![]() Television is no longer this poorer cousin of film. “Everything has changed so much lately – and quickly – in terms of what television is. ![]() ![]() The complicated answer, he explains, is partly because of the new artistic possibilities the genre affords, and partly because of business and survival. Pegg remembers the initial question and we dart back to the topic of television. I always listen to music when I write I’ll always be thinking of something if I listen to music.” That was all choreographed in my head to a specific piece of music. “It helped me to structure the whole scene when we rescued Colin the dog from the vivisection laboratory. “I remember writing chunks of Spaced to specific pieces of music,” he says, as the music continues to echo into the room where we are talking. It’s a question that somehow takes us initially to Colin the dog, who was as much a star of Spaced as his human co-stars. But then it’s like, well, if you did record some kind of paranormal event on video and put it on YouTube, nothing would change because people still wouldn’t believe it – they’d still think you were charlatans.”Īs music radiates from the office where he is due to return to work later on, I ask him if the decision to go back to television was because of a yearning to return to his Spaced television roots or a need to break from his frenetic film schedule of the last few years (Pegg has four films out this year alone). “These days when you look at paranormal activity on YouTube, there’s stuff you look at and you think, ‘okay, that might be a ghost’ and you aren’t scared by it at all because rationally, you think somebody has obviously created a trick. We just thought it would be really fun to do a show based on a low-rated YouTube channel about ghost hunting that starts to get some actual, real results.” Basing a comedy around truth in a post-truth era seems like classic Pegg-Frost territory, their ability to capitalise on the dark tragi-comedy of contemporary society always proving fertile ground for both fantasy and farce in their previous work. “It’s just a silly idea we’ve been tossing around for ages. Immediately after our interview ends, Pegg will finish writing the pilot episode. This will be one of the first projects to emerge from inside the walls of Stolen Pictures, their new production company. “It’s something being written right over there,” he explains, pointing to a room across from where we are sitting. Pegg is now turning his and Frost’s part Ghostbusters, part Spaced experience into a new television series, Truth Seekers. “We went as total cynics though,” Pegg quickly clarifies, laughing, adding that neither him nor Frost actually believed in ghosts – or at least, he thinks they don’t. ![]() Detailing some of their youthful ghost-hunting expeditions, the protagonists could very well be their Spaced alter egos, Tim and Mike. The anecdote sounds like a sketch from 90s cult television show Spaced, the programme that launched the careers of the real-life best friends. “We’d drive out to an abandoned church or something and we’d give ourselves alternative names and then start to look for ghosts.” “Nick Frost and I always used to love to go ghost hunting in our spare time,” Simon Pegg tells me, laughing over lunch at the offices of his and Frost’s production company in Soho.
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