Jesse Armstrong

Jesse Armstrong is a British comedy writer, best known for the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show and the BBC political satire The Thick of It. He is from Oswestry in Shropshire, and attended a comprehensive school there before reading American Studies at the University of Manchester, where he met his writing partner Sam Bain. Before going into comedy writing in the late 1990s, Armstrong worked as a researcher for the Labour MP Doug Henderson. 2Career 3Collaborations with Sam Bain At the beginning of their writing career, Armstrong and Bain wrote for the Channel 4 sketch show Smack the Pony and the children's shows The Queen's Nose and My Parents Are Aliens. They went on to create and write Peep Show, BBC One sitcom The Old Guys, and most recently Channel 4 comedy-dramas Fresh Meat and Babylon. They also wrote for the Radio Four sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound, starring Peep Show's two main actors David Mitchell and Robert Webb, and its BBC Two adaptation That Mitchell and Webb Look. Peep Show has won several writing awards, including a BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy in 2008. To date, Armstrong and Bain have written two films together – the 2007 comedy Magicians, and, alongside Chris Morris, the 2010 terrorism satire Four Lions. Armstrong and Bain received the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award at the British Comedy Awards 2010. In 2012 both Armstrong and Bain were featured on the TV industry journal Broadcast's 'Hot 100' list, highlighting the most successful people in UK televisio