As Peep Show enters its final series, fans of the show are happy and heavy-hearted in equal measure. Happy because, after a three-year hiatus, perennial losers Mark and Jez, an anal loan manager and juvenile waster who live together out of purgatorial necessity, are back on television in all of their tragic glory. Heavy-hearted because this series marks the end of twelve years of stagnant careers, disastrous relationships, untold social faux-pas, and eating the occasional dead dog. Yet, viewers can take solace in the ever-insightful words of Jeremy, referring to a bouquet of flowers he’s bought for Big Suze – “They’ll die eventually, but everything does, doesn’t it? Apart from love, a true love. A good love can sustain you all the way through.” Though it may be coming to an end, a good love of the remarkably re-watchable and quotable Peep Show can continue to sustain you.
And it is a real love that fans hold for the show, which has gained a cult following. Written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Peep Show is perhaps most notably distinctive for its point-of-view filming style, which constantly alternates between the characters’ faces. While this technique may have originally jarred, seeming occasionally dizzying and disorientating, it allowed for the trademark of a sitcom that has come to define a generation: the excruciatingly honest internal monologues that articulate often unspeakable but unfalteringly comical thoughts – “How do I feel? Empty, check. Scared, check. Alone, check. Just another ordinary day.”
In their voyeuristic frankness, it is these thoughts that make the show so worryingly, yet somehow comfortingly, relatable, revealing the inward selfishness, warped morality, and loneliness of the characters. In season three, Mark tells Jeremy he’s proposing to his girlfriend, Sophie, and Jeremy immediately thinks: “How does this affect me?” The way in which the sitcom embraces these grimly realistic qualities – the awkwardness of sex, the simultaneous excitement and stupidity of drugs, the unspoken nervousness and cynicism with which we greet so many people and social situations – gives it unrivalled and darkly accessible hilarity, perhaps best encapsulated by Mark’s adage, “I suppose doing things you hate is just the price you pay to avoid loneliness.”
The writers utilise the perpetual hopelessness of our generation for maximum comic effect, cultivating sharp comedy from the inescapable greyness of the everyday – the anxiety of being confronted by local youths and called a ‘clean shirt’, the sad satisfaction derived from the frugality of having the boiler on a mild twenty-one degrees, and the outrage at the decision to order ‘four naans’ at an Indian. Bain and Armstrong also skillully engineer scenes of somehow believable ridiculousness: Mark’s turkey rant at Christmas, the grotesque ‘bad thing’ at Jeremy’s shroom party, Mark hiding on his wedding day as Jez uncontrollably wets himself, and the pair vandalising a music executive’s caravan at a Christian rock festival. The show’s colourful secondary characters supplement this: Alan Johnson, a recklessly confident corporate manager with motivational maxims including “Fuck a chicken if that’s what it takes. Watch a chicken fucking a horse”, and Super Hans, Jez’s band-mate with a crack addiction, a part-time job on an oil rig, and unseen twin children who were “fünf, zwei years ago”.
In the first episode of the new series, aired last week, the comedy was true to form, with a blend of the drearily ordinary, as Mark grinds through a new bank job, and the entertainingly outrageous, as the self-styled ‘Croydon Bullingdon’ waterboard Mark’s erstwhile flatmate, Jerry, with a sleeping bag and a Budweiser tinny. Somehow, it couldn’t finish any other way.
