On paper, there is a lot to like about period police comedy Year of the Rabbit (Channel 4). For a start, it stars Matt Berry, also currently playing a vampire in the TV version of What We Do in the Shadows. The writers, Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, have won Emmys for their work on Veep. And Keeley Hawes is in it.
The idea also sounds promising. It has been described as a Victorian version of The Sweeney, but it is really more like Ripper Street played for laughs: a heady mix of period detail, gleeful anachronism and baroque profanity.
Detective Inspector Rabbit (Berry) is a rough, hard-drinking, one-eyebrowed (not a monobrow; a dog chewed the right one off) copper, newly saddled with a rookie partner (Freddie Fox). They are in turn shadowed by the chief inspector’s daughter Mabel (Susan Wokoma), who is determined to become the Met’s first female police officer.
In the opening scene, we see Rabbit roundly abusing a suspect: threatening him, planting evidence in his pocket, and finally slamming his head nose-first on to the desk. We then pull back to discover that Rabbit is actually demonstrating what policemen do all day for a classroom full of schoolchildren, using their teacher as a stand-in. “Now,” he says. “Who wants to see how we fish opium out of sailors’ arseholes?” Little hands shoot up.
Shortly after this moment, my predisposed goodwill towards Year of the Rabbit began to ebb. Beneath its vulgar, frenetic energy, something seemed to be misfiring. There were a few genuinely funny moments – the Elephant Man appearing as an informant, for one – but there were more gags that I simply watched tumbleweed by.
Year of the Rabbit is too arch to seat itself in the period, but neither is it a full-on parody of costume drama. It veers jarringly from silly to gruesome and back – childish gags, adult violence. This could be a nod to the comparative savagery of the era, but there is a callousness at work that feels very modern.
The character of Rabbit is a little hard to invest in: junkyard-dog mean, cartoonishly dissolute, coarser than wholegrain mustard. It is not even clear whether he is good at his job, or hopelessly incompetent. He is insufficiently deluded – unlike Berry’s more masterly comic creation, Toast – to hold your sympathy from one scene to the next. And his swearing is so non-stop as to be ultimately desensitising.
The plot, although complex, is often treated as a cursory formality. In this episode it involved the body of a dead woman and an MP, and it was solved to the general satisfaction of all concerned. “I’m getting out my loose-ends book,” said the chief inspector. “I’m writing ‘Tied up’”. That line says a lot about a show that, at times, seems to revel in its own slapdashery.
To be fair, there is a lot of fun to be had just watching Berry maraud through it all. His gift for foul language, though sorely overrelied upon here, is nevertheless immense. His way with rhyming slang is almost as prodigious. Strangely, with a face as comically elastic as his, I sort of missed that chewed-off eyebrow. The remaining one was left working overtime.
Funny is a hard thing to pronounce upon – some viewers will no doubt find Year of the Rabbit spot on. And it is almost always unfair to judge a comedy series by its first episode, or even, on occasion, by its first series. I have peered into the future, and I am happy to say that episode two is a bit better than episode one, and episode three better still.
It may simply be a question of Year of the Rabbit finding its feet, for relationships between the characters to develop beyond the mere exchange of insults, and for the plot, which extends across the series, to take hold. There is too much proved talent behind the enterprise to write it off at this stage.
But there is a moment at the top of episode three that still feels telling. Rabbit is explaining the fresh bruises on his face to Gwen the barmaid. “It all started last Thursday …” he begins, before halting abruptly. “You know what? I can’t be arsed.” It’s essentially a gag about not having a gag, and it is hard not to see it as a missed opportunity.
