PEEP SHOW
Where: ABC2, Thursday, January 17, 9.30pm
Details: visit abc.net.au/tv/abc2
Preview: Myke Bartlett
Now into its eighth season, this discomfiting British comedy is losing none of its black bite. Indeed, it’s darker and bleaker than ever, with its protagonists mired in seven years of mistakes and bad decisions.
Mark (David Mitchell) has lost his prized-yet-despised office job and seen his newborn son whisked away by his arch-enemy and his ex-wife. Slacker Jeremy (Robert Webb) finds that being unemployed in your 40s no longer feels edgy and artistic.
Shot from the protagonists’ perspective and giving us access to their interior monologues, the series plays on our deepest insecurities.
Trapped in Mark and Jeremy’s somewhat sociopathic heads, we feel no one understands anyone else. Even worse, we’re sure it’s for the best that nobody gets to truly understand us.
The horror of the show stems from the suggestion that, no matter how we struggle to better ourselves, our inner voices expose us as not-very-nice people. The thin comfort comes from the revelation that we’re not alone. Mark and Jeremy will always be worse than we are.
That, at least, gives us something to laugh about.
