It's easy to get resentful in your fifties. Age creeps up on you in your forties, but after that it positively stalks you. Your children are at university, cruelly driving home the fact that your own brush with higher education was more than 30 years ago. You have to give up organised sport because your malfunctioning knees can no longer do much more than support a TV dinner. And you need your reading glasses to cut your toenails so as to avoid involuntary amputation. Old people are just like everyone else, except that they think that the previous window has vanished off their computer screen whenever they open a new one.
For this last observation we're indebted to Peep Show, the comedy that has just finished its fifth run on Channel 4. Like all the best comedies, it treats us to clever, endearing revelations about ourselves. Peep Show first appeared in 2003 in a blast of originality. It featured two sex-obsessed twentysomething college friends, Mark and Jeremy, who share a bachelor flat in Croydon. Mark ("I want a fuck buddy") is a credit manager at "JLB Credit." Jeremy ("maybe I'm a knobhead") is unemployed but fantasises about a music career with Super Hans, his narcotically challenged chum. So far, so ordinary. But all the dialogue is shot from the point of view of the characters—head on, into the camera. At the same time we hear the protagonists' inner thoughts—lewd, neurotic and usually chaotically at odds with whatever is happening to them. The two characters are played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, both incubated by Cambridge Footlights and more recently seen and heard in their own comedy sketch shows on Radio 4 and BBC2 (That Mitchell And Webb Look). The two desperate characters developed for them in Peep Show (by writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain) are a sort of Laurel and Hardy on crack cocaine, trapped in sub-suburbia.
From the start, Peep Show was a critical success. It felt fresh and experimental and attracted a small but devoted following, generally receiving around 1.2m viewers. But because your average sitcom costs a minimum of £200,000 per episode, Peep Show was not paying its way on Channel 4. Nevertheless, enjoying the critical plaudits, the programme commissioners ordered two further series, but by early 2006 they had pretty well decided to axe the show. Three things saved it: its DVD sales were very strong, Mitchell and Webb seemed sexier once their separate sketch show was taken up by the BBC, and the comedy mafia, led by generalissimo Ricky Gervais, closed ranks to demand Peep Show's continuation.
Talk to any network boss in the US and they will tell you that television comedy is in decline. Where now are the Friends, Seinfelds and Cosby Shows of yesteryear? What they are less likely to admit is that it is their own fault. So intense is the competition between the declining broadcasters that any show not rating within three episodes is summarily executed. But comedy needs time, sometimes years, to take root in the affections of the audience. Fawlty Towers started with 1m viewers but on its umpteenth repeat could get 9m. Last of the Summer Wine "failed" for two series before it took off. Dad's Army had a very muted beginning. More recently, the US version of The Office on NBC was not performing but, unusually, they persevered and now have a solid comedy hit with a commercially attractive young audience.
It is to Channel 4's credit that, in the end, it stuck with Peep Show. ITV has virtually given up on the considerable investment necessary to create hit comedy (with the honourable exception of Benidorm). Five does not have the resources. That leaves the BBC and Channel 4. If "public service broadcasting" means anything, it should represent sustained investment in comedy talent. It is an essential part of our culture. And we need companies like Objective Productions, which created Peep Show, to continue to come up with the opportunities for that investment.
