Interview: John Hannah, star of A Touch of Cloth

JOHN Hannah thought he was doomed to make an ordinary police series until he read the script and fell about laughing, writes Lisa Williams.

John Hannah could be forgiven for having a case of the post-Hollywood blues when he returned home to the UK after his character in the swords-and-sandals epic Spartacus was killed off. While he was States-side, the part of ruthless gladiator boss Batiatus afforded him daily doses of on-set sex and violence, whereas the roles this small island had to offer an actor of his age and stature seemed somewhat more pedestrian.

“There were doctor shows and detective shows and lawyer shows … and that was it, really,” says the 50-year-old Scottish actor, looking rugged yet handsome in a navy suit and serious salt-and-pepper stubble.

“And they are all a variation on the detective show: doctor shows are just people investigating diseases and so on. I really didn’t want to do that any more.”

Luckily, help came in the form of a script by Charlie Brooker. The journalist and professional cynic, known for his colourful diatribes against popular culture in the series Screenwipe and his newspaper column, has turned his attention to television detectives to create a two-part spoof called A Touch of Cloth.

“Anybody who knows the expression will probably know what to expect and where we’re going with this,” says Hannah who, despite being able to swear like a sailor, is giggling and can’t bring himself to elaborate on the meaning of the title.

The actor plays title character DCI Jack Cloth. With a drink problem and disastrous personal life, he’s in the mould of many detectives we’ve seen before. But with an impressive gag-per-minute rate, the series pokes an enormous amount of fun at the now-hackneyed genre.

“Before I read the script my thought was, ‘Oh cripes, another detective show …’ but I got the script and it was just a hoot,” explains Hannah, using a word far ruder than “cripes”.

To give a flavour of the show’s irreverent humour, one of the opening scenes sees Cloth and his obligatory female sidekick Anne Oldman (played by Suranne Jones) investigate a crime scene under the watchful eye of their shady assistant chief constable Tom Boss (Green Wing actor Julian Rhind-Tutt).

Entering the sitting room where a man’s body has been found, Cloth and Oldman start retching uncontrollably. The camera then switches to a shot of a picture of Piers Morgan in a frame.

“I don’t really know who he is,” says Hannah, laughing. “I know he used to be at the Daily Mirror and he now does TV. ”

So was there any – pun intended – corpsing on set? “There was a bit,” Hannah admits. “It was quite tricky not to laugh sometimes, because we were doing stuff which was just so insane.

“There was a bit with Suranne where we look at each other and it goes on a bit too long, turning into one of those moments where you’re like, ‘Are we going to kiss?’ That was quite hard. Julian couldn’t look at us at all.”

It must have been even trickier for Jones, who takes on the spoof role at the same time as her “straight” detective role in Scott and Bailey.

“It started getting tricky for her in the last week because she was about to go back into Scott and Bailey, so she was reading the script for that.

“We were sitting in the van one day and I said, ‘Come on, read us one of your scenes from your proper cop show’, and she read this scene out and it cracked me up as, literally, it could have been in Touch of Cloth.

“It was full of acronyms and actors talking in cop-ese. It sort of means I can’t watch any of those shows now without finding them hysterically funny.”

Hannah’s next role is equally colourful. His breakthrough performance was in Richard Curtis’s now-classic film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and it is to film he returns, this time, in a hard-hitting drama, The Wee Man, based on the life of gangster Paul Ferris.

“There’s still some controversy about that in Glasgow, but it’ll be interesting to see the reaction later on,” says Hannah, who is now based in London.

“It’s a gangster film but not in the mould of a British gangster film with Cockneys. It’s a period piece.

“I thought it was a good script, I hadn’t done anything in Scotland for a long time. It was kind of cool to be back with a whole bunch of serious hardcore Jocks, y’know?”

•  A Touch of Cloth begins on Sky Atlantic on Sunday.