When it was announced that ITV had ordered a new comedy from the creators of Green Wing about new recruits at a fictional police training academy, I was ecstatic. Victoria Pile’s wonderfully wacky hospital sitcom (which turns 20 this year) followed up her era-defining sketch show Smack the Pony and turned out to be one of the funniest and most inventive series of a golden period of British TV comedy.

With surreal interludes, an epic love triangle and a brilliant young cast including Stephen Mangan, Tamsin Greig, Michelle Gomez and Olivia Colman, it became a worthy cult classic. So I am heartbroken to report that Piglets is a bitter disappointment.

Part of ITV’s admirable attempt to carve out prime time space for new comedy on Saturday nights (following on from Alan Carr’s Changing Ends), Piglets had already prompted outrage over its title, which the Police Federation of England and Wales called “highly offensive”. ITV defended the decision as a “comedic and endearing play on words”. Turns out the comedy itself is so completely unremarkable that its name may be the only thing anyone remembers about it.

The first episode takes a tell-don’t-show approach to introducing us to the core gang on their first day at college – icebreakers so we could learn their names and one character literally asking another “so what brings you here then?”. We met Dev, Geeta and Afia, none of whom got much screen time, and Steph, Leggo and Paul who did. Steph (Callie Cooke) was only there to win back her ex, Leggo (Sam Pote) because his parents are top brass and Paul (Jamie Bisping) because his criminal family want him to be an inside plant. Overseeing matters were Superintendents Julie Spry and Bob Weekes, played by the series’ big names, Sarah Parish and Green Wing alum Mark Heap.

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Parish – hilarious in BBC spoof W1A – has been given a horrible wig and inexplicably ruddy complexion to play the no nonsense Spry, likely on the basis of the misguided assumption that she wouldn’t be funny without an ugly comedy makeover. She deserves better than this script, which strived for absurdity but never came close to going far enough, like a colleague who describes themselves as “a bit crazy, me!” because they eat their Twix before their sandwich at lunchtime.

If you’re going to set a comedy in the world of policing in 2024, the jokes need to be a lot smarter than a gag about a Far Right new recruit being quite polite. And given recent news stories about toxic police culture, one line where a trainer alludes to an incident where he went “a little too far” doesn’t sit particularly well either.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Piglets against Green Wing, but the series invited those unfavourable comparisons. The quirky editing nodded to Green Wing’s arresting visual style, using split screens instead of playing with speed, while its jaunty soundtrack called back to the former’s perfectly weird Jonathan Whitehead score.

Its characters were deflated balloon copycats – Leggo aped Guy Secretan’s loudmouthed machismo, Steph filled the quirky everywoman role of Caroline Todd, Paul brought Martin Dear’s nervy naivety and harried administrator Melanie (Rebecca Humphries) faintly echoed Sue White’s eccentricity.

It was most stark with Heap, who blends the daftness of his Friday Night Dinner character Jim with Dr Alan Statham’s mannerisms and tendency to over-egg an already poor choice of metaphor (describing the new intake as “lusting for knowledge like newborn lambs searching greedily for their mothers’ teats. And we are those teats…low hanging and full of milky goodness”).

The difference is that Green Wing made its characters utterly believable, peculiar though they were. In the self-conscious Piglets, no-one feels like a real person despite the actors clearly giving it their all.

For a new series to feel this stale compared to one made two decades ago is nothing short of criminal.

‘Piglets continues next Saturday at 10pm on ITV1. The series is streaming on ITVX.