This British crime comedy knows how to pull the bloodstained rug out from under you

The Cleaner (season 2) ★★★½

The signature shot of this British comedy was laid down in the first episode. Crime scene cleaner Paul “Wicky” Wickstead (Greg Davies, the show’s creator) stood unexpectedly facing the killer whose handiwork with a knife he’d been hired to remove – suburban wife Sheila (Helena Bonham Carter). Neither knew what to make of the other.

Tall and stout, Wicky towered over Sheila, but given the amount of her late husband’s blood that he was mopping up, Wicky was terrified of the tiny fugitive. They looked at each other in full-length profile: the contrast was comical, but the dynamic was the opposite of what you expected. Inverting expectations is what The Cleaner excels at. It’s silly when you expect solemn, revealing when you expect repartee. That bloodstained rug? It’s slowly being pulled out from under you.

Greg Davies plays Paul ‘Wicky’ Wickstead, a cleaner of crime scenes, in The Cleaner.

It all makes sense when you look at these chamber-piece half hours – essentially Wicky and someone he encounters at his latest place of business – as observations on life forged in the shadow of death. A stranger’s demise is a gig for the job-proud Wicky, and a time of sometimes painful loss for those behind, and the combination makes for awkward, telling exchanges. Wicky is a kind of emotional first responder, even if he lacks the training to professionally detach himself.

Based on the long-running German comedy Der Tatortreiniger, which aired seven succinct seasons starting in 2011, the British remake of The Cleaner debuted to favourable notices in 2021. It built on Davies’ appeal, whether it was playing the exasperated father in the scripted comedy Cuckoo, or the diligent retorts he dished out as the host of the game show Taskmaster. Introspection, not irritation, felt like a timely pivot.

Greg Davies as Paul “Wicky” Wickstead and Harriet Walter as new pub landlady Lisa in The Cleaner.

“I make jokes when I’m frightened,” Wicky tells a hulking bartender (Charlie Rawes) in the first episode of the second season, and the series has plenty of them. But perhaps that’s also a way of saying that Wicky is often frightened – not just of hulking bartenders, but where his life is going. Aged 50, family-free and mostly dedicated to his local Shropshire pub, the White Horse and its five-pound curry night (“unlimited naans!“), Wicky has lingering self-doubts that outweigh even his love of 1990s music.

Revisiting the first season, you see that while the big names were frontloaded – Bonham Carter was followed by Ludwig’s David Mitchell – and the narrative dug deeper into Wicky towards the end of the six episodes. The season one finale, where Wicky was assigned a post-shootout holiday home to remediate only to encounter a girlfriend from two decades prior, Maggie (Jo Hartley), challenged his memories and made him look anew at his circumstances.

That level of self-examination and mordant revelation continues with the new episodes. The first one, which has the outline of a Harold Pinter play, also provides a pub owner, Lisa (Harriet Walter), with a cynical view of life and love for Wicky to spar with, and she lands enough blows to have him rethinking the new girlfriend he’s been trying to impress.

The Cleaner will always be a comedy, complete with daft montages (the pub episode has an all-timer), but there’s now a growing degree of emotional introspection working parallel to the blurted, inappropriate gags. Davies knows that not everything in Wicky’s life can be left as spotless as his latest crime scene.

The Cleaner screens on Tuesday, April 22, at 8.30pm, on ABC Entertains and ABC iview.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.