All show and no go: Harry (David Mitchell) and Linda (Jessica Stevenson) in Magicians. Photograph: Liam Daniel
Six weeks ago I was evangelically singing the praises of the majestic Peepshow on these very virtual pages, claiming it to be the best British comedy show of the decade. With the fourth series having wound up in hilariously embarrassing style last Friday night, I've found no reason to change my tune.
However, having just returned from seeing Magicians - the first cinematic outing for Peepshow stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb, if you don't count Confetti - it's perhaps premature to start calling the pair the double-act of our times. While Magicians is a gently amusing film which harks back to various golden ages of British entertainment, it makes the fatal flaw of forgetting to be funny for rather long stretches.
There's about as much to laugh at in the story of competing end-of-the-pier stage magicians Harry and Karl as there is in your average episode of Peepshow, but that feels insubstantial when the film is three times the length. Mitchell and Webb also play their big-screen parts much straighter than Peepshow's fastidiously dysfunctional Mark and fatalistically self-centred Jeremy, while certain roles seem as if they were pre-written for Peepshow regulars - Harry's love interest Linda and Karl's quasi-homosexual agent Otto, for example, would have been ideal for Olivia Colman and Matt 'Super Hans' King. It all seems to reinforce how pitch-perfectly Peepshow plays to the talents of all involved.
Yet perhaps that's what's needed to give Mitchell and Webb their first big-screen success? In the absence of a more gag-saturated follow-up (the films of Pegg, Frost and Wright are a benchmark when it comes to disguising the join between story and humour), perhaps the Peepshow team could do worse than the example set by everyone from Porridge to The League of Gentlemen and put their most successful creation on the big screen? Or would that be too much like accepting defeat?
