"So have you seen this fantastic new sitcom? It's about three people who share a squat, and guess what? They're heroin addicts! How crazy is that? Have you seen it?"
Of course you haven't. There's no such programme - at least, not on telly. You won't find The Junkies in the Comedy Zone, sandwiched between an overrated sketch show and a clapped out topical news quiz, because The Junkies is Britain's first online sitcom.
It's the creation of David Quantick and Jane Bussman, a comedy writing team whose credits include jam and Smack the Pony, as well as their own R4 series King Size, although Quantick is maybe still best known as the NME and Select writer who grumbled in a Somerset accent on Collins and Maconie's Hit Parade on Radio 1.
Frustrated by the interminable hassle and compromise of the traditional commissioning circuit, and the networks' reluctance to risk making something different and new, Quantick and Bussman resolved to make the programme themselves, convincing actors and production crew to do it for nothing on location - a filthy former junkie's squat - over four days. The result is a programme made for £3,500 rather than the usual £200,000 (yes, it costs that much to make a half hour sitcom - remember that the next time you see Coupling). And you can watch it right now. Quantick reckons that if they'd tried to get it made for television, it would still be being made.
It certainly doesn't look like it's been made for less than four grand. The cast alone should be enough to impress any BBC2 or C4 commissioning editor - Sally Phillips from Smack the Pony and I'm Alan Partridge, Peter Baynham from Fist of Fun and the Friday Night Armistice, and Peter Serafinowcz from Spaced. And no concessions have been made to the limitations imposed by on-line viewing - you don't have to put up with incongruous close-ups every five seconds, even if you do have to watch it on a screen no bigger than a stamp.
That kind of restriction goes with the territory of online broadcasting, but the other constraint of The Junkies - the setting - is self-imposed. Because the three central characters are junkies whose lives largely revolve around getting drugs, taking drugs and sitting about, how do you generate enough plots and interaction to sustain a sitcom? The Junkies tries to get round this by making all the characters a) completely stupid and b) looking for something - Sal (Phillips) is looking for a job, Big Al (Serafinowicz) is searching for his return bus ticket to Liverpool, and Jackie (Baynham) is trying to track down his stolen frozen chicken.
Phillips' quest for work, which takes in an audition for an erotic dancing club and the world's most elitist modern art gallery, is far and away the highlight of The Junkies, giving both her verbal and physical comedy skills a chance to shine - the pole dancing scene is an instant classic. It should be said good and loud that she gets more to do in half an hour of The Junkies than she did in an entire series of Hippies, which is partly the reason why that show was such a tanker.
There's a memorable conjunction of brilliant delivery and well-observed writing, when her hopelessly dim character, the daughter of the Bishop of Leicester and a fantastic send-up of the kind of deb seduced by heroin chic, cites her influences as "Marianne Faithful and the Rolling Stones", putting the emphasis on the "Rolling", rather than the "Stones". Clearly the writers have been watching those classic '60s editions of World in Action.
Sadly, Peter Baynham seems doomed to spend eternity reprising his "Peter" character from Lee and Herring's Fist of Fun, which is a shame as he's an infinitely likeable comedy actor, and clearly able to stretch his talent further than he's allowed to here. If ever a series was made of The Junkies, Serafinowicz's mysterious Big Al could become the hook for viewers, an intriguing if inept Scouser, who started taking heroin to numb the pain when he was a boxer and has since developed Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. His attempt to travel back to Liverpool entertainingly undermines his confidently sinister persona, ending up with him trying to sell his shoes to pay for the ticket. He's a character that really could be sketched in and developed as a series progressed.
It's disappointing, then, that a concept as bold as The Junkies uses the tired device of a spoof Friends-style title sequence - a gag already used every week by, er, Ant and Dec - the episode's even called "The One With The Heroin", while the between-scenes "stings" also imitate the American sitcom. Besides being totally unoriginal, it also jars horribly with the "ultrarealistic" direction and feel of the show, which is de rigueur for "challenging" comedy these days, on everything from The League of Gentlemen to jam, but works pretty well here. As you'd expect, the pace of the show deliberately reflects the characters' inertia.
The fly-on-the-wall voice-over is another irritant - in fact, The Junkies is billed as the world's first docucomedy, which is an outright lie (think That Peter Kay Thing) - and it adds nothing to the programme. It seems the writers recognized this, as about 20 minutes in, the voice-overs take a back seat and the interaction comes to the fore. That's really the point in the programme when your reservations desert you, and the show really takes off.
For too much of the episode, it seemed like the writers had constructed a trio of interesting characters, but had no idea how to make them interact other than chat or bicker, which doesn't work if the characters are unsympathetic. It felt like they couldn't work out what to do with them, hence the docusoap conceit, which involves the characters talking to camera rather than interacting. For the last 10 minutes or so there's definitely a spark which proves that The Junkies could work as a series, stripped of the Friends gags and the docusoap format - something that would possibly happen in development for a real series.
But you can only speculate whether the subject matter was what prevented The Junkies being commissioned by network executives. It's easy to imagine a little Daily Mail froth if it ever turned up on BBC2 on a Friday night, but there's nothing here to frighten the horses, and naturally most of the laughs derive from the stupidity of the characters and their drug habit. The show deliberately mocks the glamourization of heroin - in one of the episode's best gags, Jackie says he first got into smack "after seeing the poster for Trainspotting - like Fever Pitch".
It needs to be underlined, however, that Bussman and Quantick aren't exactly first year media students messing around with a DV cam - they're experienced and successful comedy writers. It should serve as an inspiration to new writers and performers, but even if The Junkies is about striking a blow for creative control, what does it say about the state of comedy on television when people like them have to resort to DIY sitcom making - when not even four grand can be found to pilot something as promising and different as this, despite the obvious credentials of the creators and cast?
Give the Comedy Zone a miss this Friday and watch The Junkies at 9pm instead. A quarter of a million people can't be that far wrong, surely, as that many people have downloaded it so far, a real testament to its promise, if not its ultimate quality.
