitely not a sitcom") about the police by Peep Show admirer Danny Boyle.

When it aired as a one-off in February, Danny Boyle's comedy-drama Babylon looked like the sort of thing that deserved to come back as a series, and now here it is. The joy of Babylon is watching the various strands of the Metropolitan Police yank and bristle against each other as they attempt to stay on top of constantly evolving events. A police procedural that is much more than the sum of its parts - The Thick of It with truncheons, basically.

Danny Boyle's Babylon to air in the US on SundanceTV

SundanceTV is working in partnership with Channel 4 to show the six-part police satire. The feature-length pilot, directed by Boyle, aired in the UK back in February.

Armstrong and Bain's police dramedy packed swipes at PR, bureaucracy and obsession with social media into its sprawling, Danny Boyle-directed pilot. Reviews flitted between a muddled if ambitious curio and a bracing, blackly comedic tour de force, but the truth lies somewhere in between. A cop Thick Of It laced with Black Mirror nihilism, catch the inaugural episode on 4oD ahead of the full series due later this year.

Channel 4's Babylon: not much cop

So much seemed right about this show, but it failed to deliver a grin.

Babylon, a new series by Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, has no shortage of coppers, as it's set in New Scotland Yard. But it's not by any means a crime procedural.

Instead, the pilot, directed by Danny Boyle, focused on the press office, where a new American boss (Brit Marling) was attempting to establish her authority while a serial killer was on the loose. The fraught relationship between public relations and policing reality is promising territory for caustic treatment, but this suffered from cynical overload. Everyone appeared to be horrified by everyone else, with the characters either speaking in the sort of scathing comic lingo familiar from The Thick of It or in halting disbelief, as though no one could quite believe that everyone else was that cynical.

There were, as you'd expect, some funny lines. "You can't hold back time," one character complained. "You're not Michael J Fox or L'Oréal." But the tone veered all over the place from surreal comedy to dramatic suspense without every quite mastering one, let alone situating it alongside the rest.

You could call it ambitious - and it was - but as a pilot it was a bit of a mess. Still, there was more than enough to suggest that once it has settled in, some of those ambitions may yet be realised. "The problem with cops," said another character in what was a meta-comment on the police on TV, "is that they're cop types."