Fair Cop?

Feel The Force is a sitcom about two WPCs in Edinburgh. It stars Rosie Cavaliero and Michelle Gomez as comedy coppers Frank and Bobbins and I was hoping it would be good. And I had good reason to hope too. Gomez is one of the most watchable things on TV as Green Wing’s raving administrator Sue White and the writer, Georgia Pritchett, is one of the folk behind Smack The Pony.

Sadly it was woeful. The sort of woe that gives you a tummy-ache and makes you feel slightly overcome with melancholia and other such Victorian-sounding ailments.

In sitcom-land there’s been a distinct shift away from purely plot-based comedy in recent years and the laughs more often than not come from the oddball behaviour of the protagonists rather than the plots themselves. In other words the plot is almost an incidental part as all this now does is give viewers the opportunity to see the characters expose more of their failings. Think Ricky Gervais or Larry David rather than My Family and you get the idea.

Last night’s episode of Feel The Force, though, couldn’t tell which way it wanted to go. Was it a plot-based comedy, was it a character-based comedy, was it a quirky foibles-based comedy?

Its TV listing in my head went something like this: ‘The wacky policewomen (For so they are. Honest!), who sometimes behave in a really bizarre way for no apparent reason, babysit the inspector’s daughter and go after a wanted man – with hilarious consequences…’

Essentially it was a bad idea poorly executed and that’s a shame because it has the seeds of something really funny and it certainly has the pedigree to be so much better. But this is a lame horse and if you possessed a horse this lame you would shoot it in a tender moment of equine euthanasia. Or force-feed it port so it would suffer from gout or die of ennui…