Spaced got these two the attention they deserved (Picture: YouTube)

Fifteen years have passed since groundbreaking Channel 4 sitcom Spaced first hit our screens.

The best sitcom ever? Perhaps.

Here’s 15 reasons why there has never been anything quite like it before or since.

1. It made stars of Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson


He was best known for the sketch show Big Train and for a small part in the Alan Partridge episode featuring a dead cow.

She was best known for playing the put upon daughter Cheryl in The Royle Family.

But once they’d written and starred in Spaced in 1999, nothing would ever be the same again.

2. The premise was awesome

The ultimate flatmates (YouTube)

Tim and Daisy are total strangers until the need to get a flat advertised for a ‘professional couple only’ forces them to pretend to be a married couple.



They are thus forced to get to know each other very quickly.

As are we: in a brilliant early sequence we soon learning a wealth of unnecessary information about the duo including the fact that Tim ‘has no memory whatsoever’ of Christmas 1979 or 1994.

3. Marsha

Hellooo (Picture: YouTube)

Their friendly potentially drunken landlady (played by Julia Deakin) a woman who somehow managed to turn the single word ‘hello’ into a recurring catchphrase.

4. Mike

Before the Cornetto Trilogy there was this (Picture: YouTube)

Tim’s war-obsessed best friend played by Simon Pegg’s real life best friend, the then unknown Nick Frost.

Mike was expelled from the territorial army for stealing a tank and attempting to invade Paris.

5. Brian

Daisy and Tim’s intensely artistic flatmate who has an ‘arrangement’ with Marsha about the rent.

Deals in ‘pain…fear…anger’ in his art and played by the brilliant Mark Heap latterly of Friday Night Dinner.

6. The theme tune

Unusually for a sitcom, Spaced has no real theme tune of its own.

Perhaps to make up for this, director Edgar Wright cleverly inserted numerous familiar themes at appropriate junctures throughout ranging from Murder, She Wrote…, Roobarb, The Magic Roundabout to Baywatch and This Morning.

7. Masculine telepathy

The episode Gone witnesses one of Spaced greatest creations: the bizarre mimed pitch battles which Mike and Tim explain are a result of ‘masculine telepathy’.

They have to be seen to be believed. Clever boys…

8. The paintballing episode

Years before either The Big Bang Theory or Peep Show did it, Tim and Mike ‘play’ paintball culminating in a homage to Platoon and Tim’s rival Duane Benzie (Peter Serafinowicz) getting exactly what he deserves.

9. The Robot Wars episode

Reece Shearsmith appears as the malevolent Dexter in ‘Mettle’, another classic second series episode.

10. Karaoke and Tyres

Episodes of shows which end with musical interludes are crap aren’t they?

Think every episode of Dawson’s Creek.

But Epiphanies ends brilliantly with occasional biker character Tyres introducing the crew to rave culture and some heady mixes of The A Team theme.

11.The Wright stuff

Who directs this sitcom? Usually, who cares?

But director Edgar Wright is the hidden star of Spaced throwing in homages, eerie music and clever camera work galore.



12. Before they were famous…

Hang on a second… (Picture: YouTube)

Is that David Walliams? Bill Bailey? Paul Kaye? Ricky Gervais playing a sleazy office employee called ‘Dave’?

All were largely unknown figures when they appeared on Spaced in 1999-2001.

13. It made it cool to be a geek

Despite there being no references to the internet on it at all.

14. Without Spaced there would be no…

Just wouldn’t have happened (Picture: File)

Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End and probably no Scott Pilgrim Vs The World.

Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (formerly Stevenson) would not be in the Star Trek, Mission Impossible films or W1A today.

15. It knew when to stop

Like Fawlty Towers and The Office, two short series and that was your lot. Spaced ended on a high.