Robert Popper's comedy starts with a straight face: a calm voice, a wrong fact, a pause long enough to make you check you heard it. Look Around You is the purest version; his later sitcoms kept the deadpan and let the family in.
Fi1m perspective
A calm man explains a subject over film of beakers, and something in the explanation is wrong. That is Look Around You (2002), the schools science programme of the 1970s and 80s remade shot for shot by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, with the facts taken out. Nobody winks. The film stock is right, the synthesiser is right, the pauses are right, and the wrong fact arrives with all the authority of the original. We laughed hardest not at the facts but at the pauses before them, the presenter waiting for a classroom that was never going to answer, and we were slightly alarmed at how much of the real thing we still had by heart.
Popper came to it from the other side of the desk. He wrote for The Comic Strip and for Zig and Zag on The Big Breakfast, then spent years as a commissioning editor for comedy at a broadcaster, saying yes to other people's programmes, Black Books and Spaced among them, before leaving to make his own. Two series of Look Around You followed, the second in 2005 with Popper on screen as Jack Morgan, a man who believes he is at the cutting edge and is content to look foolish. Then he went back to helping: producing series three and four of Peep Show, script-editing The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd, and writing spoof correspondence as Robin Cooper in The Timewaster Letters (2005). In 2011 came Friday Night Dinner, six series about a Jewish family's Friday nights, and with it a move from spoofing television to writing about people he knew.
We will not judge Friday Night Dinner here, but the habit it shares with Look Around You is plain: eccentric people saying absurd things in a level voice, and a writer who declines to explain the joke. I Hate You (2022) is built around a female friendship, and Popper has been plain about that: “I’ve always enjoyed writing women. I mean, if you can’t write female characters, then you’re not really a writer.” The reservation is that the parody instinct runs narrow. Look Around You is so exact about one kind of television that a viewer who never sat through the original has to take the accuracy on trust, and the second series, with the presenters on camera, is the broader and slightly lesser show.
Serafinowicz is the collaborator who matters. On Look Around You he co-wrote, acted and composed, and the pairing gave the show two men unwilling to let a joke run a second longer than the format would allow. Popper's small parts in Edgar Wright's films, an uncredited news reporter's voice in Shaun of the Dead (2004), come from the same circle. Start with the first series of Look Around You, shown to someone who remembers the television on the trolley, and watch their face.
Biography
Robert Popper is a British comedy writer, producer and actor. He co-created the BBC Two mockumentary series Look Around You (2002–2005) with Peter Serafinowicz, writing and appearing in it as Jack Morgan. He later created, wrote and produced the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner (2011–2020).
Popper began his career commissioning comedy at Channel 4 before leaving to focus on Look Around You. He has produced series of Peep Show, script-edited The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd, and co-wrote episodes of Stath Lets Flats. He also wrote on series 14 of South Park and created the Channel 4 series I Hate You (2022). Under the pseudonym Robin Cooper he wrote the Timewaster Letters books.
Popper had small roles in the films Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Look Around You received BAFTA and British Comedy Award nominations, while Friday Night Dinner won a Rose d'Or.
