I hope you like Greg Davies as much as I do because there is going to be no escaping from this man of many hats onscreen this autumn. He is already presiding over Taskmaster season 18, the most unique game show on TV on Thursday nights on C4. He is also about to return in the quizmaster's chair on Sky Max's Never Mind The Buzzcocks on October 16. And now on he is wearing his sitcom hat in The Cleaner season 3, which is available as a box set on BBC iPlayer and is airing on BBC One on Friday nights.
The Cleaner — also written by the star and loosely inspired by a hit German comedy called Der Tatortreiniger is something of a departure for Davies. After making a memorable breakout splash as the head Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners the former real-life teacher has fronted sitcoms before, but nothing like this one. Both Man Down and Cuckoo traded on Davies' talent for capturing a kind of manic haplessness, with him usually at the centre of chaos if not actually creating the chaos himself.
The tone is noticeably different here to his other roles, even if there is still plenty of his trademark physical humor. As VW-driving crime scene cleaner Paul "Wicky’" Wickstead he is literally there to sort of the mess left by others. Which he inevitably does in a comic way, but there's a darker, more melancholy undertow as well as laugh-out-loud moments.
Each episode is a self-contained standalone installment, with a different scenario for Wicky to deal with and a different guest, a little like the anthology series Inside No 9, but with less gothic horror. Previous runs have boasted luminaries including Helena Bonham Carter and David Mitchell. This time round we are promised, coincidentally, Inside No 9's Steve Pemberton, as well as Games of Thrones stars Conleth Hill and Gemma Whelan.
The opener, entitled "The Reunion", certainly has a distinct feel to it. There does not appear to have been a crime. Instead, Wicky has been called in to break out the bleach and mop up the blood after a shiny grand piano has crashed through an upstairs banister and squashed someone in a large suburban mansion. It soon turns out that the house — and very flashy car in the sweeping gravel drive — is owned by Justin, an old schoolfriend-done-good played by Ghosts star Ben Willbond.
Wicky and Justin are soon recalling their childhoods over coffee and discussing how their lives diverged. Could things have turned out differently? Could Wicky be living the high life now rather than still be roughing it in a flat in the road he grew up in. Soon other old mates turn up as Justin gets the playground gang back together, with inevitably comic consequences alongside the nostalgic eighties pop soundtrack.
To go into further detail would spoil how thing pan out, but this definitely feels like a swerve for both The Cleaner and Davies. It’s a long way from his stand-up routines about his eccentric family and embarrassing things his mum says. This is a man who memorably wrote a show called Firing Cheeseballs At A Dog. There is more emotional depth on display here. Things are never quite as they seem. He even looks different, slimmer than in the past.
I first saw Davies in a stand-up comedy competition two decades ago. Future stars Rhod Gilbert and Kerry Godliman were also in the final but Davies stood out and clearly had star charisma. There was much more to his stage presence than his imposing 6 foot 8 inch frame which he joked was down to a diet that mostly consisted of Ginsters pies.
From the very start, there were comparisons with Rik Mayall. Not just because of the striking physical resemblance but also a slightly unpredictable glint in the eye that both shared. Davies was lucky enough to work with Mayall in Man Down shortly before the star's death, where Mayall played his father. Davies described Mayall at the time as "a force of nature." He could have been talking about himself.
Davies still has that unpredictability that makes him so exciting but in The Cleaner this time round he is doing something different. I believe it is called "proper acting". Will we be seeing him do "Hamlet" or "King Lear" next? Maybe not for a while, but The Cleaner shows that although he might be trimmer these days there is a lot more to Greg Davies than meets the eye.
