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ship_manifestoTitle: Not Sick, Not Well
Fandom: Peep Show
Pairing: Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne*
Wordcount: about 2,000
Notes: This manifesto is written to be accessible to people who haven't watched Peep Show, but it does contain spoilers up to the end of the fifth series. There are some pictures, but it's not massively image-heavy.
* spelling of surname canonically variable
Not Sick, Not Well
a Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne 'ship manifesto
The Show
Peep Show is an extremely dark British sitcom, written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and featuring comedy double act David Mitchell and Robert Webb as the principal characters, Mark and Jeremy. There have been six series of six episodes each, and a seventh is currently being broadcast in the UK. Stylistically, it’s very striking; almost every shot is filmed from someone’s point of view, whether a main character or simply a passer-by, and Mark and Jeremy’s thoughts are often audible in voiceover.
Peep Show is largely about failure, and about its main characters’ struggles to succeed in a world for which neither of them is remotely suited. It can be very difficult to watch, particularly if you have a strong embarrassment squick, but it is brilliantly written.
Mark Corrigan
I’ve got a friend! I’ve made a friend! Maybe there’s nothing wrong with me and I’m just a normal human being!
Mark Corrigan is a deeply unfortunate man; a combination of his own neuroses, external factors and having Jeremy for a friend ensure that he is unlucky in love, unlucky in his career and unlucky in any other area of life you’d care to name. He is painfully repressed and socially inept, unable to grasp social conventions and living in constant terror of breaking them. I and many other Peep Show watchers identify very closely with him and wish we didn’t.
Mark is a brilliant character, and one who wouldn’t work in any other format; externally he might appear almost dull, but when his thoughts are audible it becomes clear that he is a seething mass of insecurity and neuroses and suppressed rage. He is played by David Mitchell, who has received a BAFTA for his performance.
At its heart, Peep Show is primarily about the tragedy that is Mark Corrigan’s existence; the premise of most episodes is ‘Mark has a brief glimpse of happiness, and then it all goes horribly wrong’.
Jeremy Usborne
This is almost definitely a terrible idea, but I won’t know for certain until I’ve actually done it.
Jeremy O/Usbo(u)rne, as I seriously had to consider titling this section (his surname has been officially rendered as ‘Osborne’, ‘Osbourne’, ‘Usborne’ and ‘Usbourne’, presumably just to make things difficult for manifesto-writers), is Mark’s flatmate, meaning that everyone who therefore does not have Jeremy Usborne as a flatmate owes Mark a great deal of thanks. Jeremy is delusional; convinced that he is a musical genius, he refuses to accept any job that fails to make use of his creative talents. As he has no creative talents, this means that he spends an awful lot of time not working. He owes Mark over four thousand pounds in rent.
It’s not that Jeremy means to be a bad person. It’s just that, well, he’s a bad person. He is astonishingly, incomprehensibly selfish; Mark is selfish as well, but his moral failings dwindle into insignificance alongside Jeremy, who will lie, cheat and betray his friends, and Mark in particular, for sex or for the opportunity to pursue his misplaced dreams of a career in music, with barely a hint of remorse. He is played by Robert Webb, who should receive a BAFTA for his performance.
Jeremy will occasionally remember that they are actually friends and attempt to do something nice for Mark. Mark being Mark, these attempts generally backfire spectacularly. It’s not clear what’s more dangerous: a Jeremy serving his own interests or a Jeremy who is actively trying to be good.
Friendship, of a Sort
Well, he’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot.
Right, first things first: any sort of relationship between these two is going to be, at best, a bit twisted. Their friendship is twisted enough as it is, and adding romance to that particular mess is only going to make things twistier.
At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that ‘friendship’ is too strong a word to describe the dynamic that Mark and Jeremy have. Each is perfectly willing to betray the other for his own ends, Jeremy perhaps moreso; he has, at various points, slept with Mark’s estranged wife, tried to get Mark sectioned, and locked an unwell Mark in his bedroom so Jeremy could use the rest of the flat for a magic mushroom party. In an early episode, whilst Mark and Jeremy smile and call each other ‘mate’, the viewer can hear their thoughts:
Mark: (Workshy freeloader.)
Jeremy: (Tight-fisted cockmuncher.) (1.02)
A little deeper, though, one will find, if not quite a pleasure in each other’s company, at least a need for each other. Jeremy’s selfish tendencies often lead him to destroy Mark’s prospects for the sake of sexual or musical opportunity, but in the episode ‘Mark Makes a Friend’ he ruins Mark’s plans for going into business in Cardiff simply to keep Mark from leaving him. Whilst Mark’s need for Jeremy is less obvious, he has covered the cost to keep Jeremy from being arrested, even though having Jeremy in prison would probably make Mark’s life infinitely simpler, and there’s an uncharacteristically lovely little moment when Jeremy is about to leave to join a cult; the atmosphere is painfully awkward as he bids Mark farewell, leaves and then, after a moment, returns.
Jeremy: There was just one thing...
Mark: I – I don’t think you should go. You – you do know that, don’t you? I’ll come and get you, if you like. I’ll happily deprogram you. (5.06)
There’s also a closeness and honesty between Mark and Jeremy that doesn’t seem to exist in their relationships with anyone else. In his day-to-day life Mark is caught up in the struggle to present himself as a functional member of society, but Jeremy already knows exactly how far from functional Mark is, so Mark can be open with him. Mark’s fiancée, Sophie, sees only his barely-maintained public face, his attempts to be the person he thinks she thinks he should be; Jeremy is the only person in whom Mark truly confides, and so it is only he who knows that Mark accepted Sophie’s proposal only because refusal would have been too embarrassing. When something goes wrong in Jeremy’s life, meanwhile, he’ll come to Mark, and Mark will smile awkwardly and tell him what he wants to hear.
Jeremy: Do you think maybe, if I plead and plead and plead, she’ll forget all about it and things will go back to like before?
Mark: Honestly?
Jeremy: Quite honestly. Not brutally honestly.
Mark: Then... yeah, absolutely. (2.06)
Ultimately, the friendship between Mark and Jeremy is an unhealthy, damaging one, but beneath the selfishness they do have a genuine fondness for each other. Jeremy needs Mark to keep him, if not grounded, at least below cloud level; Mark needs Jeremy as a person around whom he can let down his ineffectual façade of normality. Jeremy, with his thoughtlessness and narcissism, is a constant danger to Mark’s happiness, and he resents Mark’s refusal to live in the world in which Jeremy’s musical genius is recognised and nobody worries about things like the rent, but they wouldn’t be able to cope apart.
Subtext and Supertext
Maybe the pressure will build to the point where we actually try to fuck each other.
At what point can a pairing be considered canonical? Making Mark and Jeremy’s relationship sexual certainly doesn’t require too huge a leap. The fact that Jeremy appears to be canonically bisexual, if female-inclined, makes a desire from his side very easy to imagine when coupled with his fear of having Mark leave him; whilst he reassures Mark’s fiancée that four is a perfectly normal number of men to sleep with before settling down, he’s thinking, (Jesus. I’ve had sex with more men than that, and I basically only sleep with women.) The episode ‘Mark Makes a Friend’, meanwhile, is entirely devoted to Mark falling for another man and having a sexuality crisis: (I’m probably just the sort of person who’d be gay and repress it even to himself!).
Both characters have canonically experienced interest in the same sex, then, but does that necessarily mean they could have a romantic or sexual interest in each other? Their thoughts indicate that it’s certainly possible. Mark, envisioning being able to order Jeremy around should he end up working at Mark’s company, catches himself thinking, (Jeremy, could you file this for me? Jeremy, could you take that for me? Jeremy, could you suck this for me? ...Jesus, where did that come from?). When the two of them are kissing during a game of Spin the Bottle, Jeremy thinks (At least it’s Mark) before amending it to a horrified (Oh, Jesus, it’s Mark!), and he has a thoroughly worrying moment of sexual speculation when looking at a drugged and sleeping Corrigan. There are definitely signs of a potential repressed sexual interest from both sides, and, given that Jeremy is not known for his self-control, he could very well actively pursue Mark if he ever came to acknowledge that interest in himself. Whether the heavily repressed Mark would ever accept him is another question.
Then there’s the underlying theme running through Mark’s many failed attempts at romance: sooner or later the relationship will collapse, and when it does Mark will be left with Jeremy again. After Mark’s wedding, when his new wife jumps out of the wedding car in tears, Jeremy appears at the door and asks him whether he wants some company. At Mark’s birthday party, when all the women in whom Mark has a romantic interest are dancing with someone else, it is Jeremy who comes through the crowd and offers to dance with him. Women always leave Mark; only Jeremy stays. Not only is Mark/Jeremy plausible; it makes complete thematic sense within the canon.
‘It’s a love story,’ David Mitchell, Mark’s actor, says in this interview. ‘Mark and Jeremy are effectively married to each other. A woman ought to come between them, but she would never succeed.’
No matter what happens, Mark and Jeremy will always be together. They can’t escape each other. Jeremy knows this, but Mark is still searching for ‘the one’, the woman who will drag him into a normal life. He hasn’t accepted his destiny. Not yet.
Jeremy: [mockingly] She might be the one?
Mark: Fuck off, Jeremy.
Jeremy: (I’m his one.) (5.01)
The Fandom
Peep Show has very little fanfiction, sadly, and what has been written is rather scattered about.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
mitchellwebbfic and peepshowslash have the occasional Peep Show fic, but they have a more general Mitchell and Webb focus. peepshowfic was an attempt at creating a community solely for Peep Show fanfiction, but it hasn't really got off the ground, alas. There are also small Peep Show sections on fanfiction.net and AO3.
A couple of individual fic recs:
Ten Years Later is a hilarious Jeremy-POV Mark/Jeremy fic of about a thousand words, written by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dafnagreer. Jeremy pursues Mark, with questionable success.
Schemes is a Mark-POV fic byscarffetish, two thousand words long, in which Jeremy wants to dissuade an ex-girlfriend by convincing her that he and Mark are having sex. This could easily happen in an actual episode of Peep Show.
Whilst this isn't the only fanfiction out there, there is a sad shortage of Mark/Jeremy and Peep Show fic in general on the Internet. I very much hope that this will change. Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne are destined to be together, no matter how much they may wish they weren't.
Fandom: Peep Show
Pairing: Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne*
Wordcount: about 2,000
Notes: This manifesto is written to be accessible to people who haven't watched Peep Show, but it does contain spoilers up to the end of the fifth series. There are some pictures, but it's not massively image-heavy.
* spelling of surname canonically variable
a Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne 'ship manifesto
The Show
Peep Show is an extremely dark British sitcom, written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and featuring comedy double act David Mitchell and Robert Webb as the principal characters, Mark and Jeremy. There have been six series of six episodes each, and a seventh is currently being broadcast in the UK. Stylistically, it’s very striking; almost every shot is filmed from someone’s point of view, whether a main character or simply a passer-by, and Mark and Jeremy’s thoughts are often audible in voiceover.
Peep Show is largely about failure, and about its main characters’ struggles to succeed in a world for which neither of them is remotely suited. It can be very difficult to watch, particularly if you have a strong embarrassment squick, but it is brilliantly written.
I’ve got a friend! I’ve made a friend! Maybe there’s nothing wrong with me and I’m just a normal human being!
Mark Corrigan is a deeply unfortunate man; a combination of his own neuroses, external factors and having Jeremy for a friend ensure that he is unlucky in love, unlucky in his career and unlucky in any other area of life you’d care to name. He is painfully repressed and socially inept, unable to grasp social conventions and living in constant terror of breaking them. I and many other Peep Show watchers identify very closely with him and wish we didn’t.
Mark is a brilliant character, and one who wouldn’t work in any other format; externally he might appear almost dull, but when his thoughts are audible it becomes clear that he is a seething mass of insecurity and neuroses and suppressed rage. He is played by David Mitchell, who has received a BAFTA for his performance.
At its heart, Peep Show is primarily about the tragedy that is Mark Corrigan’s existence; the premise of most episodes is ‘Mark has a brief glimpse of happiness, and then it all goes horribly wrong’.
This is almost definitely a terrible idea, but I won’t know for certain until I’ve actually done it.
Jeremy O/Usbo(u)rne, as I seriously had to consider titling this section (his surname has been officially rendered as ‘Osborne’, ‘Osbourne’, ‘Usborne’ and ‘Usbourne’, presumably just to make things difficult for manifesto-writers), is Mark’s flatmate, meaning that everyone who therefore does not have Jeremy Usborne as a flatmate owes Mark a great deal of thanks. Jeremy is delusional; convinced that he is a musical genius, he refuses to accept any job that fails to make use of his creative talents. As he has no creative talents, this means that he spends an awful lot of time not working. He owes Mark over four thousand pounds in rent.
It’s not that Jeremy means to be a bad person. It’s just that, well, he’s a bad person. He is astonishingly, incomprehensibly selfish; Mark is selfish as well, but his moral failings dwindle into insignificance alongside Jeremy, who will lie, cheat and betray his friends, and Mark in particular, for sex or for the opportunity to pursue his misplaced dreams of a career in music, with barely a hint of remorse. He is played by Robert Webb, who should receive a BAFTA for his performance.
Jeremy will occasionally remember that they are actually friends and attempt to do something nice for Mark. Mark being Mark, these attempts generally backfire spectacularly. It’s not clear what’s more dangerous: a Jeremy serving his own interests or a Jeremy who is actively trying to be good.
Well, he’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot.
Right, first things first: any sort of relationship between these two is going to be, at best, a bit twisted. Their friendship is twisted enough as it is, and adding romance to that particular mess is only going to make things twistier.
At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that ‘friendship’ is too strong a word to describe the dynamic that Mark and Jeremy have. Each is perfectly willing to betray the other for his own ends, Jeremy perhaps moreso; he has, at various points, slept with Mark’s estranged wife, tried to get Mark sectioned, and locked an unwell Mark in his bedroom so Jeremy could use the rest of the flat for a magic mushroom party. In an early episode, whilst Mark and Jeremy smile and call each other ‘mate’, the viewer can hear their thoughts:
Mark: (Workshy freeloader.)
Jeremy: (Tight-fisted cockmuncher.) (1.02)
A little deeper, though, one will find, if not quite a pleasure in each other’s company, at least a need for each other. Jeremy’s selfish tendencies often lead him to destroy Mark’s prospects for the sake of sexual or musical opportunity, but in the episode ‘Mark Makes a Friend’ he ruins Mark’s plans for going into business in Cardiff simply to keep Mark from leaving him. Whilst Mark’s need for Jeremy is less obvious, he has covered the cost to keep Jeremy from being arrested, even though having Jeremy in prison would probably make Mark’s life infinitely simpler, and there’s an uncharacteristically lovely little moment when Jeremy is about to leave to join a cult; the atmosphere is painfully awkward as he bids Mark farewell, leaves and then, after a moment, returns.
Jeremy: There was just one thing...
Mark: I – I don’t think you should go. You – you do know that, don’t you? I’ll come and get you, if you like. I’ll happily deprogram you. (5.06)
There’s also a closeness and honesty between Mark and Jeremy that doesn’t seem to exist in their relationships with anyone else. In his day-to-day life Mark is caught up in the struggle to present himself as a functional member of society, but Jeremy already knows exactly how far from functional Mark is, so Mark can be open with him. Mark’s fiancée, Sophie, sees only his barely-maintained public face, his attempts to be the person he thinks she thinks he should be; Jeremy is the only person in whom Mark truly confides, and so it is only he who knows that Mark accepted Sophie’s proposal only because refusal would have been too embarrassing. When something goes wrong in Jeremy’s life, meanwhile, he’ll come to Mark, and Mark will smile awkwardly and tell him what he wants to hear.
Jeremy: Do you think maybe, if I plead and plead and plead, she’ll forget all about it and things will go back to like before?
Mark: Honestly?
Jeremy: Quite honestly. Not brutally honestly.
Mark: Then... yeah, absolutely. (2.06)
Ultimately, the friendship between Mark and Jeremy is an unhealthy, damaging one, but beneath the selfishness they do have a genuine fondness for each other. Jeremy needs Mark to keep him, if not grounded, at least below cloud level; Mark needs Jeremy as a person around whom he can let down his ineffectual façade of normality. Jeremy, with his thoughtlessness and narcissism, is a constant danger to Mark’s happiness, and he resents Mark’s refusal to live in the world in which Jeremy’s musical genius is recognised and nobody worries about things like the rent, but they wouldn’t be able to cope apart.
Maybe the pressure will build to the point where we actually try to fuck each other.
At what point can a pairing be considered canonical? Making Mark and Jeremy’s relationship sexual certainly doesn’t require too huge a leap. The fact that Jeremy appears to be canonically bisexual, if female-inclined, makes a desire from his side very easy to imagine when coupled with his fear of having Mark leave him; whilst he reassures Mark’s fiancée that four is a perfectly normal number of men to sleep with before settling down, he’s thinking, (Jesus. I’ve had sex with more men than that, and I basically only sleep with women.) The episode ‘Mark Makes a Friend’, meanwhile, is entirely devoted to Mark falling for another man and having a sexuality crisis: (I’m probably just the sort of person who’d be gay and repress it even to himself!).
Both characters have canonically experienced interest in the same sex, then, but does that necessarily mean they could have a romantic or sexual interest in each other? Their thoughts indicate that it’s certainly possible. Mark, envisioning being able to order Jeremy around should he end up working at Mark’s company, catches himself thinking, (Jeremy, could you file this for me? Jeremy, could you take that for me? Jeremy, could you suck this for me? ...Jesus, where did that come from?). When the two of them are kissing during a game of Spin the Bottle, Jeremy thinks (At least it’s Mark) before amending it to a horrified (Oh, Jesus, it’s Mark!), and he has a thoroughly worrying moment of sexual speculation when looking at a drugged and sleeping Corrigan. There are definitely signs of a potential repressed sexual interest from both sides, and, given that Jeremy is not known for his self-control, he could very well actively pursue Mark if he ever came to acknowledge that interest in himself. Whether the heavily repressed Mark would ever accept him is another question.
Then there’s the underlying theme running through Mark’s many failed attempts at romance: sooner or later the relationship will collapse, and when it does Mark will be left with Jeremy again. After Mark’s wedding, when his new wife jumps out of the wedding car in tears, Jeremy appears at the door and asks him whether he wants some company. At Mark’s birthday party, when all the women in whom Mark has a romantic interest are dancing with someone else, it is Jeremy who comes through the crowd and offers to dance with him. Women always leave Mark; only Jeremy stays. Not only is Mark/Jeremy plausible; it makes complete thematic sense within the canon.
‘It’s a love story,’ David Mitchell, Mark’s actor, says in this interview. ‘Mark and Jeremy are effectively married to each other. A woman ought to come between them, but she would never succeed.’
No matter what happens, Mark and Jeremy will always be together. They can’t escape each other. Jeremy knows this, but Mark is still searching for ‘the one’, the woman who will drag him into a normal life. He hasn’t accepted his destiny. Not yet.
Jeremy: [mockingly] She might be the one?
Mark: Fuck off, Jeremy.
Jeremy: (I’m his one.) (5.01)
Peep Show has very little fanfiction, sadly, and what has been written is rather scattered about.
mitchellwebbfic and peepshowslash have the occasional Peep Show fic, but they have a more general Mitchell and Webb focus. peepshowfic was an attempt at creating a community solely for Peep Show fanfiction, but it hasn't really got off the ground, alas. There are also small Peep Show sections on fanfiction.net and AO3.A couple of individual fic recs:
Ten Years Later is a hilarious Jeremy-POV Mark/Jeremy fic of about a thousand words, written by
dafnagreer. Jeremy pursues Mark, with questionable success.Schemes is a Mark-POV fic by
scarffetish, two thousand words long, in which Jeremy wants to dissuade an ex-girlfriend by convincing her that he and Mark are having sex. This could easily happen in an actual episode of Peep Show.Whilst this isn't the only fanfiction out there, there is a sad shortage of Mark/Jeremy and Peep Show fic in general on the Internet. I very much hope that this will change. Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne are destined to be together, no matter how much they may wish they weren't.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-12 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-12 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 10:31 pm (UTC)I love this, thanks very much.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 02:33 am (UTC)Sadly, there's still not that much Peep Show fiction!! I wish I was better at writing, I'd do some pieces I cannot find. Such is life, I guess.
And I am also a firm believer in the fact that Mark and Jeremy are really destined to be together!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 09:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 04:55 pm (UTC)(and glad I'm not alone about the straddling, haha!)