Tuesday, January 06, 2015

The other half speaks

Robert Webb: Peep Show has taught me we need to let women be idiots, too

David Mitchell, who I think has been the funniest man on British TV for quite a few years now, has worked a lot with Robert Webb, but I have never seen the latter writing or saying anything alone.  Well, that's now been corrected by the above article in The Independent.

Like Mitchell, it's very easy to mentally hear his voice in his writing.

As for Peep Show, which has been on for years but I have only been intermittently watching it for 18 months or so, it really is one of the pretty extreme examples of the cringe inducing comedies of embarrassment that Britain seems to specialise in (nearly to the exclusion of all other sitcom styles, as far as I can tell.) 

It is something of a guilty pleasure - the language is far too unnecessarily vulgar too often; some of the actions of some of the characters are just a bit too appalling to feel real; and you can start to feel a kind of claustrophobia from spending even 30 minutes with such hopeless losers.  But for all of that, it can be intermittently very funny.  I think both Mitchell and Webb are very good comedic actors; I just wish the material they were working with in the show was not always so relentlessly bleak about their character and prospects....

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