Peep Show

As always, the writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain have got our thought-processes exactly right. Not many people would vocalise these particular thoughts like Mark and Jez do on this occcasion, but, let's face it, we've all thought something similar. And that, above all else, is Peep Show's enduring success.

Things improved radically on Friday with the return of Channel 4's best comedy in the history of laughter. Yes! Peep Show's back!! I only discovered this gem last year but the complete DVD collection now sits proudly displayed on my shelf and I'm reliably informed that makes me immediately cool so way hey!

Most shows entering their fifth series would be showing signs of aging and losing the edge that made them so intriguing but that's not so here. Thanks to the surreal brains of writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain and the always wonderful performances from David Mitchell and Robert Webb, Peep Show appears to be going from strength to strength at a stage when other shows wilt under the pressure.

The world of Peep Show is surreal, of course, but the scripts and acting draw you into the world of Mark and Jez so well you don't want to leave. David Mitchell recently said he'd like Peep Show to carry on for years and, if this is the standard they can keep it to, I'd be happy about that too.

Perhaps the most consistently funny British sitcom since The Office

As we return for the fifth series of this engagingly filthy comedy, Mark (David Mitchell) is getting drunk and maudlin on wedding champagne as his flatmate Jeremy (Robert Webb) urges him to go out on a double-date: Beggars can't be choosers, she's an actual woman.

Mark - remember, this is a man who once based his romantic strategy on the Siege of Stalingrad - arms himself with a copy of the Friends of the British Museum magazine and goes forth again to search for love...

I adore Peep Show and I adore Mark and Jeremy, an amiable pair of misfits trapped in a squalid, mutually destructive friendship. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's script is packed with the kind of quotable funny lines that should be on T-shirts, and Mitchell and Webb are both just marvellous.

The Guardian visits the Peep Show set

[q]Standing in a muddy field on the set of the new fifth series of Peep Show, watching the three main actors chat with one another, something occurs to me.

People in general think men are Jez, Peep Show's shallow self-styled libertine; men themselves wish they were Super Hans - tall, confident, elegantly wasted, utterly amoral; but men are really Mark, a highly moral, but sexually repressed conservative whose idea of a good date movie is the four-hour German submarine epic, Das Boot.

For all the quibbles, however, I can't stress enough that Peep Show is by far the best sitcom of recent years.

Peep Show is the best comedy of the decade

A blog entry on The Guardian website claiming Peep Show is the best comedy of the 2000s.

As Ricky Gervais quite rightly commented at last week's Comedy Awards, it is both a travesty and a debacle that Peep Show (Friday, Channel 4) didn't win anything. Persistently the best thing on television at the moment -- a winning blend of clever, stupid and dark -- Peep Show, starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, has also managed the achievement of being a British sitcom that stayed hot even in its third series, which puts it in very select company indeed (Blackadder, Rising Damp, Yes Minister, Dad's Army).