Peep Show

I think the best way to start the review of this programme is with the following statement: Peep Show is better than Father Ted.

I know that according to Channel 4's Greatest Comedy Show Father Ted's is better, but it's wrong. It's merely more popular. Peep Show's funnier because of the writing, the plot devices, the innovative camera work, the quality of the performances and the darkness of the humour and characters. Peep Show may never have attracted more than 2 million viewers for a single episode, but the quality of it stands.

Peep Show returned with its usual mix of darkness and desperation, thanks to the struggling lives of flatmates Mark and Jez (David Mitchell and Robert Webb). At the start of this series, Mark is trying to get Jez out of the flat so his love Dobby (Isy Suttie) can move in. Mark's plans are so desperate; he even thinks breaking Dobby's microwave will help. Also, Mark gets a job tip from - of all people - Super Hans (Matt King), Jez decides to undergo therapy, and the health of Mark's love rival Gerrard (Jim Howick) takes a turn for the worse.

There's so much to like in this opening episode, including Jez's somewhat paranoid display when he attends his therapy session, to the horrifying consequences which result when Mark tries to prevent Isy from seeing Gerrard. One interesting plot device which seems to be sprouting is Jeff (Neil Fitzmaurice), now living with Sophie (Olivia Colman), getting a bit too close to Mark's baby son Ian for his liking...

Part of the enduring appeal of Peep Show (Sunday, Channel 4) is that you want to believe that Mark and Jez are exaggerated versions of David Mitchell and Robert Webb, the comedy partners who play them. Actually it is written not by them but by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (though Mitchell and Webb do provide some "additional material").

Whether or not they are like their characters perhaps doesn't matter. What is important is that those characters don't have anything in common apart from their shared flat. Mark is pessimistic, conservative and neurotic; Jez is feckless, uninhibited and shallow.

After almost 10 years, and eight series, Peep Show still feels quite subversive and edgy. The stylistic device the show pioneered - of using point-of-view shots with the thoughts of the characters audible as voice-overs - still seems fresh and it is surprising that this has been so little imitated. (There's Miranda, and that's about it.) There was a wonderfully timed moment in the first episode when Mark and Jez were having a back and forth argument which Mark ended in his head, having the last word.

To bring their story up to date: Mark is now a father, though he is not with Soph (Olivia Colman), the mother. He is trying to gets Dobby (Isy Suttie) to move in with him and get rid of Jez in the process. Jez is still unemployed and has been persuaded to see a therapist, whom Mark pays for. The humour is as black as ever, with Mark being annoyed with a rival suitor for winning sympathy by dying. My favourite line from episode one: "A squirt of Lynx: the busy man's shower."

Peep Show still feels relevant, capturing well one aspect of the aspiring but doomed middle classes. Though they are in some ways a conventional flat-sharing "odd couple", they both need each other because they like to think there is someone who is even more of a loser than they are. In many ways Jeremy is a child - a hedonistic and casually cruel one. Mark is easier to identify with. Most of us are more connected to our inner Mark than our inner Jeremy, though we would like it to be the other way around.

The existence of Kookyville may have just been a ploy to flatter the preceding Peep Show: a bona fide comedy returning, remarkably, for an eighth series. And though this tale of two emotionally stunted flatmates isn't quite as snortworthy as it once was, it's gained a kind of pathos in its middle age, bound up with its lead duo's near-pathological inability to change. A state of affairs encapsulated beautifully in this week's opener when David Mitchell's anal Mark reacted to the death of love rival Gerard. "Life, spinning past, every second, every single fleeting moment until we're gone," he mused. "I'm taking a look at my phone tariff."

Fresh Meat is from the people who brought us Peep Show which, just to make Secret State jealous, is back for an eighth series. Student behaviour, albeit from two men who should know better? One of whom is a rail museum? If Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong only have one joke, it's a very good one.

So much derision flows between Croydon-based flat mates Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell), it's easy to forget that underneath it they need one another in a terrible, attraction-of-opposites kind of way. They're forever in a sort of losers' arm-wrestling match, competing to belittle each other into oblivion, then occasionally one will save the other from disaster. It's almost heart-warming, or as near as this marvellously bitter series gets.

Tonight, the pair are both on new career paths: Mark's book Business Secrets of the Pharaohs has found a publisher, while Jez is learning to be a life coach (a whole week's intensive training).

Naturally, Mark is scathing about Jez's new calling: "I suppose it's better than some of your job ideas, like becoming an admiral," he sneers, but by the end he may just have softened.

The quality control of Peep Show remains remarkably high: it's tough to think of too many British sitcoms that reach an eighth series in such fine fettle. Much of the pleasure has been in watching the glacial evolution of Mark and Jeremy and their reluctant engagement with the adult world, which reaches pitiful new levels tonight as Jeremy trains to become a life coach (Mark: 'it's better than some of your job ideas - like being an admiral') and Mark's new book, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs, is picked up by a small publisher with a cashflow problem. Both prove singularly ill-equipped to cope alone; less predictably, and rather charmingly, they could also prove to be each other's salvation.

Peep Show series 8 episode 2 review

The roles are reversed in this week's middling but enjoyable episode of Peep Show...

Video: Peep Show episode 8.2 preview

Watch a clip of this Sunday's episode of the sitcom, in which Jeremy takes his therapist out on a date.

Peep Show made despair ridiculously funny

The eighth series of Peep Show saw David Mitchell and Robert Webb return as odd couple Mark and Jez, whose unlikely bromance is now as comforting as it is funny.

There was a moment at the start of last night's Peep Show where my own internal monologue got a bit antsy. Could the dysfunctional flat-share sitcom really be back for an eighth series? Surely Mark and Jeremy should have moved on a bit from their odd-couple shtick by now - Mark has a baby for goodness' sake.

Wasn't the joke, like the show's protagonists, getting a bit old? But then Mark and Jeremy started interacting with other humans and it was all OK again. Or rather, it was very much not OK. It was, as usual, watch-through-your-fingers-make-it-stop stuff and sadistically enjoyable it was too.

Peep Show, shot on single camera and soundtracked by the thoughts spooling through the heads of its two anti-heroes, has been going since 2003. And while jobs, mates and girlfriends have come and gone, nothing has changed. Mark still thinks he's cleverer than he is. Jeremy still thinks he's cooler than he is. Both still have zero people skills. The wince-per-scene rate remains remarkably high.

The series kicked off with Jez packing up to make way for Mark's girlfriend, Dobby, to move in. Except that Dobby seemed quite happy in her own flat and, worse, was spending an awful lot of time with Mark's rival Gerrard. There was an inkling that Jez might not be moving out so soon after all.

As usual, the cringe-factor ratcheted up until Pompous and Punchable had each delivered a tour de force of squirm. Mark's was a eulogy to his former rival that he précised into bullet points and a "take-home message" in order to rush off to an interview while Jeremy's was a sweaty, paranoid and futile attempt to wrongfoot his therapist. Both were exquisitely performed by David Mitchell and Robert Webb but I still hope that this series might be their last. I'm not sure there's much more the writers can put them, and us, through.