Spaced

Spaced is 14 episodes of insanity, aimed squarely at thirtysomething SF enthusiasts.

I could tell you that it's a sitcom about a guy and a girl who pretend to be a couple so that they can move-into a flat they both need, but after the first few episodes, this premise gets almost entirely forgotten.

Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson), along with their creative collection of friends, simply encounter the inane mundanities of life, but directed with with all the energy of an action movie. Nothing actually impossible ever quite happens, but with every character exerting such a unique attitude towards life, sparks don't so much fly as explode.

In one episode, Tim's mate Tyres (Michael Smiley) drops-in listening to a rave track in his head, driven by, among other things, the ringing telephone and hissing kettle. When he returns the following series, Tim and Daisy wordlessly take the phone off the hook and switch-off the kettle. The episode finishes with Tyres standing on a traffic island dancing ecstatically to the beeping of a pelican crossing.

Surreal? Yes very. But the dialogue crackles too.

Mike and Tim wait impatiently in Mike's camouflage van at a road block.

Tim: (honking the horn) "COME ON! COME ONNN! What is the hold-up?!"

Mike: (staring trance-like, and muttering spookily) "... there's been an accident... ...somebody got hurt..."

Tim: "Who?"

Mike: "...a lady..."

Tim: "How do you know?"

Mike: (turning to look Tim in the eye) "...because we hit her..."

Tim: "Did we?"

Mike: "Yeah, that's her there."

Tim turns to look through his window and screams.

Cyclist: (smacking on the window) "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING! IT'S BROAD DAYLIGHT! YOU PEOPLE HAVE NO CONSIDERATION FOR CYCLISTS!"

Tim winds down the window.

Tim: (meekly) "Pardon?"

Cyclist: "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING! IT'S BROAD DAYLIGHT! YOU PEOPLE HAVE NO CONSIDERATION FOR CYCLISTS!"

Tim: (facetiously) "All right! What's your problem?"

Mike begins to drive the van away, accidentally running over her bike and mangling it.

And yet, these supremely warped events happen to characters with such well-observed depth, that they put most TV dramas to shame. Here's Tim comforting Brian (Mark Heap) over his break-up with Twist:

"You're gonna be fine. You're gonna spend a long time thinking that you won't be, and then one morning you'll wake up and you will be. And then, y'know, for a while you'll miss the fact that you're not because it almost seems scarier when you are, because at least when you're not you've got something to cling to, and then, when you've got over that, then you're gonna be fine. Right? Feeling better?"

Just this once I actually watched the documentary on the DVD too – Skip To The End - which is also very well made. Simon Pegg's anecdote of conning the TV company into paying for a day's shooting of trailers, when the plan was actually to spent the afternoon doing retakes for the series, is the sort of grass-roots insight that you never get from carefully-manufactured press-kits with the agenda of selling a show.

Top moment here though has to be when, while filming an interview on location at the Spaced house, two fans coincidentally turn-up outside to photograph it. The terrific moment when they encounter Tim and Daisy emerging from the front door to greet them is the stuff that you have to be a fan of a series (any series) to really appreciate.

If you can get past the seediness, (and there's so much in here that it's easy to miss stuff) then Spaced is post-modern comedy gold.