JEZ: We’re in the Euro now and there’s nothing you can do about it.

MARK: We are not in the Euro!

Peep Show is the cultural achievement most universally feted across the media, from the Guardian to the Telegraph to the blogosphere. But where its own political position stands – in the words of Super Hans, “a deal-breaker”, whatever it may be – requires a lot of analysis, both direct textual interpretation and careful visual and verbal inference. The lagubrious Mark shall form a blacksuited Charon to a whole political underworld; one that may yet be revelatory as a means of prophecy of the next election, and beyond.

MARK

I eat red meat and don't necessarily think money or Tony Blair are a bad thing.

Mark Corrigan was born and bred in Middle England. His father, an aspirational if incompetent businessman, to this day considers “Sir David Frost something of a hippy.” In his early thirties in the present day, Mark was a child of Mrs Thatcher, and rebellion seems unlikely to have thriven in his nature. Privately educated at first, Mark quickly developed what would become a life-long passion for history. Any inspection of the ranks of OUCA must tend to uncover a correlation between historical sympathy and sentimental conservatism, and it is in such a mould that I see the young Mark. However, things changed for him half-way through the Major government, when “Dad’s BAE shares went down the tubes”, and Mark entered upon a brutally unhappy phase at state school.

Beaten up by bullies like Foz, witnessing a crumbling government, financially and politically, and perhaps a little loosened by student life with Jez at “dear old Darty”, the approximately 20-year-old Mark would have voted in Tony Blair in 1997 with a fair measure of satisfaction. At last he was breaking free of paternal shackles, defying the ghastly father who had made him read Business Studies instead of Ancient History. About this time he also went out, briefly and disastrously, with Merry, a bipolar Canadian hippy. Perhaps she too left his politics the softer.

But capitalism – an area at which Mark is quietly very competent; we should note Johnson’s trust in him, or Mark’s demolition of Jeff in any reasoned argument – remained the cornerstone of whatever form of leftism Mark was willing to espouse. It was not fox-hunting that turned him off Labour (he is ill at ease among Sophie’s country gentry kin), nor even the Iraq war; he took perverse satisfaction in the idea that “my rivals from school have probably perished in Blair’s oil wars”. Mark, a bit of a military buff, was probably pro-invading Iraq as he had been pro-defending the Falklands as a boy. He basically stuck by Blair all along; he found William Hague northern and abrasive, Iain Duncan Smith sympathetic but hopeless, Howard frightening and though he saw much to commend in David Cameron, he suppressed it out of social inadequacy and a fear of borderline homeroticism. The advent of Brown made his feelings much less complex; he was all for the heir to Blair, and reverted to eurosceptic, belt-tightening type. It’s hard to tell how he would have voted in 2008 in London; Ken and Boris represent different Markian nightmares. Conceivably he would have been seduced by the latter’s classical erudition.

JEZ

JEZ: You know how I feel about capitalism.

MARK: Yes. Confused.

Jeremy Usbourne’s background is higher prestige than Mark’s; in fact, as an upper-middle class rural being turned urban modern he has a certain affinity with Sophie. There does seem to have been a fluctuation in his development; early on we meet his dying uncle Ray, a gruff policeman, but much later in his career his mother (“Mummy”, in fact) is a model of upper-middle-tenderness. There are two solutions to this inconsistency – Ray was a bit of a tearaway, or Jez’s father’s side is fairly salt-of-the-earthy and Mrs Usbourne married down. In any case, Jez’s attitude is consistently faux-proletarian, from his name onwards. The classic example of Jez’s inept buddying is his interaction with a crooked handyman. He is not much less awkward than Mark in his deployment of “mate, the magic word”, though he is personally convinced of his down-to-earth rapport.

Economically Jez is illiterate, irresponsible, but rapacious (vide his eventual treatment of his mother, or his ruthless behaviour to music industry contacts like Gog or Sophie’s cousin). Politically, he is extremely unlikely to get out of bed at election time but probably sees himself as left-wing, as this tends to be more consistent with his “sensitive” womanising routine. Ironically, come the next election this will make his vote much more likely to be caught by Cameron than Brown. But he can’t really be bothered, and probably thinks in some vague sense that President Obama is the leader of his country.

SUPER HANS

It’s a deal-breaker for me.

Much understanding of Super Hans’s inner world depends how much the viewer is impressed by his blagging. For myself – and I expect I hold the majority position in this instance – I am, very. Super Hans probably won’t achieve anything ever in life, but that is because he holds the common existence in contempt. His abilities, wit and unorthodoxies leave Jez far behind. Like a brilliant, Satanic animal, he is morally above self-awareness or guilt.

When Super Hans announces a plan or motive, I do not merely take it as bluster. I take it as inhumanly long term, but ingenious, strategy. The most obvious case is Hans’s pioneering attempt to establish the ‘Swan and Paedo’ pub, harbouring its “strong political message”. Other situations where I suspect Hans is more in control than he makes out include his crack addiction and farcical cold turkey, his recruitment of Jez as a functionless roadie, and his destructive but decisive initiation into a cult at the end of series 5. Hans is the thinker and the actor; the Wordsworth and the Byron. Jez may seem unfairly put upon quite a lot, but he simply is the junior partner in talent and personality.

While Jez would rarely exert his suffrage, it seems to me impossible that the highly advanced anarchist mastermind Hans has ever missed an opportunity to befuddle the British political system. I see a man who has tactically voted Trotskyite, Sinn Fein, BNP, whatever. Labour won’t get his favours, but David Cameron should be worried as well. Hans – who cannot but be Westminster-educated – will look upon the Tories with all the contempt a patrician revolutionary can summon.

JOHNSON

I mean, actually kill them.

Johnson of JLB Credit is a man whose life has experienced many brands of trajectory. “I’ve been to the bottom of the bottle, and I clawed my way back up.” He is partially to Mark what Super Hans is to Jez, but he is more powerful and benevolent – the brilliant Super Hans is definitely a version of Satan, but Johnson consciously takes an angelic, miracle-working part. Why stop there? It is not difficult to accuse the formulator of “Project Zeus” of a delight in playing God.

Johnson is definitely a top-percentile earner. If he was ever into Prosperity! Labour, this year’s Darling budget has probably sent him running. The Tories – both at Central Office and City Hall – will be slavering at the opportunity of such an ideal poster boy. Adam Afriyie was possibly heard remarking at the Tory Black & White Winter Party that Johnson “is the most likely British Obama, after me.” But though the party may be equally after his cash and his company, Johnson is careful with his dignity and might not play.

THE REST

They really don’t know us at all, do they?

Don’t go there, Clinton.

But the protagonists and their mentors are by no means the only figures to encapsulsate Peep Show’s political concerns. At breakneck speed the following should not be omitted:

Sophie Chapman. Tory family background has probably driven her to embarrassed, semi-conscientious Lib Demhood.

Toni from next door. A New Labour glamourpuss, maybe a bit homeless and drifting Cameron in the Brown era.

Big Suze. Physically a Sam Cam type and an admirer of Hawkesmoor churches. An actress. Body Shop swathed. Most probably posh enough to be Lib Dem.

Jeff from JLB credit, Mark’s nemesis – a tribal Labour voter who will be pleased at clear Brownite dividing lines.

Nancy – Yes we can.

Dobby – a computer fixer and devout online gamer. Let’s call her a Greenpeace activist and regular Green voter.

DEDUCTIONS

Whether future series of Peep Show will remain so politically tuned is not certain. The Blair era contained, like the reign of Charles II, a government that relished and pandered to cultural self-depiction; a struggle through a recession may just lack the plot details necessary for winsome Blair style joke-importation. On the other hand, speaking cannily not culturally, the success of The Thick of It, which transformed Peter Capaldi’s Professor MacLeish into Alastair Campbell’s most grotesquely mimetic portrayal, may prod scriptwriters into tightening up, rather than abandoning, political synthesis.

Peep Show’s class war is very up to date – not a matter of right vs left, but voters vs tossers – and whether Mark votes red or blue, Jez’s apathy will keep this mechanic reliably frozen.