Peep Show

Peep Show Episode 6.2 Review

Another terrific episode, taking its cue from the great tradition of British farce. For the majority of this half-hour, events were contained within Mark and Jez's tenement block, as the pair grappled with a malfunctioning new boiler and a terrible lie...

Peep Show: Series six, episode two

Mark and Jeremy never keep the girl, but the fact that they get any girl in the first place feels like something of a stretch.

Peep Show series 6 episode 2 review

Another solid episode this, if not a barnstorming one, but I sense some belters to come.

Peep Show! It just gets better and better with every series, doesn't it? This one is fabulous, the filthiest and the funniest thing on telly at the moment by a mile. I'm already worrying about when it finishes: a Friday night without half an hour inside Mark's and Jeremy's sordid minds. Best line in this one goes to Mark: "Why do you insist on seeing the anus as some sort of human USB port, waiting to have all kinds of hardware plugged into it?"

Into its sixth series, you feel that Peep Show could and should be with us for decades yet, like Last of the Summer Wine, only funny. This week, Mark trains his ever-desperate sights on the ever-wonderful Dobby (Isy Suttie) while Jeremy finds love with the entirely unsuitable Elena, a Russian lover of music and poetry. Sophie, however, appears when it's least convenient and spills the beans about her pregnancy. Long live the Croydon dystopia.

Hurrah for the return of the Bafta award-winning comedy about two socially inept flatmates. After last week's typically witty first episode in which Mark (David Mitchell) and Jeremy (Robert Webb) tried to avoid facing up to the fact that one of them is to become a father, Sophie (Olivia Coleman) finally reveals whose baby she's carrying. But both boys are more interested in pursuing their respective love interests: Mark makes a final play for IT worker Dobby (Isy Suttie) and Jeremy takes a shine to an arty Russian émigré.

Socially inept Mark (David Mitchell) once used the Siege of Stalingrad as a template for seduction, so it's hardly surprising he's so hopeless with the ladies. He hasn't learnt his lesson; tonight, when the object of his adoration - shy former workmate Dobby - turns up for a date, he resorts to a plan of attack as he goes in for a kiss: "Time for me to roll in my militarised divisions! We're Roosevelt and Stalin!" It's excruciating and hilarious, as are his housemate Jeremy's (Robert Webb) equally clumsy attempts to romance an attractive Russian woman who lives in the same block of flats. But Mark and Jeremy are at their comical best when they are at their most craven and pathetic. So sit back and get ready to hold your jaw as it drops into your lap when the unfortunate Sophie finally reveals which one of them is the father of her baby.

You'd think that Sophie revealing the father of her baby would make for a spectacular enough denouement but this goes one step beyond, thanks to a tissue of baby-related lies Jez has told to the latest apple of his eye and the fact that a malfunctioning boiler is causing Mark to hit, um, boiling point. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's script is on particularly good form tonight, with Jez's poem F*** You Bush a corkingly stupid highlight.

Channel 4, Friday night, around 9.50pm: Derren Brown attempts to stick viewers to their sofas. Channel 4, Friday night, 10pm: Peep Show begins with Jez and Mark getting rid of their old sofa. Mark to Jez: "I suppose you never really sat on that sofa much did you/ Maybe just for about 100,000 hours..." Serendipitous scheduling? Canny planning by Objective Productions? Or do Derren's powers go further than we thought...?

Peep Show returned on Friday - with Jeremy reluctantly taking up a job at JLB International, only to be made redundant - along with everyone else in the business - before it's even time for mid-morning coffee. This was a great disappointment for Mark, who had been hoping to exploit his newly acquired managerial power ("Maybe I could make him wear a little coloured hat like a chimpanzee," he'd mused, as they set off for work). He was also dismayed that Jeremy seemed to feel that a one-and-a-half-hour service record qualified him to be as stunned by dismissal as someone who'd been working his way through the cubicle farm for five long years. "You're freeloading on my trauma! You're a grief thief!" he complained, when Jeremy murmured something collegiate about the shock. It all ended badly after Mark had rallied his employees in rebellion against head office, for the sole purpose of getting Dobby into bed. It all ended badly, that is, in a very good way.