The odd couple

QUIRKY comedies rarely have much of a lifespan, but this week sees Peep Show (Friday, Channel 4, 10pm) return for a seventh series.

And while the long-running show does fulfil the first rule of life about nothing being as good as it used to be, the opening episode of the new run would suggest that David Mitchell and Robert Webb are still starring in the best British sitcom around. They are the most entertaining oddball flatmates since Oscar and Felix.

And for those who’ve seen their rather lame sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, fret not. Peep Show is largely the creation of writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, with the two actors just throwing in suggestions along the way. It obviously works better that way.

This week’s opener has Mark and Jeremy at the hospital as Sophie is about to give birth. The perfect scenario to bring out some of the funniest traits in both characters, we see Mark perfectly playing the role of the useless male in the delivery ward (“What do I say? I can’t sit back eating popcorn, and I can’t alleviate”), while Jeremy is his usual lecherous self ‘comforting’ an attractive woman whose boyfriend is in a coma.

And then there’s Super Hans who pops in with the ultimate piece of male-to-male advice for a birth situation: “Stay out of the goal end, mate.”

Another show that may provide you with a few laughs is Scannal (Monday, RTÉ One, 7.30pm). Unfortunately, these chuckles may be of the painful ironic kind as it tells the tale of how AIB dragged the country into an awful financial mess. Twenty-five years ago.

If you can bear watching, you’ll learn how in 1985, Insurance Corporation of Ireland (ICI) – a subsidiary of AIB – collapsed. Ireland was in the midst of a recession at the time, but it was deemed necessary to bail out the bank. Sound familiar?

Anyway, by the end of the sorry saga, the cost to the Irish taxpayer was £400 million. Of course, we learnt all sorts of important lessons from the fiasco about trusting companies like AIB, and measures were put in place so that such disastrous events could never happen again. Ha, ha.

Garrett Fitzgerald was Taoiseach at the time and he’s among the contributors to the show, while Senator Shane Ross is again the onscreen expressor of public incredulity.

Meanwhile, from across the Atlantic there’s word of Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro taking the helm for the new Hulk series on TV. Unfortunately we won’t see the show until at least 2012, after the scheduled July release of The Avengers, a film adaptation of the Marvel comic story that will feature Mark Ruffalo as the hulk’s human form, Bruce Banner.