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The Cleaner stars Greg Davies, whose character is called Wicky but that’s clearly irrelevant, since Greg Davies only does Greg Davies, with his typical ‘man angry with the world’ schtick as soon as it begins, because he has to clean up a kitchen where a woman killed her husband, and it’s the last job of the day, yet he’s got evening plans for a curry with his workmates.
He moans they kept a white rug in the kitchen, and that the ‘tattooed MILF’ he’s been seeing looks like she’s got a “treasure map” on her back.
There’s a lot of screaming and shouting because he wants to get off home, but when the murderer – Helena Bonham Carter – comes in, she’d rather capture him at gunpoint and stick him in the cupboard. Can he shout/sweet-talk her round?
Along the way, there’s the age-old dullness abvout being held against your will, plus a fantasy dance sequence involving sitting on a toilet having a poo.
However, it can’t have taken long for Davies to push this turd out, and my only fantasy involved this coming to an end as quickly as possible.
Can’t we have another series of Man Down instead? It’s not as if he would’ve spent long writing this, since it’s based on a German comedy, Der Tatortreiniger (Crime Scene Cleaner) by Mizzi Meyer, which ran for 7 series from 2011 to 2018.
The Cleaner begins on Friday September 10th on BBC1 at 9.30pm, and then all six episodes will be on the BBC iPlayer. It’s not yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD.
Episode 1: 0/10
Director: Tom Marshall
Producer: Sam Ward
Writer: Greg Davies
Cast:
Wicky: Greg Davies
Sheila: Helena Bonham Carter
Neeta: Shobu Kapoor
Ruth: Zita Sattar
Man Boy: Paul Chowdhry
Wicky double: Rhys Dodman
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.