Cartoonist-cum-fantasy-artist Tim (Faith in the Future's Simon Pegg), works in the Fantasy Bazarr comic book shop with Bilbo (Bill Bailey) and has been thrown out of the house he shared with his girlfriend Sarah and wannabe journalist Daisy (The Royle Family's Jessica Stevenson) has voluntarily left the house she shared with some dope-f(r)iends. Circumstances bring them together in a cafe, which leads to them posing as a professional couple in order to get them a flat together, despite the landlady being the drunk Marsha Klein (Julia Deakin) and the building containing the weird Brian (Mark Heap, who appeared with Simon Pegg in the sketch show Big Train) who maintains he is also an artist, but one dealing in works that reflect pain and aggression.

Throw in a number of other characters including regular best-friends for Daisy and Tim respectively, Twist (Liverpool 1's Katy Carmichael) and "weapons expert" Mike (Nick Frost), plus movie references aplenty including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix and it doesn't all quite gel together, but then it's not really meant to.

I didn't quite get into this programme first time round, but learned of the DVD around the time when the series was repeated (Feb 2001) and gave it a second chance with the sixth, clubbing, episode. Then things began to click.

It's not a laugh-out-loud funny sitcom, but clearly draws you in with its style including the use of cut-scenes spliced in all over the place, such as in the final episode when an argument between Daisy and Tim is interspliced with footage of two Tekken characters slugging it out.

There's no problems with the encoding of the picture on this DVD, although it does have a slightly washed-out and blurry look to it throughout. However, that is down to the way it was filmed. It's also presented in the original anamorphic widescreen 16:9 ratio, as shown on Channel 4 and the average bitrate is a 5.31Mbs, occasionally peaking over 8Mb/s.

Spaced doesn't have a theme tune of its own, but it's populated by snippets of different songs - almost all of which are named in the subtitles - and other programmes' theme tunes, including Murder She Wrote and a remix of The A-Team, plus various audio swipes that accompany visual cues. Call me a purist, but if someone had remixed the entire soundtrack into Dolby Digital 5.1 it would have been quite a perfect treat.

The extras, all in anamorphic 16:9 widescreen, feature Cast and Crew Biographies for not only the major cast members, the director and producers, but also the characters themselves which is quite a novel twist. The Trailers section consists of two teasers, the trailers used to specifically advertise episodes 3, 4, 5 and 6 and a near-two-minute trailer for Series 2, which you'll be seeing regularly of Channel 4 if you're reading this review in the week of February 19th-23rd 2001.

There are nine minutes of Out-takes and thirteen Deleted Scenes, each with an optional audio commentary track explaining why they were left out although the booklet comments on this too. Finally, like The League of Gentlemen there's an Audio Commentary track from Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson and Edgar Wright which runs for the full length of the series. I hope more programmes do this in future.

The disc contains five chapters per episode, subtitles in English for the hard of hearing which capture just about all of the dialogue and the menus contain music plus subtle animation which changes colour. On my Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player, the menus didn't appear most of the time (I also had a similar problem with Dogma), but it worked fine on a Playstation 2.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001

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DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: