Can this really be the end for Mark and Jeremy? I wondered how they were going to do it and for a while when I was watching the final episode I thought that the writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong were going to go out guns blazing Butch and Sundance-style with them both dead.

OK, maybe not a shoot-out, but maybe Mark would finally snap and kill Jeremy after being exasperated by finding his urine drink in the fridge one too many times. Or maybe Jeremy would spike Mark’s coffee with heroin and he would OD. In the end the ninth series ended as the first one (“clean shirt!”) began, with the two of them tied together in a Strindbergian dance of death where nobody dies, it just goes on forever.

I did think for one brief moment that the series was going to turn very dark at the last bend. At one point Jeremy tried to help Mark by kidnapping April’s boyfriend Angus so that April would go out with Mark. It looked all set for a nasty scenario, like something out of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. But instead it was more like an Alan Ayckbourn farce with a bound and gagged Angus hopping around in the background while Jeremy and chums celebrated his fortieth birthday.

And so the series had to end with the suitably brilliant comic comedown of bleak acceptance of their futures. No Richard Curtis happy endings here. Sadly viewers will never see what happens next. At what point does comic loneliness become truly tragic? I think 40 is proably a good cut-off point but I’m still sorry to see them go.

I looked around for hope. Following his marriage break-up Super Hans said he was off to Macedonia to set up a moped rental business. Maybe there’s an idea for a spin-off series there. The Wheel McCoy? Hans Across The Channel? The Beep Beep Show? And maybe Mark, now unemployed and Jeremy, never really employed in the first place, could go out and join him.

Or maybe it is better to end on this gloriously gloomy high.