‘Cops’ Enters 18th Year Of Wife-Beating Voyeurism

hecklerspray quite simply loves World’s Wildest Police Chases, Channel Five’s regular Sunday night treat. So good is the show, infact, that it almost makes up for all the other bilge they broadcast rolled into one.

We ask you … what better way is there to enter the working week than amidst a shakily-filmed sea of hilarious drunken rednecks and their veering pickup trucks (pig in passenger seat entirely optional)?

The icing on the cake, of course, is the host … clear throat, deep gravelly voice … ‘Sheriff John Burnell’. Burnell is never far off the mark, be it delivering immacutely-timed quips (’he won’t be hijacking a camper van full of nuns …. IN JAIL!!!!’) or emerging from the scene of a devastating traffic accident, just in time - it would seem - to flash his ivory-tombstone teeth and perform a link to camera.

Johnny and his car-crashing antics would be nothing, though, without the big bad grandaddy of them all. Cops, the officially stamped and sponsored TV show of backwoods American idiocy, and original reality TV show, has recently been commissioned for it’s 18th consecutive series.

That’s right. If Cops was a human being, it could vote.

Quite what party Cops would vote for, however, remains a mystery. The Federation Of Spouse-Thumping Fork-Lift-Truck Drivers, maybe? The Coalition Of The Undereducated? The League Of Shirt-Removing Alcoholic Gunmen Whose Beer Bellies Shift Like The Tides Of The Ocean As Overenthusiastic Lawmen Piledrive Electric Tazors Into Them?

It’s a tough one to call.

Apparently the 18th season is to launch with a two-hour special - it’s 600th episode, no less - which involves ‘officers chasing a fleeing suspect and mediating an incident involving a feuding couple’. Pushing the boundaries of the format, then.

Still. At least Cops is entertaining (you know, in a braindead, illicit-substance-smoking sort of way). What do the Brits have to offer in terms of all-action reality TV?

Airport - some fat bloke with a goatee babbling into a walkie-talkie while precisely nothing happens. Redcoats - a bunch of disturbing loners stalk around their Butlins-shaped kingdom scaring children left, right and centre. Life Of Grime - some binmen do some binmen-related things, occasionally stopping to talk about their lives as binmen.

Sneer if you must. In TV terms at least, those doughnut-scoffing yankee officers have got it sussed.

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Listen to Bill Hicks’ ‘Cops’ routine on ‘Rant In E Minor’ here

[story by C J Davies]