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Series two, episode two
That thin line between stupid and clever isn’t always a funny one. The concluding part of Charlie Brooker’s would-be non-stop laughfest gets becalmed between metatextual policier spoofing and jokes about bumming. The inventive sight gags that distinguished our first stint with Jack Cloth (John Hannah) and Anne Oldman (Suranne Jones) have been largely sacrificed in favour of exhausting single entendres, while the repetition that begins as part of the joke ends up being plain repetitive.
Which is a shame, as it’s always fun watching serious actors (in this case, gnarled mobster Stephen Dillane and uppity politician Anna Chancellor) being very silly. The understandably threadbare plot, by the way, sees Cloth’s cover blown and Goodgirl (Chancellor) locking horns with Boss (Julian Rhind-Tutt) over whose running the city of Town. Rather more miss than hit; perhaps Karen Gillan and Adrian Dunbar, lined up for the imminent third series, can revive a concept that’s run out of steam rather quicker than we might have hoped.