--- title: "Ideal" year: 2005 kind: "series" canonical: "https://film.one/tv/ideal" fi1m_score: 71 critics_reviews: 1 published: "2026-09-17T01:31:55.154755+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T01:31:55.553020+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Ideal (2005) Created by Graham Duff · 30m · Comedy **Fi1m score: 71** · Critics: 1 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Seven series of Johnny Vegas answering his own front door and regretting it every time > Graham Duff’s sitcom locks a small-time hash dealer in his flat and lets the world come to him. It is dark, slow and frequently very funny, and Johnny Vegas gives it a sadness most sitcoms would not risk. The lack of plot is the point, until it is not. ## Synopsis Moz (Johnny Vegas) sells hash from his flat and would rather not leave it. Customers knock, buy, and then sit down and stay: his girlfriend Nicki (Nicola Reynolds), who would like a life beyond the sofa; Colin (Ben Crompton), a regular who always arrives with a fresh problem; Jenny (Sinéad Matthews) from upstairs; and PC (Tom Goodman-Hill), a policeman who buys his own supply and chats about work. When Psycho Paul (Ryan Pope) comes to the door, the flat goes quiet. Moz wants a steady trade, a quiet flat and Nicki to stop nagging, and every visitor stands in the way of at least one of those. The door is the whole plot. ## Review Graham Duff’s *Ideal* has one idea and it is a good one. Moz (Johnny Vegas) deals hash from his flat, and because he never goes out, everyone comes to him. Customers ring the bell, buy what they came for, and then fail to leave, so each half hour is a procession of people through one room. That premise held for seven series and 52 episodes from 10 January 2005, which is longer than most sitcoms with three sets and a plot manage. It is a small, dark, well-made programme, and it is worth your evening if you can stand the company. Vegas is the reason it works. He plays Moz as a man whose ambitions end at the edge of the sofa: slow to move, quick to take offence, and shrewder than anyone on his sofa gives him credit for. He listens more than he talks, and the laughs come from his face while someone else is speaking. What he adds, and what a lesser comic would not, is that Moz is plainly a lonely, frightened man in a dressing gown, and the show never pretends otherwise. We liked him and we would not have wanted to sit next to him. The regulars are the material. Nicola Reynolds’s Nicki wants more than the flat and knows she is unlikely to get it. Ben Crompton’s Colin arrives twitching, every visit a new crisis. Sinéad Matthews gives Jenny a flat, unbothered delivery that makes every question she asks sound like an accusation. Tom Goodman-Hill’s PC, a policeman who buys his own supply and talks shop while he rolls it, is the show’s one properly satirical idea, and it is played entirely straight. Ryan Pope’s Psycho Paul says little, and everyone else rearranges themselves around him. Duff and Tony Burgess write them all as people who talk past each other and only occasionally, by accident, connect. The directors, Dan Zeff, Ben Gosling Fuller, Ben Wheatley and Ben Gregor among them, keep the flat dim and the camera at sitting height, so we are on the sofa with Moz and the visitors loom. Nobody tidies the place between episodes. Thirty minutes is the right length; the show knows when a scene has said its one thing and gets the person out of the door. It carries a 15 certificate, which is the drugs and the language, and it earns both without leaning on them. We laughed a good deal, and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because most of what we were laughing at was a fat man being insulted in his own front room by people who owed him money. What stayed with us was quieter. There is a moment in the first series where Moz is alone between callers, the flat silent, and he simply sits, and Vegas does nothing at all with it. We were sadder than a sitcom about a stoner has any business making us, and it was the stillness that did it. The faults are the ones you would predict. Nothing builds. An episode ends because the half hour is up, not because anything has been settled, and after a run of them the single room stops being a joke and starts to feel like a cell. The dialect and the mumbling are part of the texture but they cost us lines, more than once. And as the series go on the visitors get stranger and the show starts to chase its own grotesques, which is funny in single doses and wearing across a season. The British sitcom has always liked a room nobody can leave, from the Trotters’ flat to the Royles’ sofa. *Ideal* belongs in that company, meaner and stranger than either, and it is honest about the fact that its hero is going nowhere because he has chosen not to. Watch two episodes at a time, not a whole series; the flat is best visited, not lived in, which is a lesson everybody in it could have done with learning. *Fi1m score 71, published 17 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (1) - **Variety**, Brian Lowry (70/100, inferred): The critic finds the title ironic for this dark British comedy about a slovenly hash dealer, noting the garbled dialect and lack of plot but praising Johnny Vegas's performance as a sad, pathetic clown that holds attention. It's refreshing in its casual drug use approach despite the grungy setting. [Read](https://variety.com/2009/tv/reviews/ideal-1200507031/) ## Details - **Created by:** Graham Duff - **Creator:** Graham Duff - **Director:** Dan Zeff, Ben Wheatley, Ben Gosling Fuller, Ben Gregor - **Writer:** Graham Duff, Tony Burgess - **Producer:** Gill Isles, Ted Dowd, Jane Berthoud - **Cast:** Johnny Vegas as Moz; Tom Goodman-Hill as PC; Nicola Reynolds as Nicki; Ben Crompton as Colin; Sinéad Matthews as Jenny; Ryan Pope as Psycho Paul; Jo Neary as Judith; Andrew-Lee Potts as Lee - **Runtime:** 30m - **Release (the US):** 11 January 2005 - **Genres:** Comedy ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. Also available in: AU, GB. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Peep Show* (2003), Fi1m 88: Two men in a Croydon flat, equally trapped, with the interior monologue Moz keeps to himself. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/peep-show.md) - *The Royle Family* (1998): The sofa as a whole world, done gentler and with a family instead of customers. - *Withnail and I* (1987), Fi1m 88: Squalor, drink and dread in a flat, and the film every British stoner comedy owes rent to. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/withnail-and-i.md) - *High Maintenance* (2016): A New York weed dealer who does leave the flat, and meets Ideal’s cast in better weather. - *Nighty Night* (2004), Fi1m 82: Julia Davis’s sitcom is crueller and darker still, if Ideal’s nastier edges are what you liked. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/tv/nighty-night.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/tv/ideal