A Tale of Two Sitcoms

Funny how things balance out, isn’t it? For every yin there’s a yang; for every tin of Branston baked beans there’s a tin of those 3p ones you pick up at Lidl that resemble pebbly baby dragon shit; and for every new episode of the almighty Peep Show there’s an episode of How Not To Live Your Life on BBC Three.

Actually, scratch that. Peep Show is that rare example of a TV comedy that enters its sixth season as strong (if not more so) as it entered its first. None of that ‘leave it alone after twelve episodes’ from writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain – they, and the commissioners at Channel 4, know when they’re onto a good thing.

Highlights of the season six opener (Friday, 10.30, Channel 4) included Jez’s yelp of “Bloody hell, Mark. Get your elbows in. It’s all gone Backdraft!” on realising the JLB fire alarm wasn’t a drill, and Mark’s inevitable encounter with his German überführer while sporting a marker-pen Hitler ‘tache; “Did Goethe have a moustache, I wonder?” But I won’t waste the effort on writing a proper review. You know it’s brilliant, and in case you missed it, you can watch it here, or download it from the intertube piracy site of your choice, if you’re into that kind of thing.

But, just as an imaginary deity rewarded Noah’s boat-building skills with a massive tit-off flood (making for a fantastic yachting holiday, but with the unfortunate side effect of having to shovel twelve metric fucktonnes of assorted animal faeces over the side each morning), so the gods of TV commissioning decide that if we’re going to have a new series of Peep Show, we must also have a new series of How Not To Live Your Life; which, in case you missed it, was splashed all over BBC Three last week like semen on an Army barracks’ communal FHM.

I can only describe How Not To Live Your Life (Tuesday, 10.30, BBC Three) as a Nathan Barley for people who didn’t get Nathan Barley, albeit minus the medialand parody. It shares the central tenet of Charlie Brooker’s first proper foray into television by following the adventures of Don, a swaggering cock-about-town of imbecilic proportions; cavorting his way through the usual succession of comedy ‘adventures’; deciding between a stripper or a student for his new flatmate; failing to grasp the basics of adult life, and so on and so-fucking-predictable. The gags are poor, the writing even worse, and you can’t help but feel you’ve seen the same shit 18,000 times before.

Of course, Peep Show and How Not To Live… share an essentially similar conceit; they both focus on baffled losers showing us, well, how not to live our lives. But the difference is that Mark and Jeremy are well-written and rounded characters – they have hearts; we feel for them, and even as they dig themselves into deeper and deeper shit, we know that they’re never going to be happy (because to be so would ruin the fundamental dynamic of the show), but there’s always that element of hope – maybe, just maybe, this time they’ll turn things around. Don, however, is an empty vessel – sure, he encounters misfortune, but at the end of the day he’s so unlikeable that you can’t help but reason that it’s all his own fault for being such a massive preening cock.

And that’s the confusing thing about How Not To Live…; it’s impossible to judge its tone. It aims for high farce, but everything about it feels so pedestrian they may as well paint black and white stripes on it and stick it the middle of the high street. Are we meant to care about this guy? Feel sorry for him? Or just laugh at the next ‘hilariously’ imbecilic thing to come out of his mouth? But I guess that’s the thing about BBC Three – for every ‘The Wrong Door’ or ‘Gavin and Stacey’, there’s a ‘Two Pints of Lager’ or a ‘Coming of Age’. Talk about balance.