Spaced/Art

Art
Season 1, Episode 3
Airdate	October 8, 1999
Written by	Jessica Stevenson & Simon Pegg
Directed by	Edgar Wright
← 1x02 Gatherings	1x04 → Battles
Spaced — Season One

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Art is the third episode of the first season of Spaced. Tim hallucinates while on speed and playing Resident Evil 2, Daisy goes on a job interview at a women's magazine and Brian winds up bringing both to his ex-partner's performance art exhibition.

Starring: Jessica Stevenson (Daisy Steiner), Simon Pegg (Tim Bisley)

Cast: Julia Deakin (Marsha Klein), Nick Frost (Mike Watt), Mark Heap (Brian Topp), Paul Kaye (Hoover), Melissa Lloyd (Linda), Claire Rushbrook (Yolanda), David Walliams (Vulva)

Plot Overview

After a long night of taking speed and playing Resident Evil 2, Tim has started to hallucinate about fighting off zombies in the middle of the night. Daisy interrupts his fantasy and grounds him back in the real world with tea and mail requests. He informs her that he and Mike (who is circling a tree on an imaginary motorbike) bought some cheap speed and he's been playing the game all night. She gets the mail, discovers that one of the letters actually isn't a rejection and goes off to research magazines, including one called Huge Fat Cocks.

Brian comes in just as Daisy is leaving, bringing back a mop he borrowed. Tim lets him know, while he's hanging about, that they got a letter addressed to him the other day. The letter is an invitation to a performance art exhibition hosted by his old friend Vulva, who he once had a performance art partnership with. Tim makes him leave and Daisy returns from her research excursion into the shops. While fretting about what to wear, Tim offers her a toke off a spliff, which makes her maddeningly paranoid.

Despite being high and terrified, Daisy goes to her interview at Flaps which ends in disaster. The people in charge of hiring make up their mind to hire Linda, the black woman who one of them already knows, even before Daisy has her interview. But, the interview doesn't exactly lend her credibility either; she hasn't seen the launch campaign, hears circus music when Yolanda is talking, answers incorrectly on a vague question about whether or not she's a post-feminist and even throws out a "Girl Power" as she's leaving.

Elsewhere, Brian is still struggling with whether or not to go to Vulva's performance. He eventually decides to go and seeks fashion advise from Tim and Daisy, as well as subtle support. He tries, weakly, to dissuade them from going but the promise of free booze is too strong from him to break. They all arrive at the theater to see two hours of total non-sense about cleaning supplies. After the play is over, Daisy tries to make nice with Hoover (Vulva's partner) but he's set on antagonizing her, although she's oblivious to it. Brian attempts to speak with Vulva, but she shuts him down as well. Meanwhile, in the background, Tim eats some twiglets, hallucinates about zombies again and punches out Vulva. He drags Brian and Daisy out of the theater and passes out on the couch when he's successfully saved them from the zombies.

When Tim wakes up, Daisy explains what happened that night and discovers her rejection letter from the magazine. In the last scene she reimagines the entire situation as a piece of performance art based on something she said about rabbits.

Trivia

Behind the Scenes

• Inspiration: The zombie sequences in this episode inspired Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright to make Shaun of the Dead, their romantic zombie comedy film released in 2004. The two reportedly liked doing the hallucination scenes so much that they were inspired to carry them out in feature film form.

Allusions and References

• Resident Evil 2: Tim spends hours playing Resident Evil 2 on speed in this episode and hallucinates about zombies. Resident Evil is a series of survival horror video games released primarily on the Sony Playstation about survivors of a zombie apocalypse centralized in the town of Raccoon City. Players fight their way through the hordes and attempt to uncover a conspiracy about the origins of the plague. Resident Evil 2, the second in the series, was released on Playstation on January 21, 1998.

• The Conversation: When Daisy jokes about how no one is listening in on them, the camera moves to the other side of a wall, showing a man spying on the two. This is a reference to the film The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as a paranoid man who believes the neighbors he's spying on will be murdered.

• Suzi Quatro: Suzi Quatro is an American singer-songwriter who also appeared in the television series Happy Days as Leather Tuscadero. She is more well known in Britain as the host of a weekly radio program on BBC Radio 2 called Rockin' with Suzi Q. She notably dresses in all leather at concert performances, which leads Tim to think that's what lesbians might dress like. In fact, Quatro is married to a concert promoter and has two children.