'SPACED' - THE FINAL FRONTIER FOR TWENTYSOMETHING CHILDREN;
JAMES RAMPTON MEETS THE 'POPULAR CULTURE ANORAKS' BEHIND C4'S FLAT-SHARE SITCOM
The first episode of the second series of Channel 4's sitcom, Spaced, opens with a sweeping pan across a silhouette of the London skyline at night. It is accompanied by the atmospheric music of George Gershwin and a sultry voiceover intoning: "Chapter One. She adored London, a city as passionate and beautiful as she was - no, no, too derivative." It's a neat pastiche of Woody Allen's Manhattan and underlines just how innovative this critically-acclaimed sitcom is. You can hardly imagine an episode of 2.4 Children starting with, say, a homage to Battleship Potemkin. Written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, Spaced is a one-off - a series replete with all those qualities thought to be no longer on speaking terms with sitcom: wit, imagination, fantasy, oh yes, and laugh-out-loud funny gags. It is a pointed riposte to the almost weekly op-ed columns wailing: "Why, oh, why are today's sitcoms all rubbish?" The series, which zooms in on the self-deluding dreams of Tim (Pegg) and Daisy (Stevenson), a pair of flat-sharing twentysomething slackers, has this tang of originality because the writers come to the genre with fresh, unjaded eyes. Picking at a bowl of fruit in a chic, glass-walled conference- room at Channel 4 headquarters, the pair reflect on the inspiration behind Spaced.
"A lot of people think sitcom is easy," reckons Pegg, who is sporting a vivid blond barnet and a goatee Jimmy Hill would be proud of. "They say, 'You just follow the magic formula: you write so many gags per minute, you have a studio audience and a box set'. But we wanted to get away from that. Each new generation needs to subvert convention. You can't rest on the same old formula. You mustn't be afraid to risk change, you must embrace it. All we've tried to do with Spaced is something different." The writers were prompted by a strong feeling that their generation was not being properly represented by such hackneyed flat-share comedies as Game On or Babes in the Wood. "We felt that we weren't being spoken to by sitcoms of that kind," says Stevenson, who is looking impossibly glamorous in a new short haircut. "Those dispossessed twentysomething years hadn't been portrayed accurately before. The thing we wanted to do was communicate with people of our age, and to do that we had to stand out."
Like many close partnerships, they have a habit of continuing each other's thought- processes. Now it's Pegg's turn again: "We just write about where we are in life. It's a democratising process - like when stand-ups ask, 'Have you ever noticed?' and everyone in the audience nods and thinks, 'Yes, I have'. In the last series of Spaced, we did an episode about clubbing, and young people in the street came up to congratulate us for it. They loved the fact that their world had been shown without the need for a moralistic lesson about not taking ecstasy. A show written by people from a different generation might have turned a joint into a major event, but to so many people of our age a joint is no big deal.
"In the past, it was never expected that people in their twenties would do anything as grand as writing a sitcom. For our parents, the twenties were occupied by children. With that impetus removed, we've been given an extra 10 years of childhood in which to do things like write sitcoms. Our generation has just found its voice. We were the first in the queue to write about the experience of life as a twentysomething, when you have the privileges of adulthood and the freedom of childhood." In a TV landscape which is increasingly fragmenting into niche markets, it appears to matter little that many people over the age of 30 will be baffled by the youthful universe that Spaced portrays. Each episode is stuffed to the gunwales with popular-culture references, and Stevenson admits that "our working day is like a convention of popular-culture anoraks".
But that culty ambience is just what distinguishes Spaced from the showrooms full of cosy three-piece-suite-coms that are cluttering up the schedules. "It's nice every now and then to have a programme that is exclusive to your age-group and that your parents wouldn't like," Stevenson continues. "Remember your parents' tangible disapproval of The Young Ones? It was the punk of comedy. It's thrilling to watch something that was written with you in mind."
Thanks to Spaced, Stevenson and Pegg have become hot properties. Having made her mark as Cheryl, the neighbour with a weight problem in The Royle Family, Stevenson is now starring in the latest Russell T Davies (Queer As Folk) drama, Bob and Rose. Meanwhile, after Big Train and Hippies, Pegg has just finished playing David Schwimmer's sidekick in Band of Brothers, the epic Steven Spielberg series about the Second World War.
For all their other starry vehicles, however, they are already bubbling over with ideas for a third series of Spaced. "What happens when Tim and Daisy do finally have to start taking responsibility?" Stevenson wonders. "You can shirk and shirk, but responsibility eventually finds you. Events will take them over and force them to change. For instance, what if they were to have a child?"
But for the moment, Stevenson and Pegg are in no hurry to grow older. "When it comes to writing Spaced," Pegg says, "Our youth gives us the advantage of knowing what we are talking about." "Yes," Stevenson chips in, "And it means we don't have to have a nap after lunch."
The new series of 'Spaced' starts on Channel 4 on 23 Feb