‘The Cleaner’ Will Scrub Up for Christmas 2026
It’s Robert Webb’s turn to guest star in Greg Davies' ‘The Cleaner' as the series lands its first festive special.
It took three seasons to get there, but The Cleaner has finally reached a level of popularity in the U.K. that it was deemed worthy of a BBC Christmas special. The Greg Davies comedy, which was initially commissioned in 2021, has been a slow-burn sleeper hit over the show’s five-year lifespan, and while there’s no Season 4 yet commissioned, the announcement that the special would run a full hour instead of the usual 30 minutes suggests fans shouldn’t worry too much about its future.
Based on the (actually funny!) German comedy series Der Tatortreiniger (Crime Scene Cleaner) created by Ingrid Lausund, Davies stars as Paul ‘Wicky’ Wickstead, a “state-certified cleaning technician.” His job is to scrub up all the bits of flesh, guts, brains, skull fragments, and bone while getting bloodstains out of the furniture and carpets from murder scenes after the police have finished collecting evidence. Only, the thing is, because he’s a nobody, a gossipy, sympathetic ear who doesn’t seem all that bright, he finds himself, time and again, face to face with murderers who all but confess.
Even if the series were just Davies, this pitch-perfect satire of the typical British cozy crime would almost certainly have found an audience. However, the series’ other genius conceit is in casting some of the U.K.’s most well-known actors as the murderers of the week, each of whom seems committed to winning an unspoken contest of who can turn in the strangest character performance that season.
Here’s the Christmas Special synopsis:
In the show’s first-ever hour-long special, Wicky reluctantly joins his girlfriend Ruth and her friends Andrew and Andrea on a hiking holiday in the Italian Dolomites. When an accident occurs, he’s forced to spend the rest of the trip at a remote mountain hotel while Ruth heads off to enjoy the great outdoors. Surrounded by an eccentric hotel manager, an array of peculiar guests, and a cast of increasingly suspicious staff, Wicky’s boredom soon turns to paranoia...
Davies returns as Wicky with Zita Sattar (Years & Years) as his girlfriend/partner in crime solving, PC Ruth Edwards. The one-hour special will also boast multiple A-list comedians including Robert Webb (Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping)* as Andrew, Tori Allen-Martin (Death Valley) as Andrea, and Peter Serafinowicz (The Gentlemen) as the hotel manager.
(*David Mitchell already guest starred in The Cleaners’ inaugural season.)
Director Tom Marshall (Ted Lasso) once again returned to helm the installment, from a script written (and improv-ed) by Davies, with Gareth Edwards producing. Vivien Muller-Rommel executive produces.
The Cleaner’s first-ever Christmas Special is currently filming in the U.K. It will premiere on BBC One during the “2026 festive period” (aka sometime between December 20 and January 2). It is expected to follow on BritBox, but the timing remains unknown.
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