Year of the Rabbit, episode 1 review: if you can stand the potty mouth, Matt Berry's ribald comedy is great fun
Anyone with a low tolerance for the bluer bits of the Anglo-Saxon lexicon should probably offer a wide berth to Year of the Rabbit (Channel 4). Detective Inspector Rabbit, who patrols the seamier bits of east London in the 1880s, has possibly the pottiest mouth on television. Everyone else, however, should pile in.
The ribald and highly entertaining script is by Kevin Cecil and Andrew Riley, who have previously written for Veep and, further back, Black Books. But an additional gags credit goes to Matt Berry, who plays Rabbit with his usual fortissimo foghorn – the loudness extends to his bright blue frockcoat. He presumably ad libbed extra bum cracks on set. (He also composed the title and credits music.)
The set-up doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel. Rabbit is a boozy jaded detective whose long-suffering superior Chief Inspector Wisbech (a much-moustachioed Alun Armstrong) thrusts an eager squeaky-clean sidekick upon him in the shape of Wilbur Strauss (Freddie Fox), who as a student of criminology at Cambridge came top but also bottom of his year. Also muscling in is Wisbech’s adoptive daughter Mabel (Susan Wokoma), who is eager to anoint herself as the first ever policewoman. The trio are thwarted by cocksure colleague Tanner of the Yard (Paul Kaye, who can play hissing baddies in his sleep).
Each episode clocks in at 23 minutes, which isn’t much to establish character and sprint through a plot while stuffing every gap with a gag. Somehow it manages it. Freudians may note that the show has a bit of a bottom fixation, references to a---s and a---holes being never far from anyone’s lips. “Who wants to see how we fish opium out of sailors’ a---holes?” Rabbit asks a classroom of schoolkids on an outreach education project. But this is nothing if not an equal opportunity filth. There are roughly 10 smutty euphemisms for female copper.
The other pleasure of Year of the Rabbit is an evident love for the period. The writers have consulted the odd history book and pepper the script with mocking references to mesmerism, secret societies, the Victorian gentleman’s ankle fetish and freak shows. There was a lovely cameo for John Merrick, aka the Elephant Man. As played by David Dawson channelling John Hurt, he owes as much to Quentin Crisp. It’s Ripper Street with knob gags in, and Keeley Hawes as an evil crime boss to come. What, unless of course it isn’t your sort of thing, is not to like?
