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.

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.