Piglets: ITV’s “offensive” police comedy

This series set in a police training academy is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and simply embarrassing.

Reviewing television comedy is tricky. Rarely do the jokes work on the page, and when they do, who wants to spoil someone else’s punchlines? Sitcoms take time, too, to bed in: to reach that sweet spot where a writer can play on an audience’s carefully built expectations. The best and funniest TV comedy of the past four years, Tom Basden’s sharp and sweet Here We Go – it’s on iPlayer if you want to make a pretty miserable summer massively happier – began with a pilot that was only vaguely promising. But someone took a punt and commissioned a series, and thank God they did. I mean, the one where Paul (Jim Howick) takes a penknife to his inflatable swimming pool… Oh, Lord. (At this point, your correspondent breaks off to watch this for the 18th – and, er, 19th – time.)

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, Piglets, a comedy set in a police training academy by the people who, two decades ago, brought us Green Wing (its writers are Robert Harley, Victoria Pile, Fay Rusling, Oriane Messina, Richard Preddy and James Henry). ITV obviously has high hopes for it – behold its prime Saturday-night slot nestling up to Alan Carr – and why not? The publicity campaign has gone superbly, the Police Federation having deemed its title “offensive” and “disgusting” (bit of an own goal there, I feel). More to the point, it stars Mark Heap (who was also in Green Wing) and Sarah Parish as the two superintendents who must parent our not-very-bright/utterly moronic little piglets as they learn about de-escalation, arm locks and what not to have in the canteen. Both are brilliant comic actors, especially Heap, the mere sight of whose face makes me laugh. Only bees (and Tom Basden) are better at bumbling than him.

But – woe! – it’s patchier than EE’s coverage up at your parents’. When Bob (Heap), Julie (Parish) and their crazed assistant Melanie (Rebecca Humphries, on excellent form) are performing their pas de trois – unbeknown to Bob, Melanie is in love with him, which means she’s determined he’ll beat Julie to the newly vacant job of chief superintendent – you can see series two heading towards you out of the corner of your eye. If they’re just as idiotic as the recruits, they’re also loveable. You’ll know someone just like them at your own office: a man whose chief pleasure in life seems to be the hard-boiled egg he brings for lunch; a woman who has long since been driven half insane by paperwork; another woman, this one even lonelier than the others, who describes herself as an old bat to save everyone else the trouble of doing so first. They’re good together.

But when our six recruits are doing bantz in the locker room, it’s painfully laboured. There are – sorry – a lot of cock jokes. Some of these are funny: I laughed out loud at the paper aeroplane one (you had to be there). Most, however, are not (the expression “baloney-pony” isn’t, in itself, LOLs). And when we tip into – sorry again – fannies and turds, it’s cringe. Perhaps the problem is that the trainees seem to be there to tick boxes: a Muslim, a Hindu, a black guy and a (flirty) white woman; Paul (Jamie Bisping) is from a criminal family, and Leggo (Sam Pote) is the son of two top coppers.

Then again, perhaps this has another, more satirical and subversive purpose (and if only the writers had ramped this up). The police college is, of course, the British institution in microcosm, struggling under the burden of DEI schemes that may or may not be slightly mad at this point. The senior coppers spout stuff they don’t understand and mostly disdain, leaving the wisdom to come from the mouths of babes, however unwittingly. Take Paul, the dimmest of them all. Faced with the term “de-escalation”, he suggests it’s best tackled with a sachet, like a kettle (again, you had to be there). But he’s not always wrong. “What is unconscious bias?” asks Bob, a man whose class on just and unjust power is based on Melanie’s googling, and which will descend ultimately into a whiteboard diagram of the Superman multiverse. “It’s like, when, you’re not being fair when you’re asleep,” says Paul, an answer that I think pretty much nails it – whether you are woke, broke, or somewhere in-between.

Piglets
ITVX