Happy birthday, Spaced, which was 10 years old yesterday, according to the seminal Channel 4 sitcom's director, Edgar Wright. "Not only that, but its 10th series starts tonight on Channel 4!" joked Wright. "What? You guys haven't been watching series three to nine? Where have you been?"

Actually, I reckon today is the show's 10th birthday – although I am loath to quibble with the man whose partnership with Spaced co-star and co-writer Simon Pegg has since given us the big-screen comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and is in the process of making the third in the pair's "Blood and Ice Cream" trilogy, The World's End.

Channel 4 was pretty confident about Spaced even before it arrived on the small screen on 24 September 1999. "It establishes a world that you want to be a part of and you're on a winner if you get that right," said the programme's commissioning editor Cheryl Taylor. But then, the channel also had high hopes for something called Hewitt, about a bloke who works in a video shop starring stand-up Tommy Tiernan, so nothing was guaranteed.

But with Spaced, Wright, Pegg and his co-writer and co-star Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) got it absolutely right, one of a new breed of comedies, even more than BBC1's The Royle Family, that eschewed traditional sitcom rules. "No laugh track, no studio audience, non-linear narrative, complete with visual and verbal references to a video library's worth of film and television classics," reported the Guardian.

The "sit" of this particular sitcom was established in the first episode, when Tim and Daisy moved into a flat together and had to convince the landlady Marsha, brilliantly played by Julia Deakin, that they were a couple. The rest of the episode, and the 13 that followed, was purely comedy gold.

It worked because everything was spot on – the script, the direction and the casting, with a bunch of supporting characters who you could imagine all being given a spin-off show in their own right. Or at least, an episode – Nick Frost as Mike Watt, Mark Heap as Brian Todd, Peter Serafinowicz as Duane Benzie, not forgetting Aida as Colin the dog.

Unbelievably, looking back, the show didn't pull up too many trees, ratings wise. An episode of its second series in 2001 had 1.7 million viewers, fewer than were watching a repeat of the World at War on BBC2. Some people, eh? But it has since made up for it on DVD, of course.

Favourite moments? Too many to choose from. The paintballing, the "slow motion commotion", pretty much anything from the clubbing episode? And of course the comedy pop culture references and any scene with fab Nick Frost as Mike Watt. There must be a few I've forgotten - about 300, probably – so tell me yours.

The US remake of the show, however, was laughably bad, and never made it past the pilot stage. "One of these days, McG's Spaced remake pilot will leak onto the interwebs," tweeted Wright. "Myself, Simon, Jess and Nira saw it. Wow (not a good wow)."

A special shout out to Hynes, who once emptied a champagne bucket of iced water over my head as I slept on a sofa in Montreux during the Rose d'Or television festival. I thought it was going to be the start of a beautiful relationship, but she just laughed at me with her friends and walked out. Great days.

By coincidence I had the Spaced box set out only a few days ago. I was laughing like it was 1999.