If you’ve ever read Alan Partridge’s autobiography ‘I, Partridge’, you’ll remember the chapter where he details his detective series, ‘Swallow’. It’s a morass of cop cliches and odd ideas; a police procedural from the Monkey Tennis mind.

BBC One’s pilot for the police comedy drama Walter seems to have come from the same place, but by way of committee.

It’s on record that we at CultBox are big fans of Adrian Dunbar, especially as the world-weary put-upon copper Hastings in Line of Duty. In Walter he’s…put-upon world-weary copper DI Walter Gambon, a detective so bland that it’s a wonder his co-workers can remember him. He’s struggling through a script where the targets for humour are soft (take that fat people and foreigners!) and any drama is undermined by creaky British sarcasm and dick jokes.

It’s not Dunbar’s fault, though comedy is not his forte. It’s creator Ruby Solomon’s script. Walter’s a character built of cliches and disinterest. He’s an ‘old-fashioned’ cop. The kind that’s been ‘old-fashioned’ for half a century now. So old-fashioned he uses a Sainsbury’s slogan that hasn’t been used since 1991 as a punch-line. He’s got a precocious daughter who sounds like a cream tea brought to life. He owns a dog and is near-brankrupt because he owes money to his backstory. Presumably the pilot didn’t have the budget to include a drinking problem.

As much a cut-out cop as Walter is, his co-workers are tissue-paper folk made to dress his world. Utopia‘s Alexandra Roach, again a terrific actor that we love to see, is wasted as ‘Welsh Detective with Mother issues’. Kayvan Novak wanders around with nothing to do but play on a GameBoy, a terrible waste of both comic talent and a GameBoy.

As Vexed – the Beeb’s previous stab at making cops juggle perps, pathos, and bathos – showed, British comedy-drama usually falls between the two stools of comedy and drama. It’s lucky to wobble on one. Rarely does a show manage to plant a steady foot on both. Walter faceplants unspectacularly between the LOLs and the #seriousface with a dull thud, never troubling either.

It’s difficult not to slip into hyperbole describing Walter. It’s neither funny nor dramatic, oddly-paced and weighted by exposition. It’s worn out. Boring. Mind-beige. “Do you think I’m old school?” Walter asks his colleague. “No, just old,” she replies. And that attempt at repartee is the best exchange in an hour. An hour.

As this is an out-of-the-blue pilot dumped in August, it’ll likely never make it to full series. You won’t need DI Walter Gambon – or Swallow – to solve the mystery of why.

Airs at 9pm on Friday 8 August 2014 on BBC One.