‘A Touch of Cloth’: Charlie Brooker’s magnificent ode to ‘Airplane!’
While Charlie Brooker might be best known by a wider audience for his science fiction anthology series Black Mirror, the English writer and satirist has a back catalogue that spreads far and wide. Amongst his writing credits on the likes of Brass Eye and Nathan Barley is a hidden gem, a satirical take on the detective genre, A Touch of Cloth.
Arriving a year after Black Mirror first aired on Channel 4, A Touch of Cloth was written by Brooker and Daniel Maier, who had previously worked on Harry Hill’s TV Burp. With the two comic writing masters behind the show, A Touch of Cloth sees John Hannah play police detective Jack Cloth, and Suranne Jones play his colleague Anne Oldman.
Straight away, we see the kind of humour on offer in Brooker’s show in the title, a play on words of the British detective series A Touch of Frost and the British term “touching cloth”, which of course means being on the precipice of shitting oneself. Elsewhere, the likes of Julian Rhind-Tutt, Navin Chowdhry, Adrian Bower and Daisy Beaumont also star.
“It’s a gag-packed spoof of dark British detective serials in the sort of Messiah, Wire in the Blood mould,” Brooker had once told The Guardian around the time A Touch of Cloth was being released on Sky One back in 2012. “The idea was to do something that was just outrageously stupid as opposed to dark or satirical.”
By playing with the stereotypes and clichés of the crime drama while still using the melodramatic plotlines that the genre is known and loved for, Brooker subverted them into satirical brilliance. Jack Cloth, for example, is a walking, talking parody of the kind of hardboiled DCIs found across many detective movies and TV series like Columbo and Luther.
So while A Touch of Cloth is, at its root, a detective series, such a choice of genre only really gives way to what we would expect of a Charlie Brooker work: comedy. As for the inspiration for the show, Brooker noted that he had been greatly inspired by David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams’ 1980 disaster comedy movie Airplane!.
A parody of the disaster genre starring Leslie Nielsen, Robert Strack and Lloyd Bridges, Brooker found within Airplane! the perfect way to take the piss out of the detective film in A Touch of Cloth. Speaking of his impressions of the beloved movie, he noted, “We took Airplane! as the original mould. What I love about Airplane! and what I think a lot of subsequent parody movies got wrong was that all the actors in it, you recognised from other serious disaster movies. All the performances were completely straight.”
In fact, Brooker followed suit to Airplane!, which had been made after the writers bought the rights to a movie script called Zero Hour and rewrote it with a satire flavour. Brooker and Maier decided, in light of this, to buy the rights to a storyline from 2000s crime serial Messiah and used it as “pretty much the mould we used”.
While the likes of Black Mirror and Nathan Barley are often the first things we think of when it comes to Brooker, his catalogue extends into most areas of British culture. With A Touch of Cloth, he took his satire and wit to the level of mocking the kind of hardboiled detective series that have often dominated the small screen.
