TV critic David Pollock delves into the dark humour of crime scene cleaning with Greg Davies and gives us his verdict on new home-grown sitcom The Scotts.
Paul ‘Wicky’ Wickstead is a crime scene cleaner, and no spectacle of blood-spraying murder will be allowed to defeat his array of scrubbing brushes and deep-cleaning products. Forensics have finished, the police have gone back to the station and he’s got three hours to do the job before he misses a hot date with curry night at his local pub. Or until the naans go stale, anyway.
This is the tentatively intriguing set-up of new six-part comedy series The Cleaner (BBC One), which its star Greg Davies has adapted from the German serial Der Tatortreiniger (Crime Scene Cleaner). Davies does a good job – as he always does – as amiably hangdog chatterbox Wicky, but we say “tentatively”, because The Cleaner will really have to pull some magic out of the hat to make a comedy out of the pitch-black subject matter.
Not quite there yet…
On the evidence of the first episode, it hasn’t quite made it, unfortunately. The format will apparently cover a new case with a new guest each week, and star points are high for the opening episode’s Helena Bonham Carter, who’s classy as middle-class wife Sheila. She’s snapped, slaughtered her husband with a knife, and returned home – on the run and wielding a gun – while Wicky’s literally cleaning up her dirty work.
There are some good, blackly humorous lines in here, for example Wicky’s annoyance that she couldn’t have committed murder more neatly. The tone is very strange, however, blending a fusion of Midsomer Murders and blandly prime-time comedy with some odd scenarios; chief among them a weird, dream-like fantasia where the pair sing a duet of It Had to Be You among the clouds, while Wicky attempts to escape and Sheila tries to cure her constipation.
The scene has to be witnessed to be believed. Or maybe it should never have been seen at all. Either way, The Cleaner is a comedy which is trying to sell really quite weird and abstract humour to a mainstream audience. Let’s see how it scrubs up.
The Scotts
Another sitcom finding its feet during its debut episode is The Scotts (BBC Scotland), by writer duo Robert Florence and Iain Connell. The pair star as brothers Vincent and Henry Scott, who – along with sister Colette (Louise McCarthy), mum Moira (Barbara Rafferty) and the respective Scott brother- and sisters-in-law – appear to be taking part in a West of Scotland-set fly on the wall documentary about a family who communicate only in “slaggings”.
Like Rab C. Nesbitt meets The Only Way is Essex, the stagey soap operatics are balanced by the sharpness of the one-liners as the characters find their way amid bonding get-togethers to deal with the fallout from the previously-seen pilot. “Your hair looks like you won a raffle fae a Turkish barber,” spits Colette at polite Laura (Sharon Young). Shauna MacDonald is excellent as usual as the wily Vonny, and Lee Greig holds his own as tiger-trunk wearing Darren. We’ll be back next week.
