Comfort Classic: Peep Show

COMFORT CLASSIC

Peep Show

To create a successful sitcom is one of the most difficult tasks in the TV firmament. To create a successful British sitcom that survives for 12 years, nine series and 54 episodes is staggering.

Unlike in the US, producers rarely have writers rooms on this side of the Atlantic, where teams of wordsmiths endlessly hone scripts to keep a show up and running. Remember, Fawlty Towers closed its doors after just two six-part series.

That remarkable longevity is one of the achievements of Peep Show, unquestionably a defining show for Channel 4. The programme ran from 2003 to 2015, and has the broadcaster’s original DNA running through it – an edgy, sweary adult comedy that puts sex and recreational drugs stage centre.

Steve Clarke can’t get enough of this missing link between Men Behaving Badly and Fleabag

When Peep Show first stepped out, it would have been impossible to imagine another UK network taking such a risk on a programme that smashed so many taboos and which was filmed in such a startlingly original way.

Not that Channel 4 didn’t occasionally get cold feet and consider axing it. Peep Show never struck ratings gold, and audiences hovered around the 1 million mark. But its status as a comedy classic now makes it perfect for binge viewing.

From the start, awards juries loved Peep Show: it won the Rose d’Or at the Lucerne Television Festival 2004 in the Sitcom category; Best TV Comedy at both the 2006 and 2007 British Comedy Awards; and the 2008 Bafta for TV Sitcom. In 2019, Radio Times voted it the 13th best sitcom of all time.

At its heart, Peep Show is a buddy show: Mark (played by David Mitchell) and Jez (played by Robert Webb) have a love-hate relationship that skews more towards hate.

These pairings are part of a TV comedy tradition that goes back at least to the ever-bickering Steptoe and Son. Mark and Jez are the proverbial chalk and cheese, but they are utterly dependent on one another.

Mark is Captain Sensible, a man who wears brogues with his pyjamas, is sexually gauche and socially repressed. His slightly dodgy obsession with the