 Comedy is the notorious holy grail of TV, such is the ephemeral nature of the chemistry between plot, character and the jokes needed to make people laugh. So it is perhaps no surprise that earlier this year Channel 4 tripled its chances of producing a hit show by commissioning three new comedies. The first of these, Peep Show, which is billed as an "an innovative and darkly hilarious comedy," gets its first airing this Friday. The sitcom is shot from the viewpoint of the sleazy, core characters, and in another twist, the thoughts of the two main protagonists can be heard in all their tactless, offensive, ridiculous glory. The stars are David Mitchell and Robert Webb, two of the more recent comedy success stories to emerge from the Cambridge Footlights - whose alumni seems to include practically everyone who's ever made you laugh, unless you laugh at Bernard Manning. The show looks set to be a critical success, but in fact started life as a radically different concept from the one that will actually be shown, as David Mitchell explains: "The original form was the idea of two people watching television, and it being shot from their chairs, so you see the screen from their point of view, and the channel-hopping rubbish they watch, and you hear them comment on it. "And then we thought, `wouldn't it be nice if you could find out a bit about the lives of the guys watching,' and then the more we thought about these lives, the more we thought `well let's just see their days, in the same way that we're seeing the television'. "So we see their days through their eyes, and hear their thoughts and reactions to it as their day progresses. As the idea developed, the watching-TV element became smaller and smaller, and the following-their-day element became larger and larger. "What I like about it is that it's visually quite arresting and different, but it also serves the comedy - you can do jokes about what people are thinking that you couldn't do through dialogue, because obviously people think things that they don't say." The show is all about the lives of two flatmates - sad, hardworking, lovesick Mark, and Jeremy, the wannabe pop star with an absurdly inflated opinion of his `music'. Robert Webb describes Jeremy, his character, as "vain, idle, delusional, but basically a nice bloke". So how much of Robert Webb does he put into the character he plays? "Jez has difficulty walking past the mirror without having a quick look, and I suppose there's a bit of that in me. And I can be a bit unmotivated sometimes - that's why I've got David there. "But I suppose the main difference is that Jeremy is totally deluded about the extent of his own artistic abilities, and I've got a fairly realistic idea of my own limits." Even David is prepared to admit to sharing the odd trait with the astonishingly tragic Mark. "I think both Mark and Jeremy have elements of me and Robert, and elements of Sam and Jesse, the writers. The bad side of all of us, I hope. Definitely the obsessive self-hating side of Mark is something that I can recognise in myself some of the time - but hopefully not as much as him." Although the characters of Mark and Jeremy differ enormously, they met at college and have been mutually co-dependent ever since. Jeremy needs somewhere cheap and easy to stay, where the rent doesn't have to be paid on time. Mark just needs company. In a case of life imitating art, Robert and David met at university as well, though it's difficult to imagine Mark and Jeremy going to Cambridge. "We met eight years ago," explains Robert. "We both did comedy as students, and were both in a review group called Footlights. We went on to do a show, just the two of us, and that went really well. Then, when we left, we did fringe shows around London and in Edinburgh. "From there, we got an agent and started meeting producers, and started writing and acting." The result has been a burgeoning comedy career for both men, including television, film, and radio comedy as well as live shows. Peep Show, with all it's cringe-making embarrassment and excruciating faux pas, taps in absolutely to the watch-though-your-fingers element of comedy made so popular by The Office. Witnessing Mark and Jeremy's attempts to impress members of the opposite sex are almost unbearably painful. One can only pray that Robert and David aren't drawing on personal experience in their portrayals. What have been their own worst disasters in the search for romance? "My problem has always been being too scared to do anything about things," reveals David. "I've just been miserable and alone for a lot of my life. So in a way, Mark is more courageous than I am. "Having said that, in the few short weeks of his life that the show encapsulates, there's enough eye-watering embarrassment to last a lifetime from my point of view. So maybe lacking gumption isn't such a bad thing." Robert, too, insists he's been spared the nightmare of abject humiliation. "I've been turned down a couple of times, but that wasn't so much embarrassing as baffling," he jokes. "I've been with someone for eight years, and so I'm not really in practice. "It only just finished, so I'm still thinking about getting back on the saddle or whatever you call it. The bike ... The horse." Not many punches are pulled by the writers, and much of the humour could be described as close to the bone. Do they get worried about the reaction of their families watching such comic scenarios? "Well, my parents will definitely watch it," says Mark. "Their attitude's always been that this sort of filth seems to earn me a living. They're just pleased I'm off their hands, I think. Occasionally I do something respectable on Radio 4 (That Mitchell and Webb Sound) and they can tell their friends about that. "Otherwise, they'll just sit there and cringe and assume this is the reflection of a world they don't understand." | 
Movie double-acts come in all shapes and sizes ...and with varying degrees of success.
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