'The Cleaner' Is the Britcom You Didn’t Know You Needed

I was a sitcom kid growing up. I snuck in my fair share of hour-long series when my parents weren’t looking. However, on reflection, most of what I gravitated towards were comedic, caper-based shows like Cheers, Golden Girls, Roseanne, and then eventually – thanks to PBS – Britcoms like Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, and the king of sketch comedy, Monty Python.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood, the balance shifted, and I landed and stayed firmly in hour-long drama territory.  I love to laugh, but over the decades, I have become so picky about what’s funny to me that, with few exceptions, my interest in half-hour comedy is pretty low. All of this is my stem-winding way of telling my fellow sitcom exiles that The Cleaner — created and written by, and starring Greg Davies — might be the answer to your (fairly low-priority, secular) prayers.

Paul Wickstead, known to all as Wicky, is a very tall middle-aged guy from Birmingham whose professed only goals in life are pub-centric. He wants to get down to The White Horse on Fridays pretty sharpish so he can get the first crack at the delicious naan the pub owner bakes for curry night. He wants to win a horse in the annual Christmas Day raffle (how Mervyn manages to furnish a horse for this event every year is never addressed, and I will be asking about it should I have the opportunity to interview Davies one day). He claims that he just wants to make enough money to cover his expenses and get hangover-level drunk with his friends weekly.