Due to an odd set of bizarre gifting circumstances (see clip below to view a similar situation), I now have multiple copies of "Peep Show" Season 1 on Region 1 DVD.
So I thought I would give away the extras to any blog reader with sufficient interest in the show to merit the postage. I have three copies (yes, I know). So, in case more than three of you are game to check it out, I thought I'd make it interesting with a contest.
Answer this extraordinarily simple Britcom question and email your response to Resilient.Rabbit@gmail.com. And then I will mail the three DVDs to the individual readers I like best. (Just kidding -- first three right answers win. I promise).
Query: The stars of "Peep Show" -- David Mitchell and Robert Webb -- met through the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club. Name the year that club was founded and three other past members.
Told you it was easy. That's because I like you.
Love, Rabbit.
Showing posts with label Robert Webb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Webb. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
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
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
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Why I Love the Peep Show
The subject of the Rabbit's fascination and adoration for this week is Channel 4's amazing BAFTA award winner, "Peep Show" starring England's popular comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb.
I realize that, relative to my best Britcom buddies, I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but since the show is still on the air in England (Channel 4 has just commissioned season six) and it hasn't had much U.S. exposure yet (only Season One has aired to date on BBC America)I hereby dub this post both "timely" and "relevant."
"Peep" is a sitcom featuring two former college buds, about three years out, sharing a flat in south London. Mark, played to alarming perfection by David Mitchell, is a well-intentioned introverted bumbler who responds to the stress of modern life by "doing what's expected" of him -- which amounts to listening to Radio 4 and working as an office drone loan manager. (Mitchell's naturally unthreatening appearance -- featuring wide-eyed expressions that simultaneously signal naivety and unending fear -- draws an impressive amount of sympathy for Mark's daily trials). Mark's friend and housemate, Jeremy, is a painfully immature and irresponsible musician who has no idea that his desire to avoid a real job will forever outweigh his creative talents. (Robert Webb is so strong in this role that he has apparently been alarmed at how many viewers assume that his portrayal of Jeremy must reflect his own personality. During a post-BAFTA interview a somewhat exasperated Webb blurted "I hope I'm not quite as stupid, dishonourable, deluded, selfish, feckless and thick as Jeremy." I certainly couldn't develop a more apt string of adjectives to describe his character. Webb obviously knows Jeremy well).
Overall, therefore, the premise is certainly nothing new. (The show's producers, for example, have compared the simple "odd couple" setup to "Spaced". In the States, you could just compare it to -- well -- "The Odd Couple."). As in most shows of the genre, Marc and Jeremy superficially have little in common, but they retain a functional friendship that each can fall back on during the inevitable failures that result from their daily interactions with the prickly and overwhelming "real world". So, if based on such an ordinary premise, what makes the show special and what causes it to continually garner such impressive reviews?
One unique twist is that the events of the two main characters' lives are seen almost exclusively from their own points of view and those of other characters they interact with. The camera's viewpoint is generally tightly focused on the face of the character being addressed, giving each scene an uncomfortable intimacy. The show also deepens our connection to the characters and their motives by using voiceovers to share aloud the inner thoughts of the two protagonists. Frequently, the writers use this device highlight how far Mark and Jeremy's thought range from the actions they are actually willing to take. The show's chief writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain explained that their use of first-person perspective was influenced by a Channel 4 documentary series "Being Caprice". "Caprice the model had a camera on her sunglasses and it was like a POV shooting style, which I guess was nicked from Being John Malkovich,’explains Sam. "So it’s a third-hand steal, really. We thought it would be great for comedy, hearing someone else’s thoughts. The voices give you a whole other dimension in terms of jokes".
Even the clever point of view arrangement, however, is in no way sufficient to explain why the show is so charming, magnificent and repeatedly honored. (The Guardian recently referred to it as the best television show of the decade. And yes, they are including "The Office". It's a tough call, but I'm starting to agree). The real strength and joy comes from the quality of the show's writing and it's amazing lead performers. The writing uses such clever phraseology that Peep is the most readily quotable show since Python. (In fact, Channel 4 maintains a web page of favored Peep Quotes from each season and there is even a popular Facebook page called "Peep Show Quotes.") It's fairly rare, however, to find perfect dialouge so lovingly delivered. In the great tradition of John Cleese and Larry David, Mitchell and Webb manage the nearly impossible with ease: they draw sympathy and genuine affection for two otherwise completely unlikeable characters. It's such an impressive feat that I never tire of watching it and, frankly, it has really drawn me in. It took a few episodes, but now I am fully addicted. It's so intimate that it brings back youthful memories of watching my own friends endure the pains of growing up. I absolutely and honestly cannot wait to find out what whether Marc and Jeremy will ever find a way to cope, adapt and find happiness in the world. That is a rare and treasured feeling.
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