Cooling off

Lots of new comedy this week. Mitchell and Webb are a puzzle. They had a successful sketch slot, which followed the first runs of Peep Show. Then they turned up in the ads for Apple computers. One of them (I forget which) is supposed to use an Apple Mac and the other a boring old PC. Apparently, Apple users are free, artistic, untrammelled by the petty rules of others. PC users are wage slaves, crawling their dreary way towards retirement.

Some people who think themselves cool regarded this as the single least-cool commercial campaign ever. It was held to have demolished Mitchell and Webb’s own carefully burnished image of cool. Even at my advanced years, I could see that it was terminally naff. Somehow, my new Apple laptop seems far less attractive; it’s no longer a cool style icon, but just another lump of steel and silicon. I presume that this is one of those expensive campaigns that actually harm the image of the product.

Peep Show (Channel 4, Friday) is a cult, which means that, while most people are indifferent, those who like it like it very much. It was funny, though it trod well-worn paths — the young man who goes to spend the weekend with his fiancée at her parents’ house, in this case unaccountably taking his best friend along. The bonkers father, the sexually predatory mother, the clingy little brother — these are familiar figures, but welcome for all that, I suppose, like the stock characters in the Commedia dell’Arte. We would feel short-changed if we didn’t get them. And there were some good lines. Best friend is trying to avoid predatory Mum by pretending to be asleep. ‘But I heard you snoring,’ she says. ‘Oh, er, just practising!’ he replies.