Simon Pegg

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They were once so poor that they were forced to share a single bed, but now Simon Pegg and his best pal Nick Frost are two of Britain's most powerful funnymen.

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Simon Pegg presents a one-off digital comic book featuring himself as superhero.

Video: Simon Pegg on his love of Star Wars

Simon Pegg has just written a book called Nerd Do Well where he explores the idea that he was born a nerd and that it all started with Star Wars.

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Simon Pegg says he's a hypocrite for writing an autobiography. The Star Trek star admits he hates all the celebrity autobiographies that come out in the run-up to Christmas.

Simon Pegg sends live message to space

Simon Pegg has sent a live message into space on behalf of the planet.

Simon Pegg moves to Century

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Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's zombie romcom, a tribute to George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead, is amusing, smart and, towards the end, genuinely tense. Shaun (Pegg), a Londoner in a dull job and a fractious relationship, finds his humdrum routine disrupted when almost everyone else in the country turns into a zombie. There's a special geeky pleasure in spotting all the film buff in-jokes.

Pegg: 'Spaced USA was painful to watch'

Simon Pegg has admitted that he found watching the US Spaced remake a "painful" experience.

Lizzie and Sarah is a pilot for a new series by Jessica Hynes, née Stevenson, and Julia Davis, and so dark it makes deep space look like a copy of The White Album.

Both Lizzie and Sarah are fiftysomething housewives in marriages of dull horror, which they keep meticulously dusted and polished. Sarah's husband has sex with her with a pillow over her face - when he finishes, she says, meekly, "Thank you".

Lizzie is in thrall to her au pair, Benita. Huge, sullen and ripe, Benita sits in her bedroom demanding cheese toasties and leaving the door open while she has sex with Lizzie's husband.

When Lizzie's husband says he wants a divorce, Lizzie and Sarah go to a bar, get very, very, drunk, find a gun and accidentally start killing everyone who has wronged them.

"We must remember to stop killing now!" Sarah says, at one point, before killing again.

Although it is the nature of the human brain to sort things into order, it's impossible to work out who is best here - Hynes or Davis. Both are so brilliant at embodying the millimetre-thick cheeriness - brittle as insect carapace - that grows over decades of deep, blood-and-bone pain. Hynes makes Sarah's eyes as sad as an Old English sheepdog's. Davis gives Lizzie a mouth of nervous twitching and breathless dry laughter. That they're doing all this to comic effect is to remind you, yet again, how comedy really is superior to all other genres.

As if this weren't enough, Davis and Hynes also play two teenage girls in the show - all lipgloss, "Babe!" and bird-like opportunism. In one shot, Davis sucks her thumb in the most sullen and aggressive manner imaginable, as an act of triumph over Lizzie. It's only one second long, but if you wanted to point at the most perfect vignette of a certain kind of self-obsessed, post-X Factor 21st-century teenage girl, it's all there.

However, despite being one of the most startlingly original pilots of the past few years, the BBC broadcast it at 11.45pm on a Saturday night on BBC Two - the kind of place I might hide a dead body, or the Ark of the Covenant, if I really didn't want them discovered.

Just to recap here: Hynes is the co-creator and co-star of Spaced, one of the most popular, groundbreaking and influential comedies of the past ten years; Davis is the writer and star of Nighty Night, regarded, again, as one of the best comedy series of the past ten years.

I will be honest with you - this has made my Patriarchy Alarm Bell go off. I can't imagine two male comedy performers, of equal stature, being shunted into this kind of slot, with so little publicity. Obviously the BBC is suffering from some odd manner of broadcasting shellshock, and commissioning only the most timid and inoffensive of programmes, in some manner of abject pre-emptive cringe at the prospect of an incoming Tory government. I get all that.

But, really, it's hard not to echo the comments of Simon Pegg on Twitter: "Jeez Beeb - grow a pair!!"

The 'Lizzie & Sarah' iPlayer Challenge

We at The Velvet Onion love an underdog, and Lizzie & Sarah is no exception. The new pilot from Julia Davis & Jessica Hynes has been buried in a graveyard slot this evening, and its been up to friends of the pair (including Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and our own Noel Fielding and Dave Brown) to plug the show for them!