Edgar Wright: my life on screen

Ahead of his upcoming film, Last Night in Soho, the celebrated British director spoke to broadcaster Alex Zane about his very first hit

It says something that we had to bend the Townhouse health and safety rules to cram everyone into this conversation with the British film-maker. In association with Fairmont, Wright went through all his films from Shaun of the Dead to Baby Driver, but was eager to return to where it all started 20 years ago, with sitcom Spaced.

“I’m still incredibly proud of the show. And it’s funny. Like the other day, I watched some of it and I hadn’t watched it for maybe 10 years. I can say this because I didn’t write it — Simon [Pegg] and Jess [Hynes] wrote that one — but I was just in awe of how many jokes are in it. I remember I was texting Simon and Jess about something else and I said, ‘Hey, I just watched episode two from the first series again, I always thought that was one of the weaker ones but my God, it was crammed full of jokes.’

“It’s easy for me to enjoy it because it reminds me of such a great time that we had. And it’s that weird thing where the making of the show and my own life have sort of started to blend together in my head. We felt that other ‘youthy’ sort of sitcoms around at the time all seemed to be written by people who were 20–30 years older than the characters. And I think the thing with Spaced is because we were all in our mid-twenties and were all living in North London when we made it, it felt very authentic.

“It was low-budget enough that Channel Four were like, ‘Oh yeah, fine, whatever’, which is again, unusual. I feel kind of spoiled by it in a way because I think that because we had a low budget and there were maybe low expectations, we could just get away with anything. And then it was on in between Friends and Frazier on a Friday night, which is really strange.

“I do think if I were coming up now, would I have had that opportunity to be that experimental and ambitious with a sitcom? And would it be on network TV on a Friday night? You know? It also didn’t outstay its welcome and we didn’t get bored of doing it. And so it’s a really sort of happy time. The fact that we’re all still friends is a big part of that.

“But I also like the fact that it never grew stale. That’s not to say that if Simon and Jess wanted to do something else with it — they absolutely could, and they have that right to. But there’s something about just leaving those characters kind of crystallised in amber, just at the end of that second series. I don’t know, I mean, I’m so proud of those 14 episodes.”