The winks and nods that the show was littered with, though, were just part of the package. “There are homages and skits on things,” Wright says somewhat understatedly of the show, “but I think the central joke was Spaced. The reason it has a kind of charm to it is its not ‘hey, let’s do a five minute riff on The Matrix’, it’s the fact that the characters lives are so governed by pop culture and media that they can only think in those terms; if someone has a break up with their girlfriend, they imagine it to have the same kind of crushing feeling as the ending of Empire Strikes Back.”
This blending of reality and fantasy ran through the show’s spiky scripts, which were laced with more references than your eyes and ears could keep up with, and it was echoed in the show’s characters themselves, who were all based on either the actors who had written them and were playing them, or on people they knew. Tim Bisley represented a part of Simon Pegg, albeit one that didn’t quite share the same level of Lucas-rage over The Phantom Menace (“I was nowhere near as heartbroken about the decline of Star Wars but I certainly was disappointed”), and Daisy represented a period in Hynes’s pre-Spaced life (“I had left home at 18 and had been living in various states of squalor in London, working shitty jobs, and I wanted to write something that reflected that”). Twist (Katy Carmichael), Daisy’s obnoxious best mate, was based in large part on someone Hynes and Carmichael had known at university. Even Marsha, the wine-guzzling, chain-smoking landlord, was based on a women Hynes had previously known and Julia Deakin’s portrayal of the character was drawn from a women she had met in Greece and a personal friend of hers. Friends, as it happened, were to play a big role in the development of the show and its characters, particularly in the creation of the battle-starved wannabe soldier Mike. Based on a character that Pegg’s flatmate Nick Frost used to do, Pegg only ever envisaged his pal for the role, however, with no previous acting experience, Wright took some convincing. “When Simon first suggested the idea that his best mate, who had never acted before, should play Mike, I was like ‘are you sure that’s a good idea?’. But I hold my hands up, I was wrong; Nick was just brilliant.”
The characters are the heart of the show, the living breathing embodiment of the writers’, and our, fascination with all things ‘geek’, but the supporting cast were just as integral to the end product as the core whose adventures we followed. A pre-Little Britain David Walliams, the first person in the comedy ‘world’ that Wright had met when he moved to London at the tender age of 20, played Brian’s transvestite former lover and artistic collaborator Vulva, and former Dennis Pennis Paul Kaye was on hand too as a vitriolic and snobby art punk. Best of all the minor characters, though, after the Babylon 5 devoted Derek, was Bill Bailey’s comic book shop owner and Hawk The Slayer aficionado Bilbo Bagshot. “It was a bit of a departure for me, playing a frazzled old hippy,” Bailey mocks of the role, and of Pegg and Hynes’s casting choice, “I don’t know how they thought of that!”
