The stars of Spaced reunited: ‘Our show doesn’t feel dated like Friends’
Two decades on from the cult comedy, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright and Jessica Hynes reminisce about the making of a game-changing classic
I am not in 23 Meteor Street, circa 1999. In fact, I’m in the BFI office in central London at the fag end of 2019. But by God, it’s easy to forget that, sitting opposite Nick Frost, Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg, as they talk about their seminal sitcom Spaced, and each so jarringly reminiscent of their characters it verges on unnerving. Set on the fictional street in north London, Spaced told the deceptively simple story of two flatmates: aspiring-if-she-could-just-be-arsed writer Daisy Steiner and thwarted comic-book artist Tim Bisley. Accompanying them on their deeply prosaic adventures (a paintball tournament one week, a club night the next), which somehow achieved the heights of mythic glory, were their downstairs neighbour, tortured artist Brian (Mark Heap), his girlfriend Twist (Katy Carmichael), who worked “in fashion”, by which she meant a dry cleaners, Tim’s childhood friend Mike (Frost) and their landlady Marsha (Julia Deakin).