Spaced - US remake my arse

The Guardian upset me last Thursday by running a piece in its TV blog about the long-dreaded US remake of Spaced. Just watch it, it's awful. No surprise really when you discover that it is the creation of the ridiculously-named self-styled moron of cinema - "McG". Just sod off and die.

Anyway, this started me off watching a couple of YouTube clips of the original Spaced series to cleanse my soul. In case you don't know, Spaced is the genre-defying sitcom that ran for only 2 series (12 episodes) in 1999 and 2000 on Channel 4. It follows the trials and tribulations of Tim and Daisy, a pair of 20-something work-shy miscreants who pretend to be a couple in order to get a flat and try to exist while dodging doing anything that might be interpreted as useful or productive.

Rather than being a series of well-intentioned sketches about losers (as the US series seems to be turning out), Spaced was a razor-sharp sitcom about modern life, about how friendship is becoming more important than family, about fear of growing up and having to grow more responsible. Spaced was also famed for its signature directorial style, which used oddly-timed cuts to provide a somewhat anarchistic feel to the whole thing. Series director Edgar Wright has since gone on to direct 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz'.

Spaced defied conventions and showed the contemporary generation X that someone actually understood what it meant to be a 20-something in Britain in the late 1990s. This is a series that is so quintessentially 'British' and of its era that I am always surprised to find that it has exported at all to other parts of the world, a series that managed to explore the ennui of being a person stuck between youth and adulthood as well as looking at the difficulty of building relationships in a modern world where pop-culture is just as important as real life.

Spaced took the concept of paying homage to a new and scary level, the first episode is so densely packed with oblique and obscure references to popular films, books and music that often the actual plot risks getting bogged down in a mire. Thankfully the writers are cleverer than me, and manage to piece all the references and gags together in a way that seamlessly meshes into the plot. Indeed the characters themselves are so obsessed by popular culture that they can see their own lives through it (this seems especially obvious of Tim and his sci-fi obsession).

For me, 'Spaced' is a landmark in British comedy history. It is riotously funny and one of my favourite television programmes. I even created a website dedicated to it while I was doing my PhD. Once again, another reason to stay a student for as long as possible.