Simon Pegg

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!

Laugh Lines: from Dad's Army to Hippies

Bruce Dessau's guide to TV comedy: Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' underrated sitcom Hippies, starring Simon Pegg, could have been fathered by Dad's Army.

US Spaced: the wait (and the hope) is over

The US version of Channel 4 sitcom Spaced has become the stuff of TV legend. There was much excitement when Fox announced it was adapting the sitcom three years ago, to be helmed by none other than the director of Charlie's Angels director, McG. But fans feared the worst when it turned out that none of three people behind the original version - Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson) - were involved in the remake. It was nothing to the reaction of Wright and co when they finally saw the finished version ("McSpaced" as Wright called it). Disappointed doesn't quite do it justice. "I am worried about the large amount of you who stabbed out their eyes or washed them with bleach after watching the US pilot. My sympathies," said Wright on Twitter today. For everyone else who hasn't seen it, the Stateside version has now made it to the web, so fans can finally see it for themselves. Pining for the original? Ah, that's better.

Simon Pegg plays infamous serial killer

Simon Pegg looks spooked - as he plays one of the infamous Burke and Hare serial killers.

More Burke & Hare Cast Announced

Details of the full cast have been announced for John Landis' Burke And Hare, and if you thought you were excited by the casting of Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, prepare to do geeky cartwheels at the news that Jessica Hynes, Bill Bailey, Reece Shearsmith and Sir Christopher Lee are all on board.

It might be a decade old, but back-to-back repeats of this flatshare comedy are still reason enough to stay in. Quirkily written and acted by Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, as she was then, Spaced is still effortlessly cool and funny, with edits and camera tricks that are now used by everyone. This first episode introduces non-couple Tim and Daisy, manically intense artist Brian and their dipso landlady. Pegg and director Edgar Wright went on to make popcorn classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but this was better by miles: honed, inventive and sweet as a nut.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's British zombie comedy is amusing, smart and, towards the end, genuinely tense. Shaun (Pegg), who's 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.

Revisiting this flatshare comedy, quirkily written and acted by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes, is an unalloyed pleasure. Although it's ten years old (noooooo!), Spaced is still effortlessly cool and funny, with edits and camera tricks that are now used by every Tom, Dick and Harry. This one introduces us to non-couple Tim and Daisy, as well as manically intense artist Brian and dipso landlady Marsha. Pegg and director Edgar Wright went on to make popcorn classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but this was better by miles: honed, joyously inventive and sweet as a nut.