Ear Candy: Obsessed with… Line of Duty

Second World War and wage-slave values are about as far as you can get from his bong-smoking, laid-back flatmate.

Jez is an uncompromising waster, self-deluded into thinking he’s a great musician, sexually supercharged and overconfident – superficially, at least.

Like so many of their comedy forebears, Mitchell and Webb first acted together at the Cambridge Footlights. Their double act performance is a joy to watch. The writing, too, by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, is usually pitch-perfect.

The use of Mark and Jez’s interior monologues, inspired by a scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, coupled with the close-up-and-personal camerawork enable us to see the odd couple from their own perspectives; for series 1 and part of series 2 the actors wore head cameras. These insights are often painful. Make no mistake, this is black comedy at its most unhinged.

Peep Show’s supporting cast are inspired. Oliver Colman, then virtually unknown, as Mark’s original love interest, and his prosaic and knowing work colleague, Sophie, sometimes steals the scenes.

Matt King as Jez’s bandmate, the hapless, hedonistic and unreliable Super Hans, is priceless. As the years take their toll, and his drug use escalates, his eyes appear to sink further back into their sockets. It is not until series 6 that we learn that Hans, a one-time crack addict, is father to seven-year-old twins.

Does Peep Show ever go too far? Are the endless excruciating situations too cringeworthy? Perhaps, but many of them are laugh-out-loud if you can stomach the embarrassment and heightened reality. There’s the time Mark pees in a desk drawer at his office to get his own back on a colleague – or when Jez wets himself in church at Mark’s wedding. Or when Jez sleeps with Sophie’s mum.

There is, of course, pathos aplenty in Peep Show. Ultimately, this no-holdsbarred gem is mined from similar material to Men Behaving Badly. It took male relationship comedy to a blistering new place.

Without Peep Show, it’s hard to imagine Phoebe Waller-Bridge creating the far slicker Fleabag – perhaps as a contemporary riposte to Mark and Jez’s macho excesses. n

Peep Show is available on All 4 and Netflix.

Ear candy

Obsessed with… Line of Duty

BBC

So much telly spoon feeds you, and it’s really nice when there’s not even a spoon… you can’t even get in the packet of food,” comments comedian Sarah Millican. She is, of course, praising the thrillingly impenetrable Line of Duty.

Everything is cryptic; minor characters from three series ago suddenly pop up on screen; and half of the dialogue is in acronyms. Yet viewers still can’t get enough of Jed Mercurio’s perplexing police procedural.

The series delights in plunging viewers into the darkness as they fumble to their own (often wrong) conclusions. Luckily for us, BBC Sounds’ companion podcast Obsessed with… Line of Duty is on hand to offer illumination.

Hosted by actor Craig Parkinson, aka Line of Duty’s “baddie caddy” DI Matthew “Dot” Cottan, each episode interrogates the latest instalment of the series.

Parkinson is joined weekly by a new celebrity super-fan, such as Millican. They discuss their initial suspicions, air wild theories and attempt to decrypt what on earth all the police jargon actually means.

With a seven-episode bumper series, Line of Duty couldn’t have returned at a better time. The drama is sure to keep us all rapt as we attempt to crack the case. Superintendent Ted Hastings has managed to elude the slammer and is back in AC-12 with DS (now DI) Steve Arnott, but the band isn’t quite back together. Having left AC-12, DI Kate Fleming is now working on the Hill with a new murder investigation team, led by her inscrutable adversary, DCI Joanne Davidson, played by Kelly Macdonald. They are looking into the murder of investigative journalist Gail Vella in Operation Lighthouse.

It is AC-12’s highest-profile investigation to date and, as expected, Mercurio won’t be hand-holding any viewers. Mercifully, the brainboxes behind Obsessed with… Line of Duty will have us all sucking on diesel. n Caitlin Danaher