Piglets, the ITV sitcom about trainee cops, has been renewed for a second season despite being critically panned and branded “highly offensive” by a police body.
The series, set in a police training college, stars Sarah Parish and Mark Heap as the two superintendents overseeing the training of a fresh batch of recruits.
Speaking in the Reading Between The Lines podcast, one of the show’s actors Ricky Champ revealed that ITV are sticking with the series despite being critically panned.
“Piglets has been commissioned for series two,” he said. “It’s crazy because we got absolutely slammed.”
“The first series came out and it was met with absolute venom – across the board. Vemon from all these critics. We live in a very critical world at the moment, especially for comedy.”
“Immediately, I thought, ‘That’s that done.’”
However, Champ said the show received good viewing figures despite the negative criticism, “and “ITV obviously noticed that”.
The show was critically panned across the board upon its initial release in July, with The Independent’s TV critic Nick Hilton writing in his two-star review that the comedy was just “not funny”.
“Piglets looks like a rush job,” wrote Hilton. “The characters are underdeveloped, their relationships undercooked. The comedy is puerile and intermittent; too many of the jokes are missing a proper punchline. From The Thin Blue Line to Black Ops, it’s proved difficult to make an effective television comedy about the police – and Piglets does nothing to change that.”
When the show came out, the show’s title, which references the derogatory term “pig”, was called “highly offensive” by Tiffany Lynch, the acting national chair of the Police Federation of England and Wales.
She said: “It is a disgusting choice of language to use for the title of a TV programme.
“I find it incredulous that this has passed through checks and balances at an organisation made up of people who at any time have or may need the support and assistance of the police.”
Lynch called the title “inflammatory against a landscape of rising threats and violence against officers”, adding: “We should not be put at further risk for viewing numbers, our officers deserve respect, not humiliation for the job they are undertaking.
“It is incredibly dangerous to incite more negativity and misinformation against a public sector service that’s already under so much pressure.”
Responding to the criticism, ITV said: “Piglets is a fictional new comedy about a police training academy and the title is not intended to cause any offence, it’s a comedic and endearing play on words to emphasise the innocence and youth of our young trainees.”
