Peep Show: Series 1

Details

At the centre of Peep Show are Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne, two old university friends who now share Mark's flat in Croydon. Jeremy is lazy, hopelessly optimistic and possesses a wildly inflated opinion of his future music career. Having been thrown out by his ex-girlfriend Big Suze, he's ended up living with Mark, whose cautious, pessimistic and rather more conventional view of life couldn't be more different.

Unfortunately, Mark isn't exactly having much more success with life himself. Socially awkward and painfully self-conscious, he's become obsessed with his co-worker Sophie and spends much of his time trying to work out how to turn their occasional conversations into something resembling a relationship. Unfortunately, Mark's attempts at romance usually involve so much planning, overthinking and outright panic that even the simplest encounter has the potential to become a complete disaster.

Jeremy, meanwhile, dreams of musical stardom alongside his idiotic and manipulative friend Super Hans, whilst becoming increasingly interested in Mark's attractive but rather unstable neighbour Toni. Although Mark and Jeremy approach life from completely different directions, both are socially dysfunctional in their own peculiar ways and have developed an unhealthy reliance on one another - a dependence which frequently leads to frustration, jealousy and some truly appalling decisions.

What makes their world rather different from the average sitcom is that we don't merely get to watch what Mark and Jeremy do - we also get to hear what they're actually thinking. Unfortunately for both of them, their private thoughts tend to reveal considerably more than they'd ever want anybody else to know.

Picture & Sound

Made on an extremely tight budget and filmed using digital video cameras, the picture quality has all the potential to be a total disaster. However, it's actually rather good, with a decent level of detail and colour depth and no real problems with artifacting or outlining. Sure, during some of the darker indoor or brighter outdoor scenes there are occasional problems with grain, but on the whole it's more than adequate for a television series made on a shoestring budget.

The unusual point-of-view filming technique inevitably gives the programme a rather distinctive appearance and this isn't the sort of material that's ever going to be used as a demonstration disc for your new television. Nevertheless, the transfer faithfully reproduces the deliberately intimate and slightly rough appearance of the original production and there's very little to complain about.

Due to the bandwidth limitations of a terrestrial television broadcast, and let's not forget those budget restraints, there's very little to expect from the sound department. Still, the 256Kbps two-channel Dolby Digital soundtrack is more than sufficient for its needs and presents crisp and clear dialogue throughout.

Whilst there are a few benefits from feeding the audio through a surround system, you can probably save yourself a few pence on the old electric meter by dispensing with it and, assuming you have them, simply using the built-in speakers in your television or projection system. This is very much a dialogue-driven comedy and the soundtrack does everything it needs to do without attempting anything unnecessarily clever.

Menu & Extras

The menu system is scored and animated at each level, with various cut scenes from the series playing in the background along with the rather catchy, but ultimately annoying, theme tune. Selecting another menu produces another short scene before displaying the available options. The menus could perhaps have been compacted a little more, but that's being overly critical as the overall design is clever, well laid out and extremely funny.

Extras-wise, two of the episodes have Audio Commentaries, whilst things get even better with six hilarious, specially filmed character-centred shorts based around Jeremy and Mark. Laugh? I nearly choked. These are some of the best extras I've seen on a comedy series DVD and, rather than feeling like material scraped together simply to fill the disc, they genuinely extend the characters beyond the episodes themselves.

First up is Mark, who's keen to add some sparkle to his CV and has devised the self-promotional video A Voyage Around Mark Corrigan. Mark desperately attempts to convince a potential employer that he works hard, plays hard and sleeps when he's dead, whilst managing to demonstrate almost exactly the opposite. Would you employ this bloke? Not after seeing that video.

Next are the two parts of Scorpion Patrol: Real Life Behind Enemy Lines, where Mark asks Jeremy and Sophie to read extracts from a book to entertain his dad in hospital. Naturally, neither narrator is particularly impressed by the gruesome detail, whilst Mark uses the opportunity to chat up Sophie and attempts, rather unsuccessfully, to convince his dad that she's actually his girlfriend.

And if you thought Mark was weird, just wait until you see what Jeremy has to offer in his Big Brother Audition Tape. Here he attempts to convince the producers that he's totally bonkers and therefore the perfect candidate for the house. Things are helped along nicely by plenty of screaming at the camera, smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer and donning a pair of Speedos whilst suggesting he might be up for anything "gay".

Then there's Last Will and Testament, which sees Jeremy making plans for his funeral, choosing the music and deciding which guests he'd like to attend - including finding old friends through Friends Reunited to help increase the female presence. Finally, there's his Prodigy-style Outrageous video, which has him ranting, raving and passing numerous comments on George Bush and Tony Blair. At least it's rather topical.

With Mark and Jeremy's mad videos out of the way, you can return to some semblance of sanity with the Audio Commentaries accompanying the first and last episodes of the series. Quite why they couldn't stretch to the entire series is something of a mystery, but nevertheless both commentaries are jovial affairs and contain plenty of useful information about the scripts, the bizarre filming techniques, sets, characters and various friends who appear in the background.

There's also a neat little technical touch. Most audio commentaries seem to occupy the centre channel, but here writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain appear in one channel whilst David Mitchell and Robert Webb appear in the other. It's simple but surprisingly effective. Fortunately, each episode also comes equipped with subtitles, so you can listen to the commentary whilst still following the episode itself.

Overall

When the preview disc of Peep Show arrived through my letterbox unannounced, I wondered just what the heck I was going to review. Peep Shop? I'd never heard of the thing! So, with some trepidation, I popped the disc into the player for a quick spin to give me an idea of what to expect. The best part of two hours later, having nearly split my sides laughing, I rather disappointingly reached the end of the disc. More! I cried. Fortunately there is more, as the release of Series One on DVD coincides with the second series airing on Channel 4.

The first thing that makes Peep Show stand out is the way it's filmed. Much of the action is shown from the characters' point of view, putting the viewer directly into Mark and Jeremy's conversations rather than leaving us watching from the usual sitcom distance. Add their internal monologues and we don't merely see the awkward situations they find themselves in - we know precisely what they're thinking whilst they're desperately trying to appear normal.

It's a wonderfully effective idea because the difference between what somebody says and what they're actually thinking is frequently enormous. Mark can be having a perfectly ordinary conversation with Sophie whilst internally analysing every word, panicking about what he's just said and considering increasingly ridiculous ways of recovering the situation. You know he's going to put his foot in it eventually; the fun comes from discovering exactly how spectacularly he'll manage it this time.

David Mitchell is superb as Mark. He's uptight, insecure, pessimistic and capable of turning even the most straightforward social encounter into a personal crisis. His continual and disastrous pursuit of Sophie produces some of the biggest laughs and, just when you think he's finally cracked it, he'll say or do something so completely stupid that you have to wonder why he bothers.

Robert Webb's Jeremy is the perfect counterbalance. Where Mark thinks about everything far too much, Jeremy frequently appears not to think about anything at all. His confidence in his virtually non-existent musical career is wonderful, particularly when combined with Matt King's completely unhinged Super Hans. The two flatmates are utterly different, but somehow equally hopeless.

There's also something strangely believable underneath all the madness. Mark and Jeremy frequently irritate the hell out of one another and would probably both claim that their lives would be easier apart, yet neither seems remotely capable of functioning properly without the other. They're friends almost by necessity, united largely by the fact that everybody else would probably find them even harder to tolerate.

It's no wonder that Peep Show has already won a Golden Rose award and, in my opinion, shamelessly lost out to The Office at the BAFTAs. Yes, I know everybody seems to love The Office, but sorry, I just don't find it funny. Give me Mark Corrigan silently destroying his own chances with Sophie any day.

With comedy series such as Father Ted, Black Books and Spaced under its belt, Channel 4 is quickly becoming a hotbed of comedy talent that even the BBC is having trouble keeping up with. When you consider that the BBC are having to resort to repeats of Yes, Prime Minister, The Good Life, Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers, you quickly come to the conclusion that, with the exception of Coupling, their comedy department was pensioned off years ago. And no, I hadn't forgotten The Office. See above.

Peep Show has Classic written all over it. Not only am I impatiently waiting for the next episode to be screened on Channel 4, I'm now equally impatient for the second series to appear on DVD. It apparently took a bit of coaxing to get Series Two made, so I just hope writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain stick with it and somebody has the sense to commission a third.

It's wacky, painfully uncomfortable, occasionally completely bizarre and absolutely hilarious. Add some genuinely worthwhile specially filmed extras and this becomes one of those wonderful occasions where a review disc you've never even heard of turns out to be an unexpected gem. Highly recommended.

Special features

• Audio Commentary on Two Episodes by the Writers and Principal Artists
• Mark's CV
• Scorpion Patrol: Real Life Behind Enemy Lines Part I
• Scorpion Patrol: Real Life Behind Enemy Lines Part 2
• Jeremy's Audition Tape
• Jeremy's Last Will and Testament
• Outrageous AKA Celsius 488 1/3