By the time it was decommissioned by the BBC in 2022 (the last series kicking off just as Elizabeth II died), Mock the Week had been around for seventeen years. It started after Tony Blair’s re-election for a third term in 2005 and ended just as Rishi Sunak was about to take over from Liz Truss. It had become a mainstay of British political comedy, and no true successor emerged in its absence in 2023, -4 and -5.

Last month it was revealed with little notice or fanfare that the series had been recommissioned, but not on the BBC this time. Instead it now airs on the multinational but lesser-known TLC, as part of a major relaunch of that channel’s British offerings. There is also a small change of recording venue, from the BBC Elstree Centre to Elstree Studios a few hundred metres away.

At time of writing, two episodes of the revived series have been aired, with perhaps another five scheduled.

By and large, the new episodes are the same as the old with no changes to the fundamentals of the formula, so the segments and rounds are all familiar to those who saw the original. Notably the latest series features a revival of the “Between the Lines” which the BBC series dropped a long time ago.

Many of the panellists are also carried over, including late-stage regulars Angela Barnes, Sarah Pascoe and Rhys James; perennial recurring guests Ed Byrne and Milton Jones; and late-stage semi-regular Ahir Shah. The only brand new guest so far is Lou Sanders. Dara Ó Briain of course returns to host. There was no return of Frankie Boyle despite much public clamouring, though the premiere did feature a one-off comeback by early-regular Russell Howard, who acknowledged that it had been more than fifteen years since he last appeared on the old show. This is all important for establishing a sense of continuity. The one glaring absence is Hugh Dennis, who was a constant presence on the original series but had scheduling conflicts for the first two episodes of the revival.

As I have written before, a lot of British comedy panel shows are now experienced primarily as a series of online compilations of short segments, often many years removed from the context of their original air dates. This works even if, as is the case here, the jokes and commentary are in direct response to weekly events and thus in theory should be locked in time. Because so many years are mashed together like this, one’s mental cache of what the programme was like can become a vague blend which averages at somewhere about a decade ago. This is also true of the appearances of the panellists, and thus seeing them in new recordings can be quite a shock to the system as they seem to age a great amount very suddenly. I found this to be especially true in Howard’s case.

This still the main photograph on Howard’s Wikipedia page. I screenshotted it from a promotional video he did in 2017.

Also, I found that something was… slightly off about the set. It almost looked the same as the old one but a few little details had changed, the most obvious being that the main desk looked smaller and tighter than before. The font on the SWLTS topics looked different too. It was as if the old set had been recreated by sight, or even from memory, without access to the blueprints.

The overall effect of the sum of these little details was to make the first episode feel like something of a fever dream. I had to check online the next morning to reassure myself that the experience was real and not just something my brain had extrapolated out of desperation. Luckily it is real, and it looks set to be around for some time to come (although actually finding TLC to watch it at the correct time is difficult as the panellists themselves acknowledge).

The only major and deliberate departure from the old format is the increased runtime: Each episode is now three quarters of an hour long (padded to a full hour with commercial breaks) instead of half. Ó Briain says this is not a case of filming more material than before but rather of cutting less of it out before broadcast. While it is difficult to turn down the chance to see more material from the team, especially after a drought of three years, I was conscious sometimes that the lack of tight editing occasionally caused a segment to drag on too long and lose momentum, and that the panellists were sauntering back-and-forth too many times between the main desk and the performance area. Still, these issues are very minor and hopefully will be sorted as the series progresses.