Channel 4’s comedy is nearing its end. And the hapless Mark and Jeremy will be missed by its never huge, but hugely loyal, audience

After a break of nearly three years, the El Dude brothers are finally returning to our screens. Peep Show co-creator Sam Bain confirmed on Twitter that the series’s ninth season has begun shooting, sharing an image of the show’s stars David Mitchell and Robert Web on set.

Sam Bain (@sambaintv) Peep Show Series 9 started shooting yesterday. SPOILER ALERT it features these 2 idiots: @RealDMitchell @arobertwebb pic.twitter.com/wAxAWR0DHP

While this is obviously good news, it’s also has a bittersweet tinge. As Channel 4’s head of comedy, Phil Clark, confirmed last year, this will be the show’s final series. “It’s definitely the last,” Mitchell told the Radio Times. “I’ll be very sad to say goodbye to it.”

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Created by Bain and his writing partner Jesse Armstrong, Peep Show first appeared on our screens in 2004. Though it struggled to attain high viewing figures, it has had a loyal audience, and achieved consistent critical acclaim, with the show picking up two comedy Baftas and two gongs at the British Comedy awards. Mitchell meanwhile has won both a British Comedy award and a Bafta for his performance as put-upon office drone, Mark Corrigan.

Many of Peep Show’s primary players have found fame in the years since the show debuted. Both Mitchell and Webb are regular guests on panel shows, including Have I Got News For You and Mock The Week. The pair also created and starred in the sketch show That Mitchell And Webb Look, which ran for four series. Olivia Colman, who plays Mark’s on-off girlfriend, Sophie, has become one of the most recognisable actors in the UK, starring in Rev and Broadchurch. Bain and Armstrong, meanwhile, have been involved in many of the most critically acclaimed programmes of the past decade, creating student comedy Fresh Meat and police satire Babylon, and writing for Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick Of It.

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Cast and crew are keeping quiet about how Peep Show might conclude, though Bain has confirmed that Mark and his feckless housemate Jez will not meet a sticky demise, allowing the faint chance of some resurrection in the future. “We don’t plan to kill them off, so the opportunity to do more would be there if we chose to,” Bain told the Radio Times.

Still, while the pair might survive death, their ending is unlikely to be terribly upbeat. In all its eight series and 48 episodes, Peep Show has rarely offered its cast of characters little other than embarrassment and misery. Speaking to the Daily Mirror in 2014 Webb confirmed that gloom awaits the pair at the show’s end: “They will be in horrible pain as usual. They will not win the lottery, they will not have a happy ending.”