Focused on the madcap lives of flatmates Vince (Sean Lock) and Errol (Benedict Wong), the first series of the critically acclaimed BBC comedy Fifteen Stories High craftily points out the eccentricities of the modern world. Vince is an oddball with the habits of a man who has spent too much time in his own company. A lifeguard at the local swimming pool, he takes great pride in being able to tell swimmers off for no reason, and obtains his home decorating ideas from photos in Readers' Wives. His lodger, Errol is the opposite of Vince, naively stupid and always taken advantage of by others. But he has his own unusual habits, too, such as tearing at wallpaper whenever he sees an unstuck corner. Vince has the weirdest encounters, though: such as being locked in the stocks for six hours when wrongly accused of killing a swan; or taken hostage by a neighbour when he spies a moon-boot wearing Shetland pony in the man's spare bedroom. Equally as funny are the short stories of the other residents living in the tower block that are interspersed between the antics of Vince and Errol. Enclosed within the four walls of different flats on the estate, these claustrophobic locations provide the ideal settings for the extreme behaviours depicted. There's the hygiene obsessive who forces a visiting double-glazing salesman to take a bath and wear a protective suit before being able to look round his flat; the old man who spends all night in front of a mirror in a pair of underpants pretending he's James Bond; and a New Age enthusiast who's always getting disturbed when recording relaxation tapes. The general weirdness of the series takes some getting used to, but once you decipher the crazy world of Vince and Errol this is five-star comedy with a dark tinge. --John Galilee
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