Sam Bain makes the excuses people offer themselves painfully funny. We rate his writing with Jesse Armstrong highly, though Peep Show is best taken a few episodes at a time: the embarrassment can become exhausting.
Fi1m perspective
In Peep Show (2003), a man tries to look reasonable while his internal narration explains precisely how unreasonable he is being. Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong give the excuse enough time to sound persuasive before exposing its selfishness. David Mitchell’s Mark Corrigan and Robert Webb’s Jeremy Usborne are allowed to think things that a spoken exchange would conceal. We felt caught out by the series because their private justifications sounded unpleasantly familiar. The point-of-view camerawork makes it difficult to keep a comfortable distance from either of them.
After sketches and children's television in the late 1990s, Bain and Armstrong built Peep Show around two people whose thinking could sustain far more than a sketch. Bain also wrote for The Thick of It (2005), a comedy we rate highly for making ministerial chaos both funny and unpleasant. His credits are often shared, and there is little value in guessing which writer supplied which insult. What we can judge in Peep Show is how carefully the jokes fit the men making them, even when the repeated embarrassment becomes tiring.
In Four Lions (2010), Bain shares the writing with Chris Morris, Simon Blackwell and Armstrong, and the need for approval has more frightening consequences. Preparations for an attack become petty disputes among men who bicker, misunderstand and give way to one another. Morris directs a comedy in which incompetence never makes the men harmless; the writing keeps their reasons for following one another recognisable. We recommend it despite a middle stretch that repeats jokes already made, because their foolishness does not let us stop worrying about the harm they might do.
With Armstrong, Bain co-created Fresh Meat (2011), extending their ensemble writing to university students, and wrote Babylon (2014), an hour-long comedy-drama whose pilot was directed by Danny Boyle. Ill Behaviour (2017), his first solo series, takes him into black comedy thriller territory. Those shifts give a sense of the work beyond the private narration, without diminishing what is so useful about hearing Mark and Jeremy think. Start with Peep Show; choose Four Lions if a comedy that leaves us uneasy sounds like a good evening.
Biography
Sam Bain (born 3 August 1971) is a British comedy writer and producer. He is best known for co-creating and writing the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show (2003–2015) with Jesse Armstrong, on which he also served as producer. He contributed to the BBC series The Thick of It (2005).
Bain attended St Paul's School in London and graduated from the University of Manchester, where he met his long-term writing partner Jesse Armstrong. With Armstrong he also created Fresh Meat (2011) and wrote the film Four Lions (2010, with Chris Morris). His other credits include Babylon (2014) and Ill Behaviour (2017).
Bain comes from a family with connections to the entertainment industry; his father was director Bill Bain and his mother was actress Rosemary Frankau.
