Peep Show analysis

Peep show is a British comedy sitcom produced for channel 4 and follows the lives of two best friends, Mark and Jeremy through their day to day lives. The show has a heavy element of comedy within it and also a heavy element of drama as well which combines beautifully to create a brilliant blend of everyday situations interacting with the thoughts and personalities of the two characters. Although the series is a sitcom and not a drama specifically, the reason I want to analyse it is because of the techniques and conventions used in the series and how they affect the strength of portraying emotions and the popularity of the series overall.

The first thing that the series uses conventionally is the point of view shot (normally a head mounted camera) which is used to give a characters perspective on the situation. This gives the series a very realistic theme and gets the audience to really engage and empathise/relate to the character and situations brought up through the episode.  This is something that our drama project group may need to think about in our film if we need to get the audience to really believe the characters and events occurring within it.  It is also quite a powerful technique when combine with an atmos track or a backing track of music/ambient sounds because it really puts the audience in the place of the character and encourages them to be more active than passive which can get underlying messages and themes off well.

Another technique peep show uses frequently for strength and effect is the voiceover to convey a characters thoughts. Although in our film we will most likely not use a voiceover, it is interesting to see how they have done this in the series as it allows the actors to really express the emotions being portrayed solely through body language and expressions, instead of relying on the dialogue (much like that in Sign Language). The actors in this series do this exceptionally, however, as we will be using inexperienced and new actors, if we try and apply this technique to our film, we may not get as strong performance as we like, which will hinder the strength of our final piece.

The body language and expressional acting techniques used in both Peep Show and Sign Language, are very key in the structure of any solid drama film as it means the plot is not dialogue driven which will really help our project as none of us have any real experience in script writing. I also believe that combining this technique with the creative sound design I will attempt with ambient sounds to create mood and emotion in our film.