On its launch 25 years ago, Spaced felt like a private treasure. Buried in Channel 4’s Friday night schedule, it was the kind of show you discovered in a post-pub haze and, the next morning, couldn’t quite be sure if you had imagined it. It didn’t help that — as the initial ratings attest — hardly anybody else seemed to be watching it.

This hallucinatory quality was all the more vivid because, if you were the target audience, Spaced was a show that spoke directly to you. Its leads, played by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) are two twenty-somethings on the verge of, well, nothing much. Careers, love, responsibility remain tantalisingly out of reach. 

Pegg’s Tim is an aspiring comic book artist working in a geeky shop, while Hynes’s Daisy — a fantastic, un-self-conscious performance —  is a writer yet to use her typewriter for anything more constructive than a cleaning rota. The two are strangers, brought together over the housing section of Loot, who have to pretend to be a professional couple in order to win the last reasonably priced flat in North London. With few commitments, they spend their days and evenings watching telly, getting stoned or going clubbing in Camden.

When Spaced premiered in September 1999, I was working on the rock floor at Tower Records Piccadilly, as absorbed as I would ever be in pop culture. Watching the show was the closest I’ve ever come to that moment in The Purple Rose of Cairo where a character in the movie addresses Mia Farrow in the audience. But while Jeff Daniel’s fictional hero stepped out of the screen to woo, Spaced invited you in. If you weren’t already living in a flat much like Tim and Daisy’s, you soon wished you were.

This direct relationship with its audience was possible because Spaced was the work of fans. 

Writers Pegg and Hynes and director Edgar Wright — whose frenetic style has left an undeniable imprint across mainstream film and telly over the past two decades — were children of VHS and UK Gold, raised in the aisles of video libraries and CD shops, who built friendships around swapped tapes of classic films and obscure albums. Although shot on smeary tape, the series took its visual cues from cinema greats, music videos and computer games.

The Simpsons had spent the 90s gorging on Hollywood, riffing on films familiar from daytime repeats, but Spaced did more than spoof: it made pop culture the fabric of its characters’ lives.  Tim and Daisy — and, to a lesser extent, Tim’s sidekick Mike (Nick Frost) — rely on precedents from film, TV or music to make sense of their experiences. 

Part of the reason Tim and Daisy take so long to realise they are (probably) in love with each other is that theirs is a romance without any actual romance. Being friends first — and bonding over repeats of Grange Hill — is not the sort of thing Hollywood prepares you for. 

This fixation on the culty fringes of pop seems to prefigure the geek culture that has since come to dominate mass media

A quarter of a century on, this fixation on the culty fringes of pop seems to prefigure the geek culture that has since come to dominate mass media. But back then being geeky still amounted to a love of outsider art — expressed most pretentiously by the lovable downstairs weirdo Brian (Mark Heap) — and low culture. The comics Tim admires are not the bland Marvel superheroes but the edgy British variety epitomised by 2000AD (the character takes his surname from artist Simon Bisley, who worked extensively for that publication).

Tim might obsess over US imports Buffy, The X-Files and Star Wars, but his is a very British take on geek culture, where gatekeeping is the order of the day. “You weren’t there at the beginning!’ Tim rants at a young, newbie fan wanting to buy a Jar Jar Binks toy. “You don’t know how good it was, how important!”

Obviously, the joke is on Tim, who takes his love of cult sci-fi too seriously. But it still speaks to an age where cultural criticism was combative, not apologetic. (“I punched a bloke in the face once for saying Hawk the Slayer was rubbish,” Tim’s boss Bilbo confides; “Good for you,” Tim replies.)  In the years since, pop culture has become infected with a kind of Californian non-judgementalism where it’s a crime to “yuck someone else’s yum”. In other words, if someone likes something, it must be inherently good. “Let people enjoy things,” as one infamous cartoon says.

The music press that once sneered at bland, formulaic pop now strives to elevate it, while movie magazines dedicate the bulk of their pages to corporate comic book pap. The sub-cultures that supported indie film and music have died away, leaving us with mainstream art that is for everybody everywhere but nobody in particular.

The joy of what used to be dubbed cult wasn’t that everyone loved it, but that nobody loved it like you did. Or, at least, that’s how it felt. And that’s how Spaced felt.

You can probably enjoy Spaced as a fast-paced, surrealism-tinged sitcom, but you’re not going to appreciate it properly unless you’ve done the research. What other show, on its DVD release, came with a homage-o-meter — special subtitles identifying the countless references most “true fans” would have already spotted?

Far from being alienating, these in-jokes felt like a delightful cultural exchange. Just as its characters introduce each other to outré art galleries or Akira, these encouraging nods to the broader canon felt like a crash course in “great works you might have missed”. The reward here wasn’t just discovering The Shining, but knowing you would now enjoy Spaced more with each revisit.

And revisit Spaced we have. Like many enduring cult classics, the series was not an instant hit, but found a wider audience on home media. Alongside other student fave Withnail & I, these repeat viewings have entrenched many of its lines in the lexicon, becoming a quick code by which fans might identify themselves to one another.

There are probably the usual criticisms that arrive with age. I’m sure some modern viewers would wag their fingers at their lack of diversity. But what makes Spaced refreshing viewing in 2024 is that it predates our present when criticism shaped by identity and ideology defines our response to art. It recalls a time when we loved art that spoke to us, just us, and only us, and we loved it for that. 

As such, Spaced evokes an age when the art we loved didn’t divide us, but brought us together (even if it was to argue over the merits of Krull). On its silver anniversary, it still feels like a private treasure. But, happily, we’ve had time enough now to realise how many other people feel exactly the same way.