Radio Times

I love filthy, depraved TV comedies. The more filthy, the more depraved the better. Sadly television doesn't serve me well, so short of lurking around the more shadowy corners of Kings Cross wearing too much rouge and asking if anyone knows where I can get a particularly scummy sitcom, I have only Peep Show (Fridays, Channel 4) to feed my addiction. (And BBC4's The Thick of It too, when it's on. Oh, and Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Peep Show is wonderful, a model of edgy comedy perfection, with sharply brilliant, misanthropic, literate scripts from writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and perfectly deadpan performances by David Mitchell and Robert Webb (and for my money they are better served by Peep Show than by their BBC2 sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Look). Peep Show recently won, at long last, a Bafta, one of the few genuinely deserved awards of the night.

Central characters Mark and Jeremy share a flat and are locked in a tiny, squalid world of self-loathing, self-obsession and mutual recrimination. Yes, it all sounds a bit Harold Pinter, but it's not, because it's so very, very funny. And every single humiliation - and there are many in the lives of Mark and Jez - are somehow magnified by Peep Show's point-of-view filming (ie we see everything through characters' eyes) and interior monologues.

It's frequently breathtakingly filthy too, but not in a stupidly ribald, damp Carry On-type way. For instance, in the latest episode (Friday 9 May, 10:35pm) Jeremy tries to make some cash by making a "donation" at a sperm clinic. But his efforts to make his, er, deposit are scuppered by the composer Sir Edward Elgar. I really want to explain why, but I can't, it's too mucky. But boy is it inventive.

All of Peep Show's characters are so well drawn it's hard to dislike any of them, even Jeremy (Webb), who can be both endlessly selfish and dizzyingly self-abasing (particularly when he wants sex with unwilling women, which is pretty much all the time).

Mark (Mitchell), on the other hand, is clever, craven and hopelessly socially inept. He married a woman he didn't love in the last series because he was too polite to back out and in the current series he has embarked on a doomed search for "The One".

Then there is their gloriously disreputable friend, Super Hans (Matt King), who's been known to smoke crack at weddings and who seeks a certain kind of pleasure (sorry, I can't say) from just about everybody, however unsuitable.

Of course, you enter Mark, Jez and Super Hans's world at your peril. This isn't My Family. You have been warned.

**

Alison Graham is TV editor of Radio Times - read her column in the latest issue of Radio Times magazine, on sale now.