- 30 -
‘Peep Show?! They want to call it Peep Show.’
‘Mmm,’ said Rob.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said.
‘I think it’s better than “POV”.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You always say it doesn’t really matter what things are called.’
I do say that. Titles are difficult but I think, basically, they don’t matter. Once a show is up and running, the title loses any significance. As long as it’s not called Some Wood and a Pie, which is an extreme case. Usually, after a while, the title just refers to the show and carries with it the feelings or associations of that. You stop wondering if it’s a good title in the same way that you never stop to think whether ‘carrot’ is a good name for a carrot. No one would ever say: ‘Carrot, ooh I’m not sure – doesn’t seem very carroty somehow. Doesn’t say carrot to me. Wouldn’t “splandeb” conjure up something orange and pointed more effectively?’
Actually maybe it would – maybe if carrots had been called splandebs, they’d have been 8 per cent more memorable or tasty-seeming over time and consequently 4 per cent more consumed. That’s a vast increase in vegetable consumption over hundreds of years and billions of people. It would have saved lives. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, may have died because no one ever thought to call a carrot a splandeb.
But I think that’s unlikely. Even awful names for people don’t matter post-playground – they just become a label. Of course the awful names – the Fifi-Trixiebelles, the Apples, the Peacheses (which are perfectly good names for an apple or some peaches, although dugnid and famp would be better) – will always end up referring to people who are scarred by having spent a childhood with an awful name (and growing up with the sort of parents who’d give them an awful name) so this is an experiment with no control. But what I’m saying is that should you, by some miracle, reach adulthood with a viable personality despite being called Moon-Unit, then Moon-Unit will cease to sound odd to your friends and just come to refer to the perfectly decent human you’ve miraculously found a way of becoming.
Have I Got News For You, for example, is an abysmal name. There’s definitely an implied exclamation mark at the end. It’s a weird rhetorical question – and the imagined poser of such a question is a total dick. ‘Hey guys, have I got news for you! Margaret Thatcher’s resigned! I wonder what idiot they’ll pick next’ … ‘Listen, dudes, have I got news for you – you’ll never believe this, the flat’s full of asbestos!’ But people don’t think about that after a while; Have I Got News For You is just a noise denoting a great TV programme.
The only exception to my ‘the name doesn’t matter’ rule is when a title is so bad, so misrepresentative or undermining, that it makes it impossible for a show, concept, chocolate bar or band to become successful in the first place. Whatever its merits, it can’t get off the ground – like a perfume called ‘You Smell of Poo’. Who’s going to give it a go? That was why I thought ‘POV’ would be fine if we couldn’t think of anything better. It might have been incomprehensible but it wouldn’t be particularly off-putting.
Peep Show was different. It sounded licentious, which worried me. Surely that would put off some of the right people – those who might be up for a sitcom – and attract some of the wrong: those in the mood for a wank. Because, frankly, they were going to have to be really in the mood for a wank – the whole thing would basically have to be happening unaided anyway – for our show to do the job for them. The only really appreciative audience members would be those who, having been put off their masturbatory stride, found themselves in a receptive mood for comedy. That’s a tiny demographic.
I know sex sells, but so do other things. And putting sex all over something that is, in fact, drain cleaner rather than sex is counter-productive. It just annoys sex-seekers and surrenders market share to more straightforward drain-cleaner promoters. I accepted that Peep Show wasn’t totally dishonest – the title implied voyeurism which, as the show allowed you to look through people’s eyes into the intimate parts of their lives, and to hear their even more intimate thoughts, was reasonable. But what it implied a lot more heavily was a peep show: a place where you squint through a hole at a stripper.
‘Typical bloody Channel 4,’ I grumbled. ‘They’re trying to make it sound all late night.’
‘It is late night. It’s on at 10.35,’ said Rob.
‘But, you know, all sexy. Why are they making me seem sexy? I don’t like it. What do Sam and Jesse think?’
‘It was their idea.’
At which point, I decided to stop moaning about the title. God knows, Sam and Jesse had written every other word in the scripts brilliantly – who was I to complain if I wasn’t massively keen on the first two? And, like I said, titles don’t really matter.
But it always annoys me when people call the progamme The Peep Show. For me the distinction between Peep Show and The Peep Show is quite an important one. The former can be taken as a reference to the show’s voyeuristic style, while the latter suggests it’s a story about the day-to-day hilariousness of working at the low-rent end of the sex industry. Maybe people add a ‘The’ because of The Office, with which, in its early days, Peep Show was often either flatteringly or unfavourably compared.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. This decision about the show name was made a full year after ‘POV’ was commissioned. We’d made the whole series, not knowing what it was going to be called. So let’s go back to the summer of 2002.
I was on holiday in France when my mobile rang.
I’m going to leave that sentence on its own because I found it all so impressive at the time. I was on holiday – a deliberate, organised period of sophisticated relaxation. In France: a foreign country which I had travelled to using my own money with no help from my parents and showing a valid passport which I’d managed to sort out for myself – I’d been to the post office and filled out the forms like a functional human. My mobile: yeah, sure, I had a mobile phone, I needed it for work, it was quite a small snazzy one if I remember rightly; I could pay the bills and stuff, that was never a problem. Rang: MY MOBILE WORKED IN FRANCE!
I answered and it was Phil Clarke – A TELEVISION PRODUCER CALLED MY MOBILE WHEN I WAS ON HOLIDAY IN FRANCE!!! I wasn’t actually by the pool. It would have been better if I’d been actually by the pool. Phil said he’d been invited to have a chat with a bloke called Andrew O’Connor, who it seemed was some sort of magician-impressionist, to talk about a commission he’d got for a show where comedians wore cameras on their heads and he’d heard that I was involved. Would this be a good thing for him to produce or was it a nightmare being organised by a chancer?
I thought it probably was a nightmare being organised by a chancer but it was also a nightmare I’d already signed up to live through, with hilarious scripts, and the only opportunity on my horizon of actually getting on TV other than applying for Big Brother. Maybe, if it was a success, I’d have to field calls from more producers at even more exotic holiday locations. And Phil understood comedy as well as anyone I knew. I strongly encouraged him to go for the chat. After doing that, he took the job.
There were certainly times when I felt a little bit guilty. Phil had been working at Talkback, a production company with a great track record in comedy, while Objective was a company lacking a track record in anything other than filing accounts at Companies House (and I wouldn’t be amazed to hear that it had dropped the ball once or twice where that was concerned).
And the ‘POV’ shoot was very tough indeed. We were shooting something in a style that hadn’t been tried before – where every shot was looking through the eyes of one of the characters – and our first discovery was that it took much longer than normal filming. We hadn’t realised this when making the taster tape because we hadn’t really bothered with things like consistent lighting. But this was going on TV and had to look reasonably professional. And it turns out, when a camera is aping a person’s movements, it has to keep turning round to look at another part of the room. This soon leaves you with hardly any parts of the room in which to put the lights, which are the main thing that stops TV from looking like someone’s home movie.
If you haven’t seen Peep Show, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Few have. Televisually few; it would be a hell of a turnout on the Edinburgh Fringe. But it’s never been a ratings hit. It’s been well reviewed and won a few awards, including a BAFTA, a couple of British Comedy Awards and a Golden Rose, and I feel enormously proud to be in it and lucky that Sam and Jesse have chosen to lavish such amazing writing on my weird voice. Still, if you feel the need to read the following description, I’ll be neither surprised nor disappointed. Come to think of it, I won’t even know.
It’s about two young men (well, they were when we started) who share a flat, one of whom looks uncannily like me. They’re called Mark and Jeremy and, looking through their eyes and hearing their voices, we’re plunged into an intricate and comically heightened version of urban tedium. They’re friends from university living disappointing lives, Mark as a pedantic, lonesome loans manager and Jeremy as a libidinous failed musician. Each feeds off the certainty, in the midst of all that baffles him about the world, that no one could be more wrong than his flatmate. Here’s a typical exchange between the two of them from series 6. Jeremy has just fallen in love again and Mark has discovered that his computer is broken and he’s lost everything on it despite being, as we hear his interior monologue say, ‘exactly the kind of person who backs up’:
JEREMY: Hey.
MARK: Bloody computer’s dead.
JEREMY: Oh I’m so sorry! Oh that’s really dreadful for you – oh, come here.
Jeremy hugs Mark.
MARK: (Interior monologue) Ugh, hugging?
JEREMY: Poor you!
MARK: Are you okay? Is this … Ecstasy? You’re not getting into Ecstasy again, are you?
JEREMY: I’m in love, Mark. With amazing Elena. I don’t want to tempt fate but I think everything’s going to be totally great forever.
MARK: I’m pleased for you.
JEREMY: You don’t understand, Mark. I’ve realised that everything’s just a substitute for being in love. Reading, running in the Olympics, getting a job, being a doctor. And I don’t need those substitutes any more. Elena is my one true soulmate.
MARK: It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that out of the three billion adult women in the world, your one true soulmate happens conveniently to live in the same block of flats as you. Rather than, say, in a village in Mozambique.
JEREMY: Who knows how these things happen? There are powers at work beyond our understanding.
MARK: No there aren’t.
JEREMY: What was it that Shakespeare said?
MARK: He said a lot of things, Jeremy.
In the first series, we filmed everything with mini-cameras strapped to our heads. Unfortunately, the footage was so poor that a lot of it wasn’t usable so we also filmed everything on a normal camera but with the actor whose POV the camera was aping reaching round the lens so that things could be picked up or put down or other characters’ hands shaken. This was incredibly fiddly and took a lot of time. For series 2, we came to the conclusion that a lot of things didn’t really need to be filmed on ‘headcam’ as well as by a normal camera. For series 3, the headcam was used, I think, once. We haven’t used it since.
We filmed in a real flat, halfway up a tower block in Croydon, possibly the least convenient part of Greater London to get to from Kilburn. Croydon was chosen because the director of the first series liked the idea of setting a scene on a tram and Croydon is the only part of London with trams. Then Channel 4 told us not to set a scene on a tram as that would be weird because there are hardly any trams anywhere nowadays – mainly it’s Croydon and Vienna. So the tram plan was dropped but somehow the Croydon plan wasn’t, which was annoying. Sam and Jesse would have been just as happy setting it in Kilburn, which would have cumulatively saved me weeks in a car. Still, it wouldn’t have helped in my struggle to differentiate myself from Mark Corrigan.
The flat was a fairly unpleasant working environment as, at any given moment, the whole crew had to be concealed in whichever room definitely wouldn’t be visible in the scene we were shooting – which was often the smallest. Watching the show play out in a bland empty flat unfilled by Mark and Jeremy’s bland empty lives, it’s weird to contemplate that there are perpetually about twenty people just out of shot.
The scene in which Mark, very uncharacteristically, has sex with a seventeen-year-old he’s picked up at a bowling alley is precisely such a moment. In that apparently intimate bedroom, there were six or seven burly men hiding just out of sight, behind the camera and under the bed as I did my valiant sex faces, and yet more people – make-up, costume, director, writers, producer, props and art department – lurking right outside the door. In fact, that made it less embarrassing, as the ambiance was vastly different from the one we were trying to portray.
I’d been dreading the sex scene. How much of my naked body would be on display? What if I got an erection? What if when I tried to look like I was having sex, everyone thought it was weird? How was I supposed to behave to this actress I hardly knew? Some of the crew discussed the scene as if I was supposed to be looking forward to it, as if pretending to have sex was a bit like actually having sex, and this made me more uncomfortable still. I wouldn’t want to be rude to the actress by not looking keen, or rude to the actress by looking keen. It was a minefield.
Fortunately, the point-of-view filming style came to my rescue. It turned out that, through the eyes of the characters, viewers would only really see heads and shoulders – that, in this world at least, the characters did look at the mantelpiece while stoking the fire. So it involved very little nudity and very little rolling around in bed with a stranger in front of colleagues. Largely, I looked into a camera lens and pulled funny faces. I was helped here by my character who, in seven series, has hardly ever had good sex. So I was supposed to look uncomfortable and worried, which I can do. It would be mortifying to have to pull a confident, aroused face.
In that first series, I also had a love scene with Collie, who played Sophie, the object of Mark’s desire. They don’t have sex, they just roll around in bed for a bit before having to take Jeremy to hospital when he fakes an overdose. That was slightly less embarrassing as Collie and I knew each other well enough to frankly discuss how much we were both dreading the scene. We didn’t have to behave professionally about it. We were singing from the same hymn sheet. And the hymn was: Oh Lord, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.
When the shoot ended, for Phil Clarke the greatest challenge began: making sense of the weird footage. In the edit, he discovered that parts of the show wouldn’t cut together. The grammar of this new way of filming hadn’t yet been fully worked out and Phil found himself desperately trying to make sentences without enough conjunctions or prepositions. The first editor was also a problem. I think he was a bit too arty and, according to Phil, the first cut of episode 1 was basically an indecipherable blur. He refused to show it to me or Rob as he thought we’d be too depressed.
So a new editor had to be found, reshoots organised, and the money to pay for them extracted from Channel 4; and in general Channel 4 had to be mollified and stopped from panicking. This was made easier by the fact that our commissioning editor was Iain Morris (who has since co-written the brilliant sitcom The Inbetweeners). He understood the show, he loved the scripts and was determined, in the face of all our difficulties, not to lose heart. This in turn heartened the rest of us as, in the nine-month gap between the end of the shoot and the first broadcast of the show, we had ample time to wonder whether anyone would like or get this weird thing we were bringing to the screen.
A lot of the time I wished that we could have done something more normal. I’d wanted to make an old-fashioned sitcom with a studio audience. I liked the ‘POV’ scripts very much but felt that the shooting style was a gimmick. Still, I reasoned, Rob and I were virtually unheard-of and so some sort of gimmick was needed as an excuse for giving us our own show.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m now pleased that Peep Show has a distinctive filming style. I think it’s interesting, often helps the jokes and seldom hampers them. Basically though, I think the show succeeds in the same way as a conventional British sitcom. It’s about two people, with whom the audience can identify, trapped in a situation with which the audience can also identify. Like all of us, they want love, money, success, security. But they probably end up pepper-spraying more acquaintances, urinating in more churches and burning more dogs than most of us:
JEREMY: There’s a hell of a lot of steam.
MARK: Yeah. As it turns out, dogs do seem to be mostly water.
JEREMY: (poking with a stick) It’s going a bit, just … not the legs.
MARK: Put the legs back on in the middle – maybe it’ll burn better.
JEREMY: Oh right! I have to put the legs back on? If you hadn’t refused to pay for firelighters it would have gone by now.
MARK: You shouldn’t need firelighters to burn a dog, Jeremy!
JEREMY: How would you know? Shit – it’s going out.
Jeremy bends down, starts blowing at it.
MARK: Look I’ve got to get my pitch sorted before I see Malcolm.
JEREMY: We’ll have to bury it. Get the spade.
MARK: What spade?
JEREMY: You didn’t bring a spade?
MARK: Do you think I’m some kind of freelance dog-murdering mafia man?
JEREMY: Oh, great. So we’ve got no fire, no spade … we’ll just have to dig with our hands.
Jeremy tries pathetically to dig a hole in the earth with his fingers and a stick.
MARK: Jeremy. There are many things I would do to help you. But digging a hole in the wintry earth with my bare hands so that you can bury the corpse of a dog you killed is not one of them.
Mark and Jeremy are caught between jeopardy and opportunity in the same way as Steptoe and Son, Tony Hancock, the various incarnations of Blackadder, Gary and Tony from Men Behaving Badly and David Brent. In many ways it’s a classic comedy masquerading as a ground-breaking one and, as a small ‘c’ conservative, I mean that as a compliment to the scripts, not a criticism.
The extended interior monologues, when you can hear the characters’ thoughts, were a proper innovation in TV comedy and one that massively adds comic potential. Here are the thoughts that we hear going through Mark’s mind as he attempts his first-ever jog:
MARK: (interior monologue) Hey, wow … I’m actually good at this. Maybe I’m a natural? Yeah, I’m a jogger! Of course, there had to be a sport for me! I just never realised – I’m a natural jogger! Feel the legs, like two great steam locomotives, pumping away. I’m Cram, I’m Ovett, I’m unstoppable, I’m – … Jesus, is that a stitch? I … fuck. I think I’m going to be sick. I’ve got to slow … I need to walk … Urgh. I think I’m going to puke. I am literally going to die. What an idiotic boob I was, back ten or eleven seconds ago.
If you only saw what Mark did and heard what he said out loud, he wouldn’t be nearly so funny. He’s such a model of conventionality that you’d have comparatively little (just the occasional desk-pissing or stationery-cupboard-ejaculating incident) from which to infer his inner turmoil. As it is, his thoughts can be funny even when his behaviour is meekly shy or just normal. Mark partly came out of the character I’d been chalked down to play in All Day Breakfast (the show that Sam, Jesse, Rob and I wrote together, which never got made) who was called Phil. We’d found him harder to make funny than Conrad, Rob’s character on whom Jeremy was partly based, because he was so buttoned-up and controlled. But when you can hear the thoughts of such brittle pillars of the community as they begin to crumble inside, there’s a lot more potential for comedy.
A world away from the concerns of two twenty-something men sharing a flat in Croydon was my home life: sharing a flat in Kilburn with another twenty-something man. In fact, one of the things that struck me when I first walked into Mark and Jeremy’s flat for filming was that it was slightly nicer than mine. Certainly anyone stumbling into my Kilburn residence could have been forgiven for thinking that I was a method actor who’d taken things a bit far (if that’s not a tautology).
But Robbie Hudson and I get along a lot better than Mark and Jeremy. I own the flat and am an inept landlord who doesn’t know how to repair anything and finds even the process of contacting those who do very stressful. Things just go wrong in flats, it seems. All the time. It isn’t just the doorbell. Things that used to work – washing machines, boilers, lavatories, lights – just stop doing so, for no reason. It’s like a Microsoft application – except you can’t just turn a blocked sink off and on again. And apparently, if you own the flat, it becomes your fault and you have to sort it out. Well, I’m not very good with that but, in compensation, I don’t notice if the rent’s a bit late. I’m not saying Robbie ever pays his rent late – just that, if he had, I wouldn’t have noticed.
Of course we have our differences. He likes the place to be clean but doesn’t mind a bit of clutter – whereas I’m not very fussy about cleanliness but do like things to be tidy. So we’ve compromised on neither of us getting his way.
But mainly we have lots of things in common: we drink a lot of tea; we work from home most of the time; we take any opportunity to be distracted from work by something stupid on the internet; we enjoy mocking daytime TV while avidly consuming it. And, most of all, we both believe that, if you’re going to share a flat with someone for any significant length of time, you should never express annoyance. This principle, while it would hobble a sitcom, is vital to a calm life. It is so much easier to live with being annoyed by someone than to live with someone being annoyed by you: the first state is one of irritation, the second is a tyranny. So it’s much better to suck it up and never get cross while, in return, all the maddening things about you are reciprocally overlooked.
We’ve had the occasional point of conflict, however. Robbie likes football, which I do not. During one international football tournament, he took to putting up England memorabilia around the flat. This was only to annoy me – he’s not a moron. There were flags on the fridge, lions on the windows, bunting along the bookshelves, etc. He was clearly trying to wind me up, but I rose above it. And, as I rose, so did the tide of memorabilia. More and more household items were decorated with England-liveried plastic, including a large poster of one of the players on my bedroom door. The flat looked like we were celebrating a sort of nationalistic version of Christmas. But the more there was, the more determined I became never to mention it. I knew he was trying to provoke me and reasoned that the most annoying thing I could say was nothing. In a conflict, you should always do what your opponent wants least. One day, all of the memorabilia was suddenly gone. We have never spoken of it. In fact, only if he reads this book will he know for sure that I noticed.
And then there was the partial rent strike. It was over my failure to put in a shower. When we moved in, I promised I’d get a shower fitted and then did nothing about it as I had no idea where to begin. (Anyway, baths are fine.) Robbie would occasionally mention this. Then he would often mention this. I felt guilty. Then he said he was going to dock the rent he was paying until a shower materialised. I was very relieved by this strategy as it meant I no longer felt guilty. He wasn’t paying for the shower any more, so I wasn’t being unfair by not providing it. I was able to massively scale back my shower-procuring efforts.
I know what you’re thinking: two eligible young men with their own pad in London’s glittering Zone 2. What happened when one or other of us wanted to invite a young lady back? Well, it would be unfair of me to discuss the existence, extent or nature of Robbie’s love life here but, on the rare occasions when I’ve had a one-night stand, and for the brief period when I was in a relationship, I avoided spending the night in the flat – but this was largely because, until 2007, I still had a single bed. Ridiculously monkish of me, I know. But for years, while single, I didn’t like the thought of getting a double because it would feel like I was doing it in the expectation of starting to go out with someone or having more sex. There it would be: all big enough for two people, rebuking me as I lay there alone reading history books. And wanking.
It was my friend Benet Brandreth who finally made me snap out of this attitude, saying it was absurd not to have a double bed, whether I was alone or in a couple. He took me to John Lewis to choose one – which is (I’m sorry to disappoint some readers), without a doubt, the gayest thing I have ever done.
That’s not been the only improvement to the flat over the years. I eventually got a shower and new carpets and even, under intense pressure from my parents, a new kitchen. We also got a cleaner. Robbie says ‘she doesn’t clean things properly’. I agree but counter that she’s being paid so that we don’t have to not clean things properly ourselves. I am heartened by the thought that this isn’t an exchange Mark and Jeremy would have. Jeremy certainly wouldn’t care how well the cleaner cleaned but would resent paying for her – and so wouldn’t do it. Mark would both want a cleaner and worry that he was being fleeced. In fact, come to think of it, it’s a conversation that Mark might have with himself, in his interior monologue. Oh God! Maybe Robbie’s just in my head, like in Fight Club?
After filming that first series of Peep Show, there was a long wait for it to be broadcast. In the gap, Rob and I recorded our other new series: a radio sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound (and there at last is the ‘That’!). This was produced by Gareth Edwards – six years after we’d met him, we were finally working together on something that was going to be broadcast. And it was just a normal sketch show, which was a very refreshing change. For years, since we were in Footlights in fact, Rob and I had been trying to come up with ways of dressing sketch shows up as other things – giving them ‘themes’. Maybe all the characters know each other, or do the same job, or are related, or live in the same place? Maybe the end of one sketch leads into the start of another? Maybe there’s a theme of ‘modern life’ or ‘relationships’ or ‘food’ or ‘totalitarianism’?
For ages we’d bought into the notion that a sketch show needs something like this – something unifying to make audiences keep watching, like they do with a sitcom. But, by 2002, we’d realised that was nonsense. No sketch show theme can ever give it a through-line which will attract anything like the audience loyalty that you get for a sitcom. In a sitcom, you can properly get to know characters and follow their lives – a good one like Cheers inspires huge audience love and support. People will keep watching just to spend time with those characters, even in patches where the scripts aren’t as good as they could be. In terms of repeat-viewing appeal, even the most heavily themed sketch show is hugely outgunned by the most lazily-plotted sitcom.
The only way a sketch show clings to viewers is by being funny and by providing variety – so, if an audience member dislikes one sketch, they’ll have some faith that the next might be different and therefore preferable. An overarching theme hampers both of these potential strengths: it makes the show less varied and it precludes some jokes. In my experience, you’ve no sooner decided on your sketch show concept than you’re frustrated by the discovery of a nugget of comedy gold that doesn’t fit in.
So, if you want audience loyalty, write a sitcom. If you’re doing a sketch show, accept the limitations of the form: you’re only ever as funny as your last joke. To try and deny that truth is like putting on a ballet and complaining that all the performers have to dance the whole time. But, when discussing radio pitches with Gareth, we were almost shy to say that we wanted to do a straightforward, theme-less sketch show. But he was fine about it, saying the theme could be that ‘every sketch has one of David Mitchell or Robert Webb in it and sometimes both’. That suited us, and theme-less it was. We could have a pair of snooker commentators, bemoaning the teetotal approach of modern players:
PETER: Look at John Parrott sitting there, staring mournfully at his water.
TED: Look at that. You could put a goldfish in that glass. And it wouldn’t even die.
Some eager party hosts reminiscing about the tremendous fun they’d had hanging out with Hitler:
ROBERT: I love it when he goes off on one. It’s so funny, and not a little persuasive.
DAVID: I know. But some of the things he was saying about Tube workers. I mean, we know him, so we know it’s not racist, it’s just very very clever irony.
Or an animal charity appeal:
Soft-spoken voiceover
For the price of a cataract operation which would restore this Sudanese woman’s sight, you could fund months of trawling up and down motorways looking for kittens. For the £3 a month that could equip an Ethiopian farmer with seeds and tools, you could be providing a lifetime’s doggie biscuits for this Labrador that wees itself every time it hears the Hoover.
After recording a pilot at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, Radio 4 commissioned a series.
In some ways this was more promising than Peep Show. As an opportunity, it had fewer possibilities but it was a more established, respectable achievement: our own comedy show on the old Home Service, rather than a late-night Channel 4 experiment that might disappear. It was a good thing for my parents to tell their friends about. Also, it was a show Rob and I were primarily writing ourselves. Getting laughs both for your material and your performance isn’t just twice as good as one or the other. It is roughly 3.2 times as good. I have done the maths on this.
The recordings, held at the Drill Hall Theatre off Tottenham Court Road, were very exciting occasions for me. I invited everyone I had an e-mail address for – this was our chance to perform comedy professionally in front of friends who’d seen us monkey around for years as amateurs. The consequent atmosphere was warm and supportive, like a heated truss. Rob and I, together with Collie and James Bachman who made up the rest of the cast, had a lovely time. It felt like the first night of Innocent Millions – it had the same sense of excitement and possibility – but this time it was fine that we didn’t know our lines because we were reading them off a script. That is one of the many things that makes working in radio so civilised.
Even though the radio show hadn’t even been written when we shot Peep Show, it began transmitting first – in September 2003, with Peep Show starting four weeks later. We had a sketch show and a sitcom going out at once – surely the breakthrough that we’d expected at the time of Bruiser four years earlier was happening for us now?