Peep Show

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.

Hooray for the return of Peep Show on Friday night, in which Mark lost his job, got bribed by his ex-bosses to abandon his compensation campaign and yet still found himself among the rioters wrecking their premises. Jeremy is beginning to look mature by comparison. Neither, however, wishes to contemplate the horrible truth that one of them is the father of Sophie's forthcoming baby. As Mark says, it's too big. "You can't look at it. It's like the Sun." Well done Peep Show. Each season you find new ways to make me ashamed to be a man.

Sam Bain 'fears Peep Show decline'

One of the writers of Peep Show has admitted that he fears the show could eventually go downhill.

Brown and Peep Show bump C4's ratings

C4 had a bumper ratings night on Friday, with Derren Brown's second experiment peaking with 3.4m viewers, and the return of Peep Show scoring record ratings.

Peep Show series 6 episode 1 review

Peep Show is back and as strong as ever. Eat my foam, baby!

The BAFTA-winning comedy Peep Show returned for its sixth series on Friday, with little sense that the quality is slipping. For a British sitcom, this is itself cause for celebration, as most begin to lose their mojo after three years, but the format behind Peep Show (it's all told from the physical perspective of loser flatmates Mark and Jez, a voice-over supplying their innermost thoughts) lends itself to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tragi-comic misadventures.



There truly is nothing funnier or more relatable than seeing the world through someone else's eyes, if only because it comes as blessed relief you're not alone. This new series finds best-friends Jez and Mark finally "growing up", but only in the sense they're both acting like prospective fathers to Sophie's baby -- one biologically, the other spiritually. After the comparative disappointment of series 5 (which never really capitalized on the aftermath of series 4's wedding disaster), it's great to see the show has found a compelling narrative again.

Of course, for many of us, this week was not just some normal, ho-hum weeky week: as unremarkable as April 7-14, say, or, I dunno, February 19-26 inclusive. No. This week was Peep Show week. The return of the sitcom locked in a permanent, and fabulous, battle of champions with The Thick of It to be the definitive show of what we must, still, sighingly, refer to as "the Noughties". Peep and Thick are like the John McEnroe and Björn Borg of comedy - sometimes one triumphs, sometimes the other, but for miles and miles around there's no real competition. No competition at all. That one writer - Jesse Armstrong - works on both lends the very real possibility that he might be the funniest person in Britain.

I'm not in the habit of suggesting that the Government should forcibly take sperm samples from scriptwriters, and keep them in a cryogenic vault, in the event of a "comedy emergency" in which everyone funny dies, and we need to restock Britain's gag-writing ability with a concerted breeding programme. But, you know, it might be worth bearing in mind.

As series six starts, Peep Show's profile - once so "cult" that its future looked perilous - has never been higher. The inexorable rise of David Mitchell - thinking lady's beaky sex-penguin du jour - means that even the show's first trailer was subject to mass excitement on Twitter. When we last saw Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (David Mitchell), they had just found out that either one of them might be the father of Sophie's (Olivia Colman) forthcoming baby. This is an usually "big" plot for the show - after all, even when Super Hans (Matt King) got addicted to crack ("That stuff is more-ish!"), it didn't really take up more than six or seven gags.

Within minutes of the first episode opening, more "big" stuff has happened - Mark has got the terminally feckless Jez a job at his company, JLB - but then JLB goes bust. The sexy business dick Alan Johnson (Paterson Joseph, playing one of the all-time amazing sitcom characters) comes to deliver the bad news: "I just got in from Aberdeen. JLB no longer exists. Thank you, Britain, and good night!" and then is driven away at top speed in a company car.

"That's the last Beemer out of Saigon," Mark sighs. The problem was that, as the episode went on, I noted, with mounting terror, that I wasn't really ... laughing. Yeah, there were a couple of nodding smiles, and the "Beemer" line got what would, on a Laugh Graph, be called "a snorty chuckle", but ... the usual, glorious, abandoned fug of a) borderline hysteria and b) intense emotional anguish, caused by minutely observed cases of total t***tishness, wasn't descending.

I was looking a cataclysm in the face: that Peep Show might have "gone off". We've all got to stop being funny some time. Maybe this was their time. Maybe it was all. Over. Or - maybe it was just a bad opening episode? So I rang people. I blagged. I cried. I sent a courier that cost £38. I got episode 2 sent over, and sat down to watch it in a state of pre-emptive tension rivalled only by the day before my C-section. And oh, thank God - episode 2 is one of the best episodes yet. Mark and Jez have a debate about the temperature setting on a boiler that is less like dialogue, more like an MRI scan of the idiot human brain. Then, later, Jez gets to deliver the line, "I'm a feminist - so I believe women should have any mad thing they want." It's all going to be OK. It's all still amazing. When The Thick of It comes back next month, the skies will be, once again, filled with the boom and clatter of their glorious rivalry.

Peep Show Episode 6.1 Review

A welcome return for the BAFTA-winning sitcom, now in its sixth year and still feeling fresh. You have to commend that longevity in Peep Show, as most British sitcoms, particularly ones with a strong cult following, tend to peter out around the fourth series.

After last season's highlights‚ Mark's stationery cupboard encounter with Dobby, for one‚ it's hard to imagine that Peep Show has any more human awkwardness left to plumb. Wrong! With money tight, even Jez has sought conventional employment, while the imminent arrival of Sophie's baby gives both pause for paranoid interior monologue. As ever, this is uncomfortable stuff, which paradoxically you don't want to end. Generally, you'd imagine what Mark and Jez get up to couldn't conceivably be as bad as what they're thinking; happily, this new series is on hand to prove us wrong.

It's been a busy 2009 for David Mitchell and Robert Webb, what with their sketch show, countless panel games and, perhaps most memorably, cross-dressed Webb prancing his way to victory on the Comic Relief celebrity talent contest Let's Dance. Now the duo return as stars of this ever-improving sitcom. The sixth series finds the hapless flatmates still in denial about one of them fathering Sophie's baby. Mark (Mitchell) wangles Jez (Webb) a job and continues his pursuit of IT girl-geek Dobby. Naturally, his dreams are soon scuppered - this time, by a routine fire drill.