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Mitchell and Webb due to the success of their BBC sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look, their advertisements for Apple, and their feature film Magicians. In 2006 and 2007 Peep Show was honoured with the British Comedy Award for Best TV Comedy, and in 2007 Mitchell also won “Best TV Comedy Actor”. Bain and Armstrong agreed that the POV style stopped it from becoming mainstream. In 2008 it was voted “Comedy of the Year”. In 2004, it won the Rose d’Or for “Best European Sitcom”. The fifth series showed no improvement with 1.1 million viewers. Mitchell and Webb both won the “Comedy Performance” award in the 2007 Royal Television Society awards.
Mark finds out from Jez that Jeff has been cheating on Sophie, and when Mark informs Sophie of that, Sophie begins to slowly end the relationship. Nancy asks Jez to marry her, for visa reasons, and despite the fact she does not love him and he will get nothing out of the marriage, he accepts gleefully out of his own love of her. Out of concerns for Nancy arguably using him, Mark gets Super Hans to lie to Jez and say that the latter had sex with her, but after they see his reaction they cannot go through with it.
Jez serves on a jury and has a date with the female defendant. In the last episode, Jez tries to get back together with Suze but is hindered somewhat by Super Hans attempting to go cold turkey. Meanwhile, Mark, having ruined his chances of starting a relationship with Big Suze, plans to propose to Sophie, and becomes obsessed and neurotic about doing so. He spends his saved-up Sunday Times “mega-vouchers” on taking her to a hotel in the Quantocks, a trip on which Jez, Big Suze and a withdrawing Super Hans accompany him. Despite it being apparent that Mark has privately begun to loathe Sophie, he nonetheless remains committed to proposing to her.
The events of the two main characters’ lives are seen almost exclusively from their own points of view with a voice-over providing their internal thoughts. The quality of footage captured with this method is sometimes poor and the technique was used less and less in later series. When head-mounted cameras are not used, scenes are filmed with the camera being held over the actor’s shoulder, or directly in front of their face; each scene is therefore shot multiple times from different angles.
Armstrong and Bain’s choice of the style was influenced by the 2000 Channel 4 documentary Being Caprice about the model Caprice Bourret which featured a similar technique that had in turn been copied from the 1999 film Being John Malkovich. The POV technique separates Peep Show from other sitcoms and Mitchell claims that without it Peep Show would be similar to shows like Spaced and Men Behaving Badly. The idea for using voice-overs came from a scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall in which the true feelings of the characters are conveyed by subtitles.
