Peep Show season 9 episode 1 review: The El Dude Brothers are the pathetic heroes we need

The takedowns of modern culture and consumerism are as hilarious and perfectly-sculpted as ever

(Channel 4)

[Very mild spoilers ahead, but this isn’t f***ing Game of Thrones, is it?]

“They will be in horrible pain as usual,” Robert Webb said of Mark and Jez’s fate as we prepare to say goodbye to them after nine seasons. “They will not win the lottery, they will not have a happy ending.”

I was delighted to hear this, as any kind of turn around in the flatmates’ fortunate would have felt false. What is life anyway, but a tumbling barrage of disappointments?

The first episode of the final series is as hilarious and depressing as you’d hope. Returning to Mark’s apartment you can almost smell the stale toast crumbs and Fabrezed over stains. Despite their fall-out at the end of series 8, the El Dude Brothers are forced back together like a pair of Primark candles that keep getting knocked off the shelves, and, toxic though their relationship is, they’re all each other really has.

This pitiful but touching friendship is something that will surely be the focus of the final batch of episodes, culminating in a finale the no doubt bleakness of which I don’t think I’m really prepared for. The Friends gang were ‘always there for you’ as an encouraging reminder that everything will turn out alright in the end, while the El Dude Brothers for the last decade have been too, but as a constant niggling reminder that going to work so you can afford to watch Grand Designs in a sh*tty, overpriced flat is not much of an existence.

Typically bleak though the new series is, it’s also hugely funny (Super Hans is back on form), and the writing from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong is a strong as ever - drilling down to the most mundane aspects of life, like playing Candy Crush on the toilet, the addictive quality of Storage Hunters and the lurking suspicion that YouTube vloggers are more successful than you.

It is time for Mark and Jeremy to leave our screens, but at the same it's a shame, as they’re more relevant than ever.

In a world where people present their lives online as a sequence of perfectly-filtered champagne tastings and mountain treks, the pair serve as a humbling wake-up call to how the reality doesn’t quite match up.

“I’m the Wolf of Wall Street,” Mark says of his new bank job. “Look out Boots, I’m going to buy a hundred meal deals and eat them off a prozzie in the nude.”

Peep Show's final series begins Wednesday 11 November at 10pm.