Monthly Archives: September 2026

Twenty Years of That Mitchell and Webb Look

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The BBC sketch comedy series That Mitchell & Webb Look debuted on 14th September 2006. Recently, to mark the twentieth anniversary, the BBC released the whole series on iPlayer.

It is odd to think now that this series has been around for two thirds of my life. That said, I did not see the early episodes. My first memory of discovering the series, and indeed the Mitchell & Webb duo in general, was watching the fourth season as it aired in the summer of 2010. I particularly remember the sketch about Julius Caesar being taught to speak in third person. It was retroactively that I discovered the duo’s earlier efforts of That Mitchell and Webb Sound (a radio series from which many of ‘ Look‘s sketches were repeated), The Mitchell and Webb Situation (which feels almost like a prototype for ‘Look) and, of course, Peep Show. In the early new tens I also kept up with the David Mitchell’s Soapbox series on YouTube. Indeed, the nature of sketch comedy is that sketches tend to be watched and remembered individually rather than in half-hour blocks, so I and many other fans have spent the last fifteen years continually re-watching our favourite pieces. Some of the YouTube uploads are almost as old as the platform itself and I’ve watched them so many times that even the comments sections are as nostalgic to me as the actual sketches.

Since comedic taste is of course highly subjective, it could be supposed that the success of a sketch comedy is how much of it lodges in the public consciousness and remains there for a long time afterwards, whether being analysed or being referenced by other media. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was obviously a master of this, with dozens of individual sketches having their own Wikipedia pages and the very concept of “Spam” taking its name from there. By this logic, That Look probably loses out to Little Britain and, indeed, M&W’s own Peep Show in terms of memorable lines. Still, it did at least have two successes on this front, with the infamous Are We The Baddies? sketch from the very first episode and the Remain Indoors! sub-series picking up great traction (at least among the politically-engaged communities) amid the events of the post-referendum Brexit negotiations and Coronavirus Pandemic. The football stadium sketch was also famous enough that Sky Sports eventually got in on the joke by doing it for real.

It is perhaps unfortunate that this big anniversary should so nearly coincide with the first anniversary of Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping. That series was inevitably going to be compared against the high standard set by this one. The overwhelming consensus was that it fell well short. Worse still, this recent re-release also clashes with the airing of the second season of Ludwig*, whose viewers are also generally reporting disappointment. That Look contained multiple parodies of detective dramas, often sending up the very tropes that this new production wants us to take at least semi-seriously. I don’t imagine I will ever have the same drive to re-watch these to anywhere near the same degree.

Defenders of the duo’s later efforts often make the point that those nostalgic for the old days may be looking at a biased sample because they are watching individual sketches rather than whole episodes, and therefore forgetting the lower-quality parts. On reviewing the whole series, I did not find this to be the case. Instead I clearly remembered the vast majority of the old material and found the hit:miss ratio to be very high.

Although there have been a handful of other sketch comedies on television since 2010, none have really achieved the same artistic quality or cultural prominence that this one did. It would be a great shame if none did again.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mitchell and Webb and the Death of the Sketch Show, a video essay by Stuart Hardy.

*To make matters worse, the episode aired last before the anniversary revolved around a game of snooker and featured Mitchell’s character making reference to Goodies and Baddies. The expression “hold the fort” is also used, could be a reference to one of the Soapbox episodes. When rewatching the “Friends of Moneypenny” sketch in the first episode, I noticed there is a quick joke in which the characters cannot remember if Bond’s first name is James or John, which of course is Ludwig’s central story line.

Starmer Swans Off

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It was announced yesterday that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had appointed Sir Keir Starmer, MP for Holborn & St Pancras, to be Steward & Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern. This, as my regular readers should well know, is the traditional legal fiction to allow Members of the House of Commons to resign their seats.

Almost exactly ten years ago, David Cameron was appointed Steward & Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead in order to resign as MP for Witney. He, like Starmer, had resigned as Prime Minister in the month of July and initially indicated that he intended to remain a backbench MP until the next general election, but the changed his mind in September.

In an interview at the time Cameron said “I’ve thought about this long and hard over the summer and I’ve decided the right thing to do is to stand down.”, which I remember being quoted on BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz with a remark that what he’d actually done was take the paid holiday then quit before he had to go back to work.

I had a look through the lists of holders of these two “offices of profit” to see how many Prime Ministers have taken them. In the whole of the twentieth century the only example I could find was Sir Anthony Eden on 11th January 1957, his premiership having ended two days earlier. Both resignations were triggered by a health crisis.

In the twenty-first century it became more normal, with four examples so far: Cameron and Starmer as already mentioned, but also Tony Blair on 27th June 2007 and Boris Johnson on 12th June 2023. The former quit Parliament on the same day he quit Downing Street, the latter intended to stay on but then resigned in protest at an investigation by the Privileges Committee.

That got me thinking about the Parliamentary careers of Britain’s leaders, specifically the total length of time that they spent in the House of Commons. Rounding to the nearest month (there may be rounding errors), I came up with this table for all those whose premierships began after the end of Victoria’s reign.

Prime Minister

Time in Commons
Arthur Balfour 48 years, 3 months
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman 39 years, 5 months
Herbert Asquith 37 years, 6 months
David Lloyd George 54 years, 10 months
Andrew Bonar Law 22 years, 9 months
Stanley Baldwin 29 years, 3 months
Ramsay MacDonald 27 years, 6 months
Neville Chamberlain 21 years, 11 months
Winston Churchill 61 years, 11 months
Clement Attlee 33 years, 1 month
Sir Anthony Eden 33 years, 1 month
Harold Macmillan 37 years, 1 month
Sir Alec Douglas-Home 25 years, 11 months
Harold Wilson 37 years, 10 months
Edward Heath 51 years, 3 months
James Callaghan 41 years, 10 months
Margaret Thatcher 32 years, 5 months
John Major 22 years, 0 months
Tony Blair 24 years, 1 month
Gordon Brown 31 years, 10 months
David Cameron 15 years, 3 months
Theresa May 27 years, 1 month
Boris Johnson 15 years, 1 month
Elizabeth Truss 14 years, 1 month
Rishi Sunak 11 years, 4 months
Sir Keir Starmer 11 years, 4 months
Andy Burnham 16 years, 2 months

(Of course, several of these people had considerable time in the House of Lords as well, but that’s another story.)

Note that Sunak and Starmer both began their careers at the 2015 general election and thus were tied until yesterday, but the latter’s resignation means that the former will now pull ahead. Starmer therefore has the shortest tenure in the Commons of any Prime Minister in well over a century.

The overall trend has notably been downward: Of the nine premiers who have served during my lifetime, only two have tenures over twenty years. Of those who served before my time, all had twenty years at least, with eleven of the seventeen having tenures over thirty years and four of those serving over forty. The kind of long service that was normal in the previous century feels unimaginable in the current.

Of course, premierships themselves have also been shortening: The ten premiers from Churchill to Major served over a period of fifty-seven years, whereas the nine from Blair to present have only managed twenty-nine. It remains to be seen if Burnham will be able to avert this trend, but to balance it completely he or his immediate successor would need to serve until 2054, which seems unlikely. It is also worth remembering that Lloyd George, Churchill, Heath and Callaghan all went on to be Father of the House of Commons, with Campbell-Bannerman uniquely managing to achieve that distinction while he was Prime Minister. A repeat of that phenomenon the foreseeable future feels unlikely too.

UPDATE (6th September)

The podcasts Parliament Matters and Since Attlee & Churchill have both put out episodes discussing Starmer’s resignation, and both comment on his admission that he prefers Davos to Westminster.

UPDATE (8th September)

Dr Richard Marc Johnson, co-host of the latter aforementioned podcast, has Tweeted about this article. This marks the second time that a senior academic has discovered my blog, the first being last year when Dr David Torrance cited my article about the dissolution proclamation.