Peep Show Season 5 -- Guardian Review and Interview; Peep Show Contest Coming Soon!

I know. You're tired of hearing about Peep Show already! But I can't stop. I'm just constantly amazed and impressed by this show. The Guardian has this review of Season 5 which I thought I would share with those of you who are still non-believers. (They describe the show's joys far more effectively and intelligently than I ever could).

How will I convince you - the reader -- that this show is the television masterpiece of the decade? Coming to this space soon: Resilient Rabbit will be hosting a contest and the winners will receive a copy of the first season of Peep Show on Region 1 DVD. You just have to see it for yourself. And if BBC America won't help you out there, then I will.

Born to lose

Fractious flatmates Mark and Jez are back, still going nowhere fast in a fifth series of the darkly hilarious Peep Show. Ben Marshall joins our favourite no-hopers on set, jumping for Jesus...

Saturday April 26, 2008
The Guardian


Oscar Wilde is often misquoted, in reference to his novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray, as saying, "People say I am Lord Henry, I wish to be Dorian but I am Basil."

This is only worth mentioning because 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 similar occurs to me. It should occur to anyone who has watched the show. Or, at any rate, any man who has watched the show. 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.

Jesse Armstrong, who together with Sam Bain writes Peep Show, laughs. "We all wanna be Super Hans," he agrees with a mischievous smile, "but the fact is that most of us are, as you point out, just pathetic old Mark." It's depressing little realisations such as these that help to make Peep Show the most immaculately realised, hard-hitting and painfully funny sitcom of the last decade. Not that there is much that is original about the actual premise of the show.
The two main protagonists, Mark (played David Mitchell) and Jeremy, or Jez, (Robert Webb) are locked in a purgatorial, can't-live-with-him-can't-live-without-him, relationship. Mark, a tweedy, fogeyish loans manager shares his Croydon flat with Jez, a self consciously cool, wannabe musician. So far, so normal. This sort of destructive male dynamic has been a staple of sitcoms for the past 50 odd years. But there are several things that distinguish Peep Show from all that has come before it.

To begin with there are the internal monologues, filmed in such a way as to allow the audience to not just see, but hear what the characters are going through. The thoughts of Mark and Jez are often savagely and hilariously at odds with their actions. By the end of series four Mark had abandoned the woman he purported to love after their wedding at a lovely country church, as Jez, full of cheap lager, was forced to piss against the side of the church. "Richard Dawkins can talk the talk, but does he walk the walk?" he pondered triumphantly.

Both characters can look touchingly, almost heartbreakingly, sincere while harbouring the most excruciatingly self-serving of feelings. This may be why Peep Show worries so many women. Girls simply don't want to know what men might really be thinking. "Fucking hell," says Jesse Armstrong, "We think way worse things than that." It's a very Jez moment. There's a perfect example of this in the forthcoming series (which they're filming today) where Mark, Jez and Super Hans, attend a Christian rock festival. Jez is seen wandering through fields while beatific-faced Christians discuss imminent salvation.

"Look at how happy they all are," he muses, smiling back at the youthful believers. "I could be as happy as that if I only believed in a load of old shit." Jez then quickly agrees to a full body submersion in order to become born again. Not, you understand, because he has enjoyed any sort of epiphany. Jez is just a very modern sort of pragmatist. He won't allow his innate atheism to prevent him from screwing a pretty young evangelical. Cynical? Yes. Accurate? Horribly so.

Fruitless genital gratification, the endless consumption of narcotics (mostly by Jez and Super Hans) and ignorance as bliss; these are just some of the very contemporary themes Peep Show explores. Occasionally, at its very best, it comes over like Eliot's The Wasteland rewritten as slapstick.

It is to the enormous credit of writers Armstrong and Bain that the show's contempt for modernity is coupled with a near-forensic understanding of contemporary culture. Otherwise, Peep Show could resemble a particularly bitter Daily Mail editorial. That said, there is plenty in Peep Show that would infuriate Middle England. For example, when I admire Matt King's trainers, the actor who plays Jez's drug buddy, Super Hans, he replies: "Yeah, good aren't they? I think Super Hans won them after giving the Orgazoid (a techno DJ) a blowjob."

There is a good deal of very unpleasant and extremely cynical sex in Peep Show. In one episode Jez asks a desperately shy girl how many men she has slept with. "Six," she replies coyly."Fucking hell," thinks Jez, "I've slept with more than that, and I'm not even gay."

At its heart though Peep Show, despite its extraordinary innovations and its alarming familiarity with modern mores, is a deeply conservative show. Christopher Hitchens once coined the term "reactionary modernism" in order to describe the work of Evelyn Waugh, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. The phrase might just as well apply to Peep Show. Jesse Armstrong grins, apparently delighted that a show that has incurred some controversy, should be compared to Eliot and the Daily Mail. "I think we get a lot of different views in Peep Show. But if you are talking solely about Mark, then yes he does seem to come from that perspective. He also shares that prurient, but moralising curiosity about what other people are doing with their own lives and particularly about what others might be doing together in bed."

David Mitchell, who plays Mark and who the Mail On Sunday once described as "a posh ex-public schoolboy and a natural-born conservative" agrees that he and his character share a certain well-founded horror of the new. "I do think Mark and I have certain things in common. But hopefully I am a less worried, less angry and less upset person overall. I entirely agree that the show itself exhibits a horror of the modern world. My own personal knee jerk reaction is that novelty, which everyone else seems to embrace unquestioningly, should be at least questioned. One of the all-embracing themes of the show is that Jeremy utterly and unquestioningly embraces novelty. And Mark, perhaps equally as unquestioningly, rejects novelty. Neither is absolutely right, but I certainly feel more affinity with Mark than with Jez. You see, we live in a society where no one is allowed to say that change is bad. Now maybe it's a waste of breath to say that. But I think it's pretty important. For instance, the internet seriously threatens the media. Now there's not really much that can be done about it. No one can actually stop it, no matter how desirable that might be. So the fact that the dross on YouTube may kill off established channels does not make it a good thing simply because it's new."

So is Mark Peep Show's moral centre? David laughs: "When you see what he gets up to in series five, I think you'll seriously doubt that."

"That's the thing about Mark," says Webb. "People assume he is moral because he's always worried about things. But in fact he's just a moral coward, someone who simply doesn't have the courage to behave like Jez and Super Hans."

Matt King concurs: "Both Jez and Mark are cowards to differing degrees. Super Hans is just a nihilist. And when you believe in nothing it's actually very simple to be self-contained, to be at ease with yourself, to be happy in fact. Super Hans is the only character who is pretty much free of moral neurosis, because he doesn't actually give a shit about anything. He is a very, very modern man."

So everyone does want to be Super Hans? David Mitchell shakes his head. "It comes back to what I said about YouTube. There is nothing that really can be done about it. However does that really necessitate all the CEOs in broadcasting gleefully declaring that they are desperately excited by all the new challenges presented?

"What transparent nonsense! Why shouldn't they, and the rest of us, just scream in rage, 'Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.'" Which, in a sense, brings us back to Lord Henry, Dorian, Basil and Peep Show. Mark it is then. Mark we are.

· Peep Show, Fri, 10.30pm, C4