A Touch Of Police Squad

I remember the first time I saw Police Squad - not quite like remembering the moment when JFK was shot but I was too young for that, probably in the garden digging a hole - I don't know where I was beyond 'in front of a TV laughing like a drain'. If drains laughs. 

Police Squad was the invention of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (who all sounded to me like people ho had been round the table when they wrote the Bible) Pat Proft wrote episode three (another writer at that bible bash surely). It was a spoof of the police series on Tv in the 70's with a high preponderance of puns, sights gags and non-sequiturs, all gloriously delivered in dead-pan fashion, mostly by Leslie Nielsen playing Lt Frank Drebin. Hank Simms, who'd worked as a TV announcer of 60's and 70'd TV cop shows, announced the title of each episode, though his words never matched the caption on screen. From the tiles onwards the show was a non-stop gag-a-thon. 

It was glorious in its freshness, its surreal quality, its joke count. But even as I watched I was aware that I'd stopped laughing out loud and started smiling, then nodding knowingly and then internalizing the humour - my inner comedy man saying, yeah that's funny. It's so hard to keep laughing at this kind of stuff, even when it's hilarious. 

It was cancelled after just six episodes but spawned The Naked Gun: From The Files of Police Squad  films. Those movies took millions, they were and are still loved. 

On Monday the grandson of Frank Drebin - in tone if not name - found his way onto Sky 1 in Charlie Brooker's Touch Of Cloth. A show that does exactly what Police Squad did in every way but a little more gruesomely. It spoofs crime drama beautifully, John Hannah and Suranne Jones gamely play characters not too dissimilar from ones they play in actual cop shows, and it hits you with a hail of jokes that are delivered with such regularity and speed that you have to stop, rewind and sometimes pause to get the full benefit - pause to read the signs, which are everywhere, and are hilarious.

It is relentless. It never stops with the gags, never for one moment are you presented with anything other than full-on jokes. I laughed out loud at much of the first episode but by episode two, shown the following night, I was smiling, nodding and not quite as enthralled as I had been. Maybe this was a fault of the scheduling. The shows run an hour with commercials with a high joke count to sustain, it's also a long time to keep laughing at the same kinds of gags. One a week would probably suffice. 

But well done Charlie for resurrecting the corpse of Police Squad, dusting it down and standing it up for a new audience.