Five nutty immigration police go off the rails in this daft and amusingly self-aware farce. With occasional improvisation, casually and cheerfully executed, our five characters set off on a bizarre journey of layered fantasy.
With the incoherent and slightly abstract perceptions of a small child or mental patient, they over-react to everything and are spectacularly ill-suited to any sort of organised life. Being behind on their quota of caught illegal immigrants they decide, naturally, that the best thing to do is to impersonate migrants in order to infiltrate their channels. They mentally reset, forgetting they’re really British, and begin to fantasize about life in the promised land, exposing our cultural oddities in the process.
This is mostly a madcap and zealous surreal sitcom microcluster, but running through it is the dark hangover of ancient jingoism, echoed by the tones and highlights of WW2-era iconography. Ghosts of a dead empire. The energy of the production, with all its infectious exuberance, is surprisingly neat and subtle if viewed from the right angle — relevant to our era without directly referencing it. A covertly racist zeitgeist taken through the looking-glass.
The actors effortlessly maintain the incongruity of their characters’ delusional transformations with a paradoxical smoothness and maintain a constant background mood even when uninvolved in a scene. Perhaps the script loses its edge slightly in a couple of places, and perhaps the ending isn’t as poignant as it could have been, but this is still a smart and entertaining hour and very much worth watching.
4/5 
Bernie Greenwood
(8 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
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