Sam Bain

Behind the scenes: Peep Show 6

PICTURE GALLERY: Sam Bain, co-writer of Channel 4 comedy Peep Show, reveals a sneak peek of the new series featuring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. The sixth series, made by Objective Production, will air this autumn.

Peep Show to return for seventh series

Channel 4 has commissioned a seventh series of Bafta-winning sitcom Peep Show before the sixth series has even aired. C4 entertainment and comedy head Andrew Newman confirmed that Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's sitcom would return for a further series, which is slated for next year. It is next due on screens this summer.

Final episode of the sitcom from writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. It's sharply written as you'd expect from the writers of the unassailable Peep Show, and Swift and Lloyd-Pack make an engaging double act that deserve a second series. And Jane Asher is in it, so what's not to like?

The final episode of this so-so sitcom features its main characters, two single elderly men, competing for the affections of a Belarusian prostitute in Soho - a plotline that's a long way from Galton and Simpson, to say the least. But then, this is the Noughties, and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong were also behind the enjoyably risqué Peep Show.

It's not Withnail And I, but this gentle comedy from Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong has proved a hit.

If I hadn't known that new Saturday night sitcom The Old Guys was from Peep Show pair Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, would I have given it the time of day? Probably not. At first glance this was just another variant on the Odd Couple theme: mismatched housemates bitch and bicker, the twist being that this pair had one foot in the grave.

And there was certainly a touch of the Meldrews about Tom and Roy as they railed against a future that promised prostrates the size of Spacehoppers and joked about who'd get Alzheimer's first. But there was a touching hint of vulnerability amid the black comedy and a script that refreshing refused to dumb down for a mainstream Saturday night audience. "I don't want my daughter to take me to the toilet - it's not a Ken Loach film!" declared Tom, flying deliriously over the heads of his viewers.

The old guys in The Old Guys are engaged in a sedate but still desperate competition to appear less old than they are, and, specifically, less old than each other. In the first of this new sitcom, the pair institute a competition to prove which has the stronger bladder. Caught short at their neighbour Sally's party, Tom and Roy end up peeing in her kitchen sink. Fortunately they get away with this and no one notices. Oh, no they don't! Sally discovers them mid-leak. Reaction shot. Cue music, applause and credits.

I was hoping for a little more from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the creators of the blissful Peep Show. But although their subject is age, this is a piece of juvenilia, brought to the screen many years after its first drafts. Happily for us, but sadly for the show, comedy has moved on in the meantime. Thanks to Peep Show, among other programmes, it is now twice as hard to make work a multicamera, two-set sitcom, videoed in front of a live audience. Thanks also to Peep Show, we expect comedy characterisation to go deeper than tired divisions between tidy and slobby, introvert and extrovert. At the moment, the best ways to read nuance into the pair is to imagine that Tom, played as a decayed but still snobbish student by Roger Lloyd Pack, is an older version of Peep Show's Jeremy. That would make Clive Swift's Roy, for whom a cravat is never out of the question, Mark.

Coming from the comedy genius minds of Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show) and Simon Blackwell (The Thick Of It), we were hoping for Peep Show with a Bus Pass and Arthritis. And we almost got it. But the tone was wrong (nowhere near dark enough or real enough) and, instead of being fresh and funny, it was just another humdrum BBC1 sitcom.

There's more realism in The Old Guys than Not Going Out, within the comic boundaries that allow characters to bet on holding off going to the toilet and then when becoming desperate, decide to go in the kitchen sink, whereupon they are caught by an entire party of guests. But at least the leads, Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger in Only Fools And Horses) and Clive Swift (Richard in Keeping Up Appearances) are very experienced actors who make their performances seem natural.

It's written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who also write the brilliant Peep Show, and the lazy description is that the old guys are Mark and Jeremy grown older but no wiser. The odd couple - conventional guy, crazy guy - is such a perennial set up because it works, but while this ticked along pleasantly, the jokes just didn't seem to be there.

Of course, BBC Scotland already has another pensioner sitcom in Still Game, which has a sense of place and a specific culture to play off that, so far, The Old Guys lacks.

A new sitcom by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the writers of Channel 4's excellent if uncomfortably dark Peep Show. Their new creation - which is about the misadventures of two elderly friends, played by Roger Lloyd Pack and Clive Swift - is warmer, but anarchic none the less.