Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Cleaner’ On BritBox, Where Greg Davies Is A Crime Scene Cleaner Who Gets Embroiled Personal Dramas At Every Stop

COVID has forced series writers and producers to be very creative with how they shoot shows. But with those restrictions comes some interesting premises. Greg Davies, best known for The Inbetweeners and Taskmaster, has found a way to make a funny show with unique points of view in each episode, while limiting scenes to one to three people. Read on for more…

THE CLEANER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Crime scene tape surrounds a house. A man walks right under the tape, past the police officer patrolled there. He’s warned by the cop inside that the scene is bad, and indeed it is. Blood’s everywhere. That’s when he puts down his spray bottles to get to work.

The Gist: Paul “Wicky” Wickstead (Greg Davies) isn’t a cop. He works for a company that cleans crime scenes. He knows how to get blood out of a white carpet. So he knows what he’s doing. He’s also dismayed at the fact that blood is all over the kitchen where a wife stabbed her husband 38 times. “Five would have done it,” he exclaims.

Wicky wants to get to the pub because it’s curry night, and he wants to be there when the naan comes right out of the oven. But as he starts cleaning, a neighbor comes by with a pie, which he kicks out of her hands in self-defense. But he finds out more about the new widow, who’s buggered off. She doesn’t bake, which is why the neighbor never trusted her.

Then someone else comes to the door; Sheila (Helena Bonham Carter), the widow herself. She takes off her overcoat to show a blouse full of blood, and she holds Wicky at gunpoint; now he’ll never get to the pub. She makes him stand in the bathroom while she drops a deuce, and generally talks to him about why she snapped and killed her husband in a rage instead of leaving him. Part of it involves his modeling… scale models, dozens of them. He even made the model of her dream vacation spot. But Wicky still has no idea why she would kill him instead of leave.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The mundanity of how Wicky treats his not-so-mundane job reminds us of another British comedy import, Hit Men, though Wicky would clean up what the women from that show would create.

Our Take: Davies, who might be familiar to American audiences as one of the hosts of Taskmaster, created and wrote The Cleaner; each episode is essentially a two-person play, with a few other people coming in and out of the main scene to add a little depth. But what Davies has a talent for is to not only give Wicky some particular character traits that help keep his character from being just a 6’8″ guy in a clean suit, but to create pretty full characterizations of the people Wicky encounters at the various cleanup scenes.

The first episode remarkably tells an entire story arc in 28 minutes, especially when Carter shows up. Davies’ writing, along with Carter’s performance, conveys to us all of the feelings that went through Sheila’s head, making her go from crazy to sympathetic back to crazy again. But the story goes beyond that, as she tries to convince Wicky that he needs to shake his life up just as she wanted to, and that the two of them should escape to her dream getaway before she turns herself in.

To see what other situations Wicky gets into, we watched the second episode, where David Mitchell plays Terrence Redford, an author whose grandmother dies in a wood burning stove accident. But he somehow is more concerned with his novel deadline and getting quiet than his grief. And, while that story is a bit different than the first one, Davies still manages to complete a well-examined arc in 28 minutes while getting a lot of funny material in.

In a way, The Cleaner is anthology, even though Wicky is in every episode, getting angry every time someone calls him just a “cleaner”. “I’m a crime scene cleaner,” he always replies, explaining how he knows how to clean what others deem to be impossible. Even though we don’t really see him doing that much of that work, we know he takes pride in it, and that’s a big part of what makes Wicky more than just a workaday lug, and seeing him play off the different characters he encounters is fun to watch.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Wicky says yes to Sheila’s offer for him to join her at her favorite vacation spot, but he comes to his senses.

Sleeper Star: Zita Sattar is in a few episodes as Ruth, the police detective who calls Wicky to clean scenes. She’s there to bust Wicky about going to curry night and other boring aspects of his life.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Cleaner works as a comedy, but it also works as light drama, as Davies has found an ingenious way to make each episode completely different.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Cleaner On BritBox