The series isn’t quite dark or comic enough to go down as an unqualified success. <\/p>
By Patrick Cremona\n \t\t<\/p>
Published: Tuesday, 07 September 2021 at 12:00 am<\/p>
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There\u2019s an age-old stereotype that Germans don\u2019t have much taste for comedy, but Greg Davies clearly doesn\u2019t agree. For his new BBC One sitcom, the Taskmaster<\/a> star has adapted the long-running German series Der Tatortreiniger, which revolves around a proud crime scene cleaner and the various eccentrics he encounters while carrying out his rather grisly job. It\u2019s an intriguing concept, and one with lots of opportunity for the blackest of black humour, but for the most part the format is wasted in this remake in favour of relatively tired gags and unfunny references to things like \u201cthe tattooed milf.\u201d<\/p>\n Davies stars as the titular cleaner, Paul \u2018Wicky\u2019 Wickstead, a middle-aged man who takes great pride in his job but whose personal life is somewhat in a state of arrested development (his main goal in life is to finish his job quickly enough to make curry night at the local boozer). The character\u2019s schtick isn\u2019t too much of a diversion from Davies\u2019 usual comic persona \u2013 he\u2019s a little world-weary and he suffers no fools \u2013 and Davies is a likeable enough presence to just about pull it off, even if most of his trademark rants lack the hilarity we\u2019ve seen in his stand-up and panel show appearances.<\/p>\n Probably the biggest draw of the series is the starry supporting cast that Davies has managed to assemble, with each individual episode revolving around Wicky\u2019s interactions with a different guest star \u2013 whether that be David Mitchell\u2019s pedantic and frustrated author or Layton Williams\u2019s shallow and self-interested influencer. This structure allows each episode to explore different themes and issues as Wicky inevitably gets drawn into conversation with the assorted characters, but it also means that the instalments differ wildly in quality \u2013 from the really quite poor to the fairly enjoyable.<\/p>\n\n The biggest star of all, Helena Bonham Carter<\/a>, appears in the first of the six episodes \u2013 playing a widow who brutally murders her husband after growing tired of his control-freak ways. The episode sees her hold Wicky captive inside her house when she makes a surprise re-entrance, with much of the ensuing drama taking place inside the bathroom, where she insists Wicky stays at all times.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubting Bonham Carter\u2019s star quality, and she commits to the bit, but I found this episode to be a major disappointment. There\u2019s plenty of disbelieving back and forth between the two characters as the widow explains the reasons for offing her husband, and there\u2019s an abundance of crude jokes, but the humour never really gels and it all ends up coming off a little forced. That the episode\u2019s finest moment is a fantasy sequence in which the pair sing a duet of Frank Sinatra\u2019s It Had To Be You while Bonham Carter is sat on the toilet probably tells you everything you need to know.<\/p> The better episodes are the ones where the humour actually takes more of a backseat. My favourite of the bunch was episode four, titled The Aristocrat, which sees Wicky despatched to the opulent mansion of a snobbish old lady (Stephanie Cole) who was recently the target of a failed burglary attempt. The tone here is still comic, of course, but there\u2019s a little suspense thrown in as well as Wicky begins to realise there\u2019s more to the case than meets the eye and finds himself facing something of a moral dilemma. This gives the episode a sense of narrative drive that some of the other instalments lack, and ensures it becomes an altogether more engaging experience.<\/p>\n There\u2019s something of Inside No. 9 to the series \u2013 they\u2019re both darkly comic anthology shows that largely take place in single contained locations \u2013 but the scripts here just aren\u2019t as sharp or original as in Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton\u2019s terrific series, meaning The Cleaner isn\u2019t as dark or<\/em> as comic as it needs to be to go down as an unqualified success.<\/p>\n The show is still plenty watchable \u2013 you can tell that directors Tom Mitchell and Alex Winckler had fun constructing some of the gory cleaning montage sequences, while there\u2019s a certain amount of enjoyment to be had watching the guest stars do their thing (David Mitchell, in particular, is perfectly cast) \u2013 but on the whole, this is a series that just doesn\u2019t quite live up to its potential.<\/p>\n The series isn’t quite dark or comic enough to go down as an unqualified success. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":4064,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag.jpg",620,413,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag.jpg",620,413,false],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag.jpg",620,413,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag.jpg",620,413,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/the-cleaner-review-greg-davies-crime-scene-comedy-is-a-mixed-bag.jpg",620,413,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The series isn't quite dark or comic enough to go down as an unqualified success.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/4063"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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