THE death of the British comedy has been postponed, and ironically it has taken a dead-good zombie horror show to stop the last rites.

Just when Sex Lives Of The Potato Men had obituary writers sharpening their black nails, along comes a George Romero spoof from the slacker team behind Spaced, the Channel 4 comedy too good for such evil lists as the Best Ten Sitcoms Of All Time.

Simon Pegg and director/co-writer Edgar Wright have created the world's first zomromcom: not only a new word for the Scrabble board but the shorthand for zombie romantic comedy.

Transitions from small screen to big screen are usually as cursed as an own goal, but the brazen confidence and resourceful nous that Pegg brought to Spaced comes to the fore once more in an endearing, everyman story that puts two ordinary blokes on screen to experience extraordinary events from the vantage point of their flat.

Not too dissimilar to Pegg and Jessica Stevenson in Spaced, you note.

For genial Shaun (Pegg), the Winchester pub is the centre of the universe, Playstation is his Mecca, a pint and a Sunday roast is his heaven, and his long-suffering girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) just hasn't got her grasp on life's priorities.

Welcome to just another Sunday morning in Shaun and Ed's London manor of Crouch End. Shaun shuffles out of bed, drags his feet across the road to the newsagent for the Sunday papers, and wanders home, oblivious to the shuffling corpses wandering the streets.

The joke here is that television shop slob Shaun (Pegg) and his even lazier best buddy Ed (Spaced cohort Nick Frost) are going about their daily routine as if nothing unusual is going on, when in reality flesh-eating zombies are conducting a bloody holocaust.

Like everyone in London, young and stoned, loaded or titled, our shambling heroes are too busy minding their own business to notice anyone else, let alone spot the difference between the unwashed and the undead.

To these unlikely lads falls the task of saving mankind - and pub culture - as Shaun and Ed head to the Winchester, collecting friends (Dylan Moran, Lucy Davis from The Office) and family (Penelope Wilton and the ubiquitous Bill Nighy) en route to the zombie Western showdown in the besieged pub.

Pegg, Frost and Wright ally fans' affection for Romero movies with quick, no-nonsense British wit; the dialogue crackles with sitcom pace but finds room for thinking space too; and Wright's camerawork is snappier than a KitKat bar.

Social comment and blood and gore, cricket bats for weapons and beer for sustenance, what more could you want in a British comedy?

Better still, you can trust a film that knows pork scratchings have more value in this world than old Dire Straits records.

Updated: 09:24 Friday, April 09, 2004