Starting last Friday, ‘Peep Show’ was Channel 4’s latest attempt at finding a fresh new sitcom to excite the sofa electorate. Focusing on two housemates, free spirit/wannabe popstar Jeremy and ‘posh spaz’ Mark. The former was last seen on one of Roy Mallard’s Day In The Lifes, the latter may have made his first serious foray past adverts. He fancies a girl in his office who he sees on the bus; and he is terrorised by the local street kids. He gets his own back on knobhead Jeremy, by laughing along to his awful sub-Prodge music with the woman from the flat upstairs. There was the usual up-to-date settings, clothes and dialogue. There is swearing, wanking and genitalia jokes. All standard.
Peep Show’s obligatory few twists may see it become the subject of watercoolers and Outlook inboxes. Every time there was a slice of internal monologue the camera became the mind’s eye, looking deep into the subject as you might in life. True thoughts were convincingly revealed.
The other was the nagging, cloying tension, the sense that everybody can’t stand each other really and all we’re doing in this life is constructing barely-acceptable meta existences to get by, to avoid stabbing the execrable other with the bread knife. You wonder how the two protagonists would ever have got together, but then you look at your reality and understand. When the mise en scene is this abject, this embarrassing, you have to scratch your head and remember what makes life worthwhile. As the C4 website says, in essence they are both ‘ordinary wierdos’, just like your next door neighbour, your auntie, yourself.
All in all some decent character and plot development may elevate it to the class of Office-type painful-but-funny sitcom.
(I only watched it because the trailer featured my local town hall and high street).
Watched a bit of the BBC's innovative new black Briton sitcom 'The Crouches' last night. Sheer brilliance this one, modern language and clothes are employed in the SE London setting - everybody is "feelin' it" in whatever situation they're in and there's a general light-hearted street cockney patois running through the dialogue. A street talk as unsuccessfully aped by a Lennon-bespectacled white middle-class scriptwriter, but...
Yet these are mere diversions to the reaffirmation of stereotypes for the bored sofa electorate already locked into socio-cultural inertia ("Will you hold still while you're assimilated, please!"). Dad is a beleaguered tube worker (does that mean Mum works in hospitals?) and, amazingly, one of the protagonists ends up in an incident with the police. But it's all laughed off, ho-ho-ho. Remember, whites - 'they' are different and though genial are sometimes dangerous, etc, etc, etc. This is exactly the kind of low-level insidious stereotyping and prejudice which WhoreCull has long condemned, especially when there are much grander guignols to preoccupy you in the shape of Bush & Blair Inc.
Once again, more quality filling Dyke's channels.
