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Sarah Parish, the lead star of ITV’s forthcoming police comedy Piglets, has said the controversial series is “silly, on steroids”.
The show isn’t even out yet, but it has caused a massive stir this past week with its title resulting in a damning statement from the Police Federation.
Tiffany Lynch, the deputy national chair of the group, said that the title Piglets – a reference to “pigs”, the derogatory term for police – was a “disgusting choice of language”.
But at the ITV press conference for the comedy where Parish did an onstage Q&A, there was no mention of the controversy over the name.
In the series, Parish plays plays a superintendent in charge of new staff recruits at a police academy. She and various superior staff members are trying to find a mole who has joined the police force “for the wrong reasons”.
Friday Night Dinner’s Mark Heap, who also plays a fellow superintendent, told the audience at the press conference: “Watch. It. Please.”
Parish also said to reporters that she had always wanted to work with Heap, and that they “had a lot of fun... it was a great playground for me and Mark to improvise”.
As well as calling the title “disgusting”, Lynch added that she saw it as “highly offensive to police officers risking their lives to protect the public every day, providing an emergency service”. She said the word was “inflammatory against a landscape of rising threats and violence against officers”.
“We should not be put at further risk for viewing numbers. Our officers deserve respect, not humiliation for the job they are undertaking”, she added.
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ITV responded with their own statement, saying: “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.”
In the first episode of the show, the word “Piglets” is shown to have been spray-painted by vandals on the sign of the police academy, and later cleaned up.
Towards the end of the episode, the police staff are seen booting a trainee out for ties to a right-wing organisation, showing the police staff as strict and unaccepting of hate.
The series also stars Callie Cooke, Ricky Champ, Ukweli Roach to name a few, and is out on ITV on 20 July.
