#british-comedy

#british-comedy

For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other's material and finding the alchemy, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it's been like comedy boarding school.

I wanted to mention Kenneth Williams because he was so profound, Allen tells me. And yet, because he was also funny, that profundity hasn't been acknowledged. As a child, I connected with his outsiderness. Rather than trying to fit in, he went in the opposite direction. Not only did he not apologise for being different, but he was queer in every sense, truly at odds with the world in which he found himself.

John Antrobus, who has died aged 92, was just 21 when in 1955 he joined the writers' cooperative Associated London Scripts. Based in an office above a greengrocer's shop in Shepherd's Bush, it housed a cradle of talent shaking up postwar television and radio comedy. Newly out of army officer training at Sandhurst, with a father who was a regimental sergeant-major and arriving wearing a herringbone suit, he found himself among a new generation sticking two fingers up at the establishment.

Peep Show is one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, and we need an update on what Mark, Jeremy, Sophie and Super Hans are up to these days. Are Mark and Jez still living together? Did Sophie have any more children? Did Super Hans ever make it to Macedonia to open his moped rental business? Mark Hawksley, 46, Wisconsin