As I am a net nerd I shall be randomly adding press bits that I find. My own interview with Mitchell and Webb consisted of them looking scared at my mad ramblings and being very polite. This is better:
Inside the sordid world of Jeremy and Mark
A new series of Peep Show starts tomorrow. Sam Wollaston has a close encounter with the odd couple behind C4′s slow-burn hit
Thursday November 10, 2005
The Guardian
In the middle of an empty carpet warehouse in Neasden, north-west London, something strange is going on. A construction, a building of sorts, sits in the middle of the floor. From the outside it looks like nothing much, a framework of three-by-two timbers, filled in with plasterboard – it could be some kind of giant mould, or perhaps a new work by Rachel Whiteread. Walk inside though, and suddenly you’re in someone’s home. There are two bedrooms, one neat and ordered, the other with laddish magazines strewn all over the place and a waste-paper basket full of tissues. It’s probably best not to think too much about those tissues.
The kitchen looks like the sort of place where nothing much more complicated than toast is made. In the living room is a well-sat-on sofa, a healthy-sized TV, a rack of CDs, a pile of salt on the floor where some red wine has been spilled, and in the ashtray on the coffee table is a half-smoked spliff. Who would live in a house like this? Horrible young men, obviously. And to anyone familiar with Channel 4′s Peep Show, it’s clearly the flat of Jeremy and Mark. Peep Show, a sitcom with a pair of sad male flatmates at its heart, has been a slow burner. The first series acquired a small cultish following, mostly among sad male flatmates probably. Then, with the second series, more people started to take notice. The combination of a sharp script, an almost voyeuristic style of presentation and two fine comic performances makes it much funnier than most of Little Britain. Series three, which starts tomorrow, should get the recognition it deserves.
The at-home scenes in the first two series of Peep Show were shot in a real flat in Croydon, south London, where the show is set. But the owners didn’t want to hand it over to Jeremy and Mark again, so an identical flat has been constructed here in Neasden. This suits Robert Webb and David Mitchell, the comedy duo who play Jeremy and Mark, as it’s much closer to their homes in Kilburn.
It’s easier for the film crew too. In the old flat they had to hide in any room that wasn’t in shot, the bathroom maybe, or out in the corridor. Now they can be outside in the warehouse, watching what’s going on inside on monitors. A lone heater fights a forlorn battle against the great volume of the warehouse, warming only a tiny space around it. On chairs huddled near the heater sit the director, the producer, the art director, one of the two writers, various assistants, make-up people and runners.
The break is over, back to work. Jeremy and Mark have just come home from a night out clubbing. They’ve brought some people from the club home with them, one of whom is Jeremy’s new girlfriend – inappropriately, a woman he met in court (inappropriately because he was a member of the jury, and she was the defendant, up for fraud). Right now, in the flat, she’s stealing the wallet of someone else from the club and Jeremy’s not sure if that’s cool or not. Oh, and they’re all pilled up to the eyeballs, except for square Mark, of course, who, embarrassingly, is just pretending to be pilled up to the eyeballs.
Peep Show is interesting television to watch being made, as it’s all seen from the point of view of the characters. The viewer doesn’t just observe Jeremy and Mark’s sordid world, they actually live it for half an hour, watching through their eyes, listening to their thoughts. This makes it both more uncomfortable and funnier.
Practically though, this throws up all sorts of problems. If one character is lying on the floor, they’ll have a camera person lying right behind them like a shadow, filming over their shoulder. Obviously only one person can have a camera with them at any time, otherwise every character in the final product would appear with a camera sticking over their shoulder. So every scene is filmed many times, from many different points of view, then the whole thing is stitched together, with voiceovers and the thoughts of characters added afterwards.
There is a unique but awkward chemistry between Jeremy and Mark on screen – they annoy and bully the hell out of each other, but they’re also mutually dependent, each somehow making up for the other’s many deficiencies. In the brief lunch break, sitting upstairs on the crew’s double decker bus over a meal of shepherd’s pie, Webb and Mitchell talk about their off-screen relationship. They met at Cambridge university, were in Footlights at the same time, and have worked together ever since. They do stuff on their own too – Webb has recently been in the Smoking Room; Mitchell’s done a daily chat- show on More4. But after playing away, they always get back together again. They also have a radio show. Have they ever actually lived together in real life, I wonder?
Mitchell: “I shared a flat with Rob’s then girlfriend. Rob was there a lot, cos his flat was rubbish.”
Webb: “I was living in a really horrible flat in Kensal Green, so I sort of lived with David.”
Mitchell: “Not paying any rent, shafting my flatmate . . .”
Webb: “. . . who, it should be pointed out, you didn’t want to shaft yourself.”
Mitchell: “It doesn’t mean you’re happy for anyone to shaft your flatmate. I’ve never been able to take any pleasure in the thought of other people having sex. I feel somehow diminished by their joy.”
Webb. “It wasn’t a very good idea. Not the shafting, but the accidentally living together. We’d be writing together at the computer during the day, and then we’d wander over to this other part of the room and it was like, ‘Shall we watch the telly then?’ It was 24 hours, and I think we needed space.”
Now they settle for working and drinking together, but going their separate ways at the end of the evening. They admit they still spend an unhealthy amount of time together, though it does have its advantages. “It’s quite nice as well,” says Mitchell, “when you go away and work with other people and then you come back and it’s all, you know, easier.”
They are, in many ways, like a couple -finishing each other’s sentences, looking at each other for approval before speaking. And they’re also very like their characters, though much less obnoxious. They admit there are similarities. It would be wrong if they were playing them the other way round, says Mitchell. Like Mark, he is the more conventional and conservative of the two. “And I’m not quite as lazy and stupid as Jeremy,” says Webb. “But it’s there, it’s something to work with.”
The subject of how like their characters they are seems to amuse them. Mitchell asks Webb if he has a sex tape – meaning a tape to play while having sex – as Jeremy does. No he hasn’t, but he has been thinking about it, and that’s the first step to actually making one. Mitchell says he’d have mostly classical on his, Elgar.
I ask about Rachel Blanchard, who played Jeremy’s previous girlfriend in the last series. How was a glamorous Hollywood actor persuaded to come and hang out with a couple of emotionally immature Brits in a nasty flat in Croydon? “Yeah, how did we do that?” asks Mitchell.
She’s gone back now, for a part in a movie called Snakes on a Plane, they say. Or is it Plane of Snakes? The snakes movie causes them much amusement. What were the snakes doing on the plane in the first place, they ask each other. How did they get out? Is it like Con Air, but with snakes? Or Anaconda, but with a plane, and other snakes.
The boysy banter fills the rest of the lunch break. Then it’s time for Webb and Mitchell to get back on set, to start being professional actors again. But it’s OK, they’re only playing Jeremy and Mark, they can pretty much carry on being themselves·
No, it’s not Little Britain. But it was at one point. I doubt we shall see Numberwang interactive DVD games, dolls of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar or miniature Green Clarinets for kids. And thank God for that! Mitchell, Webb, Bachman and Colman did a very good thing with this particular thing and looking at various photos of the recordings for this and the TV rehearsals I have realised that David and Robert have a small range of outfits. Same as Sue Perkins then.
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