Still really love brown toast? Peep Show Series 5 Review

Series Five of Peep Show (Channel 4 legal edict dictates it should always be prefaced with the words “Award Winning Sitcom”, or at a push “acclaimed” but we heed not these petty rules) seems to have been over in the blink of an eye. One minute we were watching the opening episode in a critics screening hoping Bruce Dessau hadn’t paid any attention to our photo on the small chance he’d read this blog, trying to avoid making eye contact with him just in case, and concentrating on the screen in spite of the projector glare from Robert Webb’s bald patch; the next watching the credits role six weeks later on a flummoxed Mark in episode six, no wiser than he was back when the show launched in 2003. A good time, then, to reflect…


It’s always polite to start with the good stuff. Peep Show is still one of the most consistently painful and brilliant experiences in TV comedy today. Every episode has a guaranteed squirm factor, and several guaranteed laughs, and its testimony to its brilliance that six years on (although as David Mitchell has pointed out, that’s only one series on an American sitcom) we still care about Mark and Jez. Series Five has been funny, undeniably, undoubtably funny.


But there’s something wrong. Something we can’t quite put our finger on. For the first time since its inception, Peep Show wasn’t the classiest work on telly. Though there was still much to like, this series felt somehow incidental, unimportant, missable. Not bad by any means, not even off-the-boil in the way The Simpsons or Scrubs has gone. Just…ordinary.


There’s been something of diminishing returns in Peep Show, basically since it went to a second series. The first round of episodes remains the shows peak, with Mark and Jez feeling like representatives for everything we don’t like about ourselves. Their internal monologue reflected our own: Petty struggles and little victories that we could all relate to (“Of course I'm the one whose laughing as I actually love brown toast”/ “Yeah, take that Big Suze. Your toilet seat regime is over”). From series two we seemed to move away from that, with scenarios becoming more farcical, more desperate, and our champs becoming less everyman and more pathetic. The cringey-can’t-believe-what-we’re-seeing-painful-funny version of the show probably peaked last year with dog eating and Jez pissing himself in church. It’s hard to believe Peep Show will quite reach those peaks again.


In a way, it was series four that really made this more recent offering suffer. The finale of the past series saw the wedding of Mark and Sophie: the end point of an arc that dominated that series (Mark doesn’t want to get married but can’t quite seem to call it off), and the culmination of Marks story for the entire four-series run. After that event was out of the way, there was always going to be an air of redundancy. It also seemed to lose track of it’s own rules: Mark is a tragic loser who hates himself and is ridiculously awkward with women…so how come he finds himself involved with a different one in each episode? It’s not that no women should fancy Mark, but they seem to be coming along with unnatural frequency.


Missing, was an arc that gently steered the stories. There were loose themes (Mark’s search for “The One”, Jez’s sudden cash crisis) but they never felt as compelling as the broader issues dealt with in the past. With the exception of the last episode, the show never really felt it was going anywhere. There could have been something to play on…wasn’t Mark’s Dad supposed to appear in this series?–the daunting figure who has been hinted at since series one? Possibly he was dropped for Jez’s Mum, which is a shame as Mark’s Dad is probably the most interesting story pay-off left in the show.


Of course it wasn’t all bad. We could squeak for weeks at the perfect casting of Isy Suttie as Dobby the office techy, and she did us proud. The dialogue was as sharp as ever, and those internal voiceovers are still brilliantly written. Johnson is still ace.


This series performed well in the ratings, and deservedly so- even off form Peep Show beats the pants of most of the Friday Night Fare, and a sixth outing is in the bag already. Let’s just hope for a little more substance to the shenanigans next time around. The end of the series (a baby!) suggests it will. We’re always ready to give Peeps Show another chance.

Bruce Almighty!

The thing about being a poncey media snob, as we at Thatjoke very definitely are (and proud of it too) is that you can’t stop yourself occasionally coming across as a bit of a wanky smugster. Fortunately we’ll never look quite as smug as this:

Yep, check that face out. Doesn’t it make your fists clench and your eyes feel slightly itchy? Meet Bruce Dessau, king of the Non-story and current comedy Critic-in-chief for the Evening Standard. He’s also worked for the Times and the Guardian (who persuaded him to pose for a less smackworthy banner-pic) and written a series of uninspired-looking comedy biographies.

Bruce is the master of writing lots while saying little; his blogs at the Standard’s website are lessons in stating the bleeding obvious at pointless length. Currently we’re reading his stuff whenever we want to feel annoyed that someone is being paid substantially more than us for such relentless space-wasting.

Observe:

Full Blog: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Boohoo?

What Bruce actually means: “a new BBC4 drama series thinks all comedians are depressed mentalists, but these comics wot-I’ve-met prove otherwise”. Or to be even more succinct: “Are comedians depressed mentalists? Not all of them but some are”.

We say: Surely the BBC4 series isn’t making a sweeping generalisation, but making special cases out of these key examples (Frankie Howard, Tony Hancock, Hughie Green, the cast of Steptoe –surprisingly not Spike Milligan too) and talking about the relationship between knowledge of human understanding and self-awareness? It’s not about comedians being naturally morose, but about morose people who happen to also be comedians and thus make for a richer and more interesting drama.

But that’s a little too dark and complicated an idea and doesn’t give Bruce the chance to do some thinly veiled name dropping and make blindingly obvious points.

Full Blog: Two's Company

What Bruce actually means: “some people who work together also work separately, and double acts usually break up eventually”

What we say: Well done Brucie! Hold the front page and get the South Bank Show on the line…there’s a big scoop in this one.

Full Blog: iPlayer Changed My Life

What Bruce actually means: “isn’t the BBC iPlayer a brilliant idea, it’s changed everything over night and now I don’t need a video”

What we say: Jesus H Corbett Desso, we’re not sure what pulse your fingers on exactly, but it clearly died years ago. Leaving aside the fact the iPlayer launched about 3 months ago, it was hardly that big a revolution even then. Unofficially VOD has been around for years. Within hours of it going out, every episode of –say- That Mitchell and Webb Look, was available to download on torrents the world over and stream all over the place, and that’s been the case for at least 5 years. We’ll admit Veoh, Youtube and Daily Motion aren’t as crisp and efficient as the iPlayer itself, and were certainly a long way from official (Illegal downloading is wrong kids, and it funds terrorism, peadophilia and mass genocide.) It was difficult to get hold of, say, the One Show or an episode of Doctors, but the real Watercooler TV moments you’re talking about? They’ve been easy to get for donkeys yonks. We like the iPlayer as much as the next media-savvy web snob, but life changing? Welcome to the internet BD.

We could go on all day.

Oh go on, one more.

Full Blog: Is Doctor Who Becoming Who is The Celebrity Guest This week?

What Bruce actually means: “Doctor who likes employing comedians, and I don’t know why”

What we say: You could also say "Why is Doctor Who obsessed with Luvvie middle aged thesps (Dereck Jacobi, Simon Callow, Penelope Wilton)", or "why is Doctor Who obsessed with pretty, young actresses (Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, Carey Mulligan, Eve Myles)". They're just people who can bring different aspects to a performance. Jessica Hynes played it completely straight, Mark Gatiss is a brilliant writer for whom Doctor Who is a dream come true, Steve Pemperton excels at grotesques. These people were brought in because they’re specific abilities related well to specific roles.

Okay, Peter Kay was just trading on a famous name and the juries out on Catherine Tate –although she was an actress before her sketch show took off, and a pretty good one at that, but it hardly proves the show is “obsessed”

We’re aware this all may seem rather petty. It’s just…if you’re going to pay a journalist to write meaningless space fillers that say nothing of any importance, we’ll do it for you at half the price.