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Emily Pope’s five-part web series, The Sitcom Show, is a throwback to the chameleonic class-consciousness and wry pessimism-as-realism embodied by the vein of British pop culture that gave the world Pulp and Peep Show In her fast-talking series of diary entries or vlogs, some spontaneous and some scripted, Pope deals with the disappointment and disobedience of her everyday existence as an artist who works for other artists It’s a line of work which gives her an intimate perspective on the art industry’s hypocrisy, which rests on patronage yet requires of its participants an ever-exacting performance of far-left and identity politics Her bullshit radar is hyper-tuned As the art critic Jaclyn Bruneau has written, ‘There is a criticality unique to the [art handler]: the artwork as seen through the lens of the specific labour required to accommodate it’ Pope mines her unique vantage point for humour In one scene, in an urgent happy whisper, she recounts the time she accidentally dropped some Sarah Lucas ‘bunny ears’ into Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde – only to be told by Lucas’s studio to just ‘remake’ the million-dollar artwork with some stockings and thread   A twenty-something art graduate living in Hackney, Pope is seen ricocheting from contract job to contract job (‘No benefits, stability, or security,’ writes Bruneau of art handlers) Pope’s two art degrees, not to mention her hard-earned experience in studio management, sees the scant ‘reward’ of earning London living wage Twin this with the spectre of austerity, and it makes for precarious living Episode one opens with a court summons – Pope has neglected to pay her council tax – and rest of the series is loosely predicated on actions that are ‘vaguely illegal, but not illegal enough to pose a threat’: skiving off work, getting high, shoplifting Choppy edits eke out a chaotic, but nonetheless pertinent, narrative about financial uncertainty, told from Pope’s bed ‘How do you channel this level of extreme class-based anger and rage into something productive… when all the structures that would give you leverage have broken down?’ she demands into her laptop camera   Shot and edited in grainy digital low-fi, the series is hardly