The Cleaner ★★★★

That Greg Davies is a very funny man is not news to anyone. Anyone who’s seen his work on Taskmaster, where he pairs his imposing size and intimidating countenance with a peerless knack for comic insults, will be familiar with his ability to draw forth guffaws. This ability is also evident in his turn as a child-loathing teacher in The Inbetweeners, and in his own sitcom Man Down, in which he subverts his authoritarian appearance as a hapless man-child completely incapable of managing his life.

So it’s no surprise that The Cleaner, written by and starring Davies, is a very funny show indeed. The schoolteacher-turned-gargantuan funnyman plays Wicky, a crime-scene cleaner tasked with tidying up the mess left after gruesome tragedies. Wicky takes pride in his work and the meticulous expertise he deploys in mopping up blood and guts and the various revolting detritus of human destruction. But he’s no crime-scene obsessive: though he’s a great cleaner, it’s still just a job, and at heart he’s an ordinary bloke who seeks no more sophisticated pleasures in life than a beer and a curry at the pub. It’s unfortunate for Wicky, then, that his job keeps dragging him into situations that require him to postpone his relaxations and engage with the array of weirdos found hanging around the crime scenes he’s assigned to.

The Cleaner is a modern sitcom with an unconventional premise, and yet in a way it follows the classic setup shows like Fawlty Towers, Cheers and Barney Miller have made great play from: situations into which any kind of fascinating or eccentric character can be easily introduced. Murder can happen anywhere and to anyone, and so it’s no effort for Davies to bring Wicky into contact with all sorts of oddballs. In the first episode, Wicky tries to scrub a kitchen clean of gallons of blood from a brutal stabbing and is confronted by the stabber herself. The relationship forged between Wicky and the murderer – a disenchanted housewife played by Helena Bonham Carter driven to off her husband– shifts between high farce and heartbreaking poignancy, and this is where the surprising part of The Cleaner comes into focus. That Davies is funny may be predictable, but this show has a heart and humanity that comes as a beautiful revelation.

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As previously mentioned, Wicky is a man who’d like to just get the cleaning over and done with and get on with his life. But the fact that he finds this so difficult isn’t just down to the complicated folks he becomes entangled with: Wicky is a man of deeper empathy than he’d like to admit, and it’s his curiosity about human nature that draws him into the lives of others as much as the vicissitudes of the job.

Each episode brings him into contact with a very different kind of sparring partner. From Bonham Carter’s tragically wistful husband-murderer, to David Mitchell’s priggish best-selling author with writer’s block, to Stephanie Cole’s elderly and somewhat sinister aristocrat, the cleaner sees all types. Sometimes it’s a matter of life and death, other times it’s simply part of his quest to unlock a secret or bring someone a measure of peace. In each meeting, Wicky brings a new perspective to someone’s life – as they do to his. Through the necessity of cleaning up what catastrophe leaves behind, different facets of the human experience are illuminated – and the gorgeous, awful, sad, silly reality of existence is exposed. Wicky never has any problem cleaning up the mess of death; the mess that is life may be trickier. But he does his best.

Don’t let the musing on the deeper themes of the show mislead you: again, we emphasise that this is a very funny show. Although minor characters pop in and out, each episode is essentially a two-hander between Davies and his guest star. The whip-smart verbal interplay is a delight, and Wicky is a marvellous character, equal parts empathy and irritability, and prone to comically bad luck. Sharp, funny, profound and warm, The Cleaner should cement Greg Davies in the top echelon of the comedy world.

The Cleaner is on ABC Entertains, Tuesday, 8.30pm.

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