There are plenty of comic partnerships that start out with a shared dream and end, like Peter Cook’s and Dudley Moore’s, in bitter tensions and seething envy. That’s not the impression David Mitchell and Robert Webb give. “If we worked in an office together,” says Mitchell, “we’d be friends and go to the pub.”

“The thing we have in common is that we make each other laugh,” agrees Webb, “whether we turn that into money or do it just for the fun of it. It happens less frequently now these days, we’ve both got our own families, but if we do end up in the pub or at weddings and if I make a joke, apart from my wife, the first person I will look at in the room is David to see if it was funny or not.”

“Same with me,” says Mitchell.

We are in a central London club and both men are showing no sign that, after two decades of working together, the chemistry is in any danger. Mitchell is sporting an unconvincing moustache for which he apologises. “I should explain I’m in a Professor Branestawm Christmas thing.”



I find it endlessly pleasing that the truth is that almost everyone feels like a bit of an outsider David Mitchell

He’s been a ubiquitous presence on TV and radio for many years now, but a large chunk of his and Webb’s success can be traced back to a breakthrough moment more than 12 years go.

September 2003 was not a major news month. Johnny Cash died, Swedish voters rejected joining the euro and Andy Roddick won the US Open. But for a hardcore of British television viewers, something very special happened: the beginning on Channel 4 of a small sitcom about two graduates living in a flat in Croydon.

The ninth and final series of Peep Show completed filming earlier this year and is soon to be screened. Channel 4’s longest running comedy by far, it has been an extraordinary creative and critical triumph, winning Baftas, British Comedy and Royal Television Society awards and in 2004 the Rose d’Or for best European sitcom. Yet despite the widespread acclaim it has remained firmly encased in that double-edged designation: cult success.

When it first arrived it looked and sounded like nothing else. For a start, every shot was filmed from the point of view of one of the characters. What they saw was what we saw. Much of the dialogue emerged from internal monologues, which meant that not only were we looking out of their eyes but listening to their minds in all their selfish, conniving, desperate glory. It made an intense, almost claustrophobic viewing experience.

In the first episode both flatmates, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) and Jeremy “Jez” Usborne (Robert Webb), seek to seduce their next-door neighbour Toni (Elizabeth Marmur). They’re both hopeless for different reasons: Mark because of his excess of self-consciousness – he tries to woo her with descriptions of the battle of Stalingrad – and Jez because of his lack of self-knowledge.

It was sharp, very funny, sad, pathetic, lifelike, yet slightly surreal. And it perfectly captured the ennui and shapeless existence of 20-something men languishing in irresponsibility and immaturity.

At first glance, though, both its originality and situation suggested a brief life. All those weird camera angles – imagine Facetiming a whole relationship – and streams of consciousness spelled recommissioning doom. And how long could that post-student life be stretched out before the whole thing snapped?

As it turned out, more than a decade. We got used to the camera angles, or just enough of us did. And the concept of an absurdly extended single life came to look less and less absurd within the culture at large.

The show was created by the comedy writing partnership of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain and executive producer Andrew O’Connor. Originally, as Armstrong says, O’Connor’s idea was to make a live-action Beavis and Butthead.

“You’d have a couple of snarky student types watching TV clips and being amusing about them,” Armstrong recalls. “When we started thinking about the idea, to make it into a half-hour it was evident it needed some other elements. Sam had been watching a crappy documentary called Being Caprice where they put a camera on the head of [model] Caprice so you saw her looking in her fridge for yoghurts. It just had that striking visual thing of the mundane – how much jam do I have left? That was very writable. And from that we thought of the interior monologue.”

The difference between what people say and what they think is fertile comedy territory, but not one often explored in film or television because of the awkwardness of voiceovers. But Peep Show found a way to turn the voiceover into a vital comic component, not tiresomely intrusive but hysterically revealing. A lot has to do with the writing, its ear for the unsayable which often borders on the unthinkable. But it’s also the pitch-perfect delivery of Mitchell and Webb.

“Sam and I and Andrew are called the creators of the show,” says Armstrong, “but really it’s a co-creation with Robert and David. There have been a couple of American attempts at re-versioning Peep Show. When you see other perfectly good comedy actors trying to do something similar you realise how alchemical their performances are.”

Webb and Mitchell in their Cambridge days, mid-90s. The picture was taken for the poster advertising their first two-man show. Photograph: courtesy of David Mitchell

The pair first met at Cambridge, where they were both in Footlights, and then did the comedy circuit, eking out a living with bits of writing here and there. When they arrived in London they were by their own accounts a pair of provincials whose main artistic ambition was to be warm and dry.

“I’m from a little village in Lincolnshire,” says Webb, “and Cambridge is just a small market town. We were living just off Finchley Road, where there are seven lanes of traffic. That literally scared me. I walked along that road and I’d think ‘Oh look, there’s a Boots, everything is not weird.’ But the buildings were so tall, I remember being frightened.”

Mitchell grew up in Wiltshire and Oxford, where his parents lectured on hotel management. They both felt bewildered by the number of comedians in London and intimidated in Edinburgh by the competition that existed among them.

“Because you have this anxiety,” says Webb, “that you’re not going to have your go, and obviously not everyone gets a go at all. But now after nine series of Peep Show and four series of the sketch show, we’ve had a go.”

If Webb has copyrighted the voice of the conceited middle-class slacker, so, in playing nit-picking loan manager Mark, has Mitchell become the comic face of uptight, sexually frustrated, convention-bound uncoolness, unleashing some of the finest embittered tirades ever committed to a script.

“We wrote very much towards versions of them that we knew they could play,” says Armstrong. “There are bits of attitude towards the world which are kind of comic exaggerations of their own views. We’ve always found it easy to figure out anything – from a car to a religious philosophy – and know what Mark and Jeremy’s take on it would be. Once you have that, it’s a very nice thing to write towards.”

Indeed, so invisible is the join between the lines and the performances that it’s been commonly assumed that Mark is David and Jeremy is Robert. It’s a conclusion that both men have in different ways played up to. As Mitchell writes in his memoir, Back Story, people wanted to know how his private life compared with that of his character.

“And I’d certainly implied in panel shows, as a way of getting a laugh and developing a persona that people could get a handle on, that I was a lonely, dysfunctional OCD loser.”

You talk to Ade Edmondson and he regrets they only did two series of The Young Ones Robert Webb

But the pair soon tired of the comparison. Early in the interview Webb is quick to arrest the inevitable line of inquiry. “‘Are you like your character on Peep Show?’ is the question you weren’t about to ask, but it comes up,” he says drily, then adds, for clarification, “We’re sufficiently like that that we’d be against type if we played them the other way round.”

Webb as Mark and Mitchell as Jez? It doesn’t bear thinking about. It would be like taking The Odd Couple and making Walter Matthau the Jack Lemmon character and vice versa.

Although Peep Show plots have at times wandered into fabulously unlikely realms, the key to the show’s enduring relevance is that everything is harnessed to an utterly recognisable milieu. The first series was actually filmed in a real, tiny and cramped flat in Croydon. (Peep Show has always prided itself on its sense of verité, but according to Mitchell, Croydon was not selected for reasons of authenticity or naturalism.

“The first director of the series [Jeremy Wooding], who did not go on to direct other series, is a nice man but not, I would say, the perfect director of comedies. He wanted to make films. He was very much doing that [mimes putting fingers together to make a frame] and he liked the idea of there being trams. It felt a bit avant garde and European, so he wanted trams and there are trams in Croydon.”

“He also lived quite near,” Webb adds.

“Maybe he was cleverer than I thought,” replies Mitchell.

But Channel 4 decided they didn’t like the trams.

“Trams aren’t funny,” explains Webb.

“So we filmed it in Croydon without a single tram in shot and no one twigged that if we’re not doing it with trams we don’t have to do it in Croydon.”

Later they moved to a north London studio in which there was room to swing a camera.)

The audience never strayed far north of a million, though, and there were rumours that Channel 4 would pull the show. “It was on the agenda after almost every series,” says Mitchell. “There were a couple of double commissions, but after every other series it’s been the presumption and mood from the channel that that’s enough of that. But its small ratings have gone from disappointing to really quite good by staying the same in a TV environment in which the audiences are getting smaller.”

One reason it never attracted a mainstream audience was the camerawork. “The visual grammar was a barrier,” Webb says. “It took a bit of getting used to.”

Another was the way Armstrong and Bain constructed the comedy. “They plan and plan and plan,” says Mitchell. “Sam and Jesse are particularly rigorous about getting to the extreme place by believable steps. That’s crucial. I always now reference the dog eating.”

Jeremy Eats a Dog – Peep Show video.

He’s referring to the scene in series 4, episode 5 in which, on a stag weekend on a canal boat, Jez accidentally kills the dog of a woman, Aurora, he’s trying to seduce. After several misadventures, the two men burn the dead dog, but later with the cooked canine in a plastic bag, Jez finds himself on Aurora’s boat. She asks him what’s in the bag and he replies turkey. To prove it, he starts eating a scorched dog’s leg.

“Exactly,” says Webb. “Always entirely logical. If they started with ‘Let’s have an episode where Jeremy eats a dead dog’ that would be ridiculous. The Fonz has jumped the shark. But every little step is driven by their characters and is perfectly logical. And that’s how you get there.”

“You can make your forehead bleed trying to sound natural,” says Armstrong. “But we’ve always been aware that structure is the thing that makes you not have to live from joke to joke.”

There are countless examples over the eight seasons of finely wrought plotting, but perhaps the wedding episode in series 4, episode 6 is a near-perfect one. Mark is to marry Sophie (Olivia Colman), his longterm on-off girlfriend from the office. Back in the series 1 opener, we see him secretly lusting after her, when, that is, he’s not lusting after his next-door neighbour. But he’s clueless as to how to approach her. By series 4, having won the woman of his dreams, he realises that she’s not the one for him. The wedding episode is in a sense a culmination of four seasons’ worth of careful construction and build-up. On the day of the wedding, Mark can’t decide if he wants to go through with it.

Jez asks him if he really wants to get married.

“I don’t know,” Mark replies. “I don’t want to end up on my own like Miss Havisham, wanking into a flannel.”

On the way to the wedding Mark sees an attractive waitress in a cafe reading a book by Roy Jenkins on Winston Churchill and decides she is his perfect woman. It all builds to a farcical end in which Jez wets himself in the church and Sophie flees Mark in tears of disappointment. It’s quite usual, says Webb, for the two of them to crack up during the read-through of a scene. But there are times, and the church scene was one of them, when they have had trouble getting through a scene because they’re laughing too much.

Central to Peep Show, and that episode in particular, is the idea of the two men wanting things they can’t have and then not wanting what they can have. To some extent that’s the human condition, but perhaps to a greater extent it’s a particular kind of male condition – the idea that all the chaos and yearning will be resolved by the right woman, only to find that it never is.

“I’d be a bit shy of characterising it as men as opposed to women,” says Webb. “There’s a thing of feeling that you’re not in the right place at the right time, that sort of cosmic party syndrome when you walk through the door and everyone else is having a party and feeling you’re on the periphery and everyone else is having a great time. I think that’s universal.”

Mitchell agrees. “They are men and they do it in a male way, but the fact that they are constantly wanting something and haven’t worked out if the thing they want will make them happy is universal.”

For Armstrong what matters is not so much that the continuing failure of Mark and Jez to form meaningful relationships with women reflects any deep social or gender truths, but that the constant search for new perfect women “refreshes your structure. It’s very amenable to sitcom in that you want there to be a new enthusiasm.”

The other element to all this is the British comic tradition of identifying with the loser, the outsider, the angry soul with a massive blind spot. Basil Fawlty, Alan Partridge, David Brent – they are all men who believe themselves to be far more significant figures than they actually are.

You can see the same delusion in Jez’s sense of himself as an up-and-coming musician. “Jeremy in the latter series has by dint of necessity had to accept that he’s never going to be in the Chemical Brothers,” says Armstrong. “But really his hopelessly inflated sense of himself will never die.”

It’s also there in Mark’s prim superiority. For all his awareness of his shortcomings, he really believes it’s the rest of the world that’s mad. Of course you can find versions of these types in American comedy, but the lead characters of, say, Seinfeld and Cheers were attractive insiders. You laugh with them, not at them.

“I find it endlessly pleasing that the truth is that almost everyone feels like a bit of an outsider,” says Mitchell. “And the real outsiders are the tiny minority who don’t. The success of not just Peep Show but sitcoms in general is a sign of how audiences identify with these apparent outsider oddball failure characters because that’s how the vast majority of people feel about themselves. But it is very comforting, the notion that the people out in the cold are the odd kind of sociopathic uber-successful Etonians who sort of feel included and loved.”

For a long time, as he makes clear in Back Story, Mitchell saw himself as an outsider. He lived in an ex-council flat in Kilburn, worked very hard and didn’t have much of a social life. But now he’s married to the woman – his fellow Observer columnist Victoria Coren – who really did bring meaning and a sense of wholeness into his life. As he writes: “…by my mid-30s I’d never formed a long-term relationship, never moved in with anyone, hardly ever got off with the same woman twice. Now I’ve met someone who I can’t live without – and I don’t have to.”

‘It’s quite usual for blokes in their 20s to be pissing away a few years in a shitty flat… once they’re over 40, it’s a different sort of person.’ Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer

Mitchell and Coren had a daughter, Barbara, in May this year. Webb is married to the comic actor Abigail Burdess and has two children. Now both men are successful, family-centred and in their 40s. Suddenly the gap between themselves and their characters has become a little too conspicuous for credibility. The post-university years are in danger of slipping into midlife crisis.

“I’m 43,” says Webb. “So they’ve been allowed to age but they haven’t been allowed to move on.”

“Yes and ultimately that turns the premise slightly more melancholy,” adds Mitchell, “because it’s quite usual for blokes in their 20s to be pissing away a few years in a shitty flat and not really working out where their lives are going. Once they’re over 40, it’s a different sort of person.”

Comedy becomes tragedy, I suggest.

“Tragedy is comedy plus time,” Webb quips.

There has been talk about revisiting the show in 10 or 20 years’ time, but essentially an idea that started out in 2001 as half a pilot has come to its natural end. It’s been a big part of Mitchell and Webb’s lives.

As soon as they realised they were on to a good thing, says Webb, “We just wanted to milk it. You talk to Ade Edmondson and he regrets they only did two series of The Young Ones. They could have had four out of that before they stopped being young.”

Mitchell has a theory about why classic British comedies often last a short time. “I think it’s all the fault of Fawlty Towers because it was a special case. Those are 12 perfectly crafted half-hour farces. They’re amazing. And I can totally believe John Cleese and Connie Booth thought there aren’t six more of these in our heads. I don’t think it’s a justification that holds for other sitcoms. They could have done more of The Young Ones. They could have done more of The Office.

“I think the audience wanted it and it might have got even funnier. People emulate Fawlty Towers’ two-series restraint and imply they’re moving on. How many people come up with more than one or at most two great sitcom premises in their whole career?”

“Carla Lane,” says Webb.

Mitchell then hails the American model, which pays creators so well they’re happy to give over the writing to a team that can produce far more material for far more shows. So could they imagine going to work in America?

“No, not really,” replies Mitchell. “I like Britain.”

“You’d have to live there, that’s the drawback,” deadpans Webb. “Just got the kids into primary school.”

“On a deeply xenophobic level…” continues Mitchell.

“Let’s go there,” says Webb enthusiastically.

“It’s nice when Americans like British comedy, but I came into this business to make British people laugh. Comedy is so culturally specific and Britain is so comedy-obsessed and indeed a self-loathing-obsessed culture, which helps, that everything I’ve wanted to do in comedy is bound up in what it feels like to be British. Suddenly coming up with jokes in California with the sun shining all the time – I would feel weird.”

What will happen in the final series? It’s known that Sophie (Colman) returns after missing the last series in which Mark tried and failed to get Dobby, his latest doomed love, to move in. Will there, to use a very un-Peep Show phrase, be a sense of closure?

“I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say the word ‘aliens’,” says Mitchell with a cheeky smile.

There’s a beat, timed with the exactness that only a couple of decades of working together can bring, before Webb says: “But we’ll get there very logically.”

The final series of Peep Show starts on Channel 4 on Wednesday 11 November at 10pm. A film of the Guardian’s Mitchell & Webb event on Thursday will be available on the website soon

Peep Show: the eight best episodes



On the Pull (series 1, episode 3)

Mark accompanies Jez to a “wicked” party where, despite still carrying his shopping (Findus crispy pancakes included), he pulls a teen goth girl. Cue an awkward double-date at a bowling alley, where Mark runs into true love Sophie, gets stoned (“I’m not gonna do a poo, am I, Jez?”) and ends up bowling his groceries.

Local Zero (series 2, episode 3)

After Mark appears in a news report drinking lager in the park, everyone thinks he’s an alcoholic. He ends up at an AA meeting, confessing to eating frozen oven chips from the bag. Meanwhile, Jez tries to impress his girlfriend with volunteer work: “I love the homeless. One of my own would be amazing. I could look after him. Not like a Tamagotchi – better.”

University Challenge (series 2, episode 4)

Peter Capaldi pops up as a professor (not a Doctor) in this episode, which finds Mark infatuated with a shoe-shop assistant (“the magical combo of beauty and low self-esteem”) and following her to college, posing as a mature student. His sex plan is foiled when she says “we’ve got three years to get to know each other”. Jez’s response: “Another notch on the bedpost. Sort of.”

Sectioning (series 3, episode 2)

Mentally unstable friend Merry offers Jez and cult hero Super Hans ownership of a disused pub, which Super Hans wants to call “Free The Paedos”. Jez suggests “something more normal, like The Swan and Tomato”. Super Hans agrees to compromise: “The Swan and Paedo.” Eventually our heroes try to section each other.

Holiday (series 4, episode 5)

Jeremy takes Mark on a canal boat stag weekend but they find themselves distracted by two sisters on another barge and begin “water-stalking” them. When Jez accidentally kills their dog, he tries to burn the evidence - but ends up eating the charred canine corpse in front of its owners, trying to pass it off as turkey.

Wedding (series 4, episode 6)

After four series of build-up, Mark and Sophie are finally set to marry. Except a hungover Super Hans throws up in Mark’s hat and shoes, cold-footed Mark tries to get himself run over by calling a driver a “jizz-cock” and “piss-kidney”, and best man Jeremy wets himself. And it leaks on to the congregation below. Fairytale stuff.

Jeremy’s Mummy (series 5, episode 4)

When Jeremy’s aunt dies, leaving him £20,000 (“I’m gonna be a millionaire!”), he and Mark find a gun among her belongings which they nickname “Gunny”. Mark offers to write Jeremy’s stepfather Martin’s military memoirs, but when he’s pounced on by Martin’s daughter, they lose the writing gig, money and even Gunny.

Seasonal Beatings (series 7, episode 5)

In an excruciating festive special, Mark invites his parents over for Christmas lunch. Everything’s planned to perfection until he unveils Dobby as his girlfriend and unexpected guest Super Hans (aka “Father Spliffmas”) starts flirting with Mark’s mum. As Mark says: “Merry migraine and a happy new stomach ulcer.”

Michael Hogan