Tag Archives: Mitchell & Webb

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.

The Inbetweeners: A Potential Revival

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Even here I’ve managed to squeeze heraldry in. The shield of Rudge Park Comprehensive School is about as generic and uninspiring as you’d expect, but at least it conforms to the rules of heraldry unlike so many in real life. The blazon is most likely “Azure on a bend Argent three oak trees of the field”.

The Inbetweeners is a televisual franchise that can be considered, if not actually dead, then at least dormant, in as much as it’s been eleven years since the release of the second film and fifteen years since the end of the TV series. Neither the audience nor, it seems, the cast and crew, can entirely move on and yesterday there was an announcement that the four lead actors had signed up to a revival. Most of the news articles I could find were behind paywalls and those few which were readable still didn’t betray much in the way of detail despite about what form this new instalment would take. Presumably nothing of substance has been decided yet. From fans and commentators there is excitement, but also a lot of dread.

My academic cohort were a few years behind that of the character, and I think we discovered the program en mass around 2011-12* — after the series proper had ended but before we reached sixth-form ourselves. While the jokes (and indeed the catchphrases) circulated widely, I’m not sure it was ever regarded as more than fiction. Nobody saw it as a reflection of their own lives at the time, much less an aspiration for the future. A lot of cultural histories of this period refer to The Inbetweeners as the way sixth-form really worked for most people in Britain, in opposition to the fantasy version presented by Skins**, but curiously I don’t remember anyone at my school talking about Skins at all. As to whether it’s representative now, I’m obviously too old to say (and likely wasn’t qualified even back then), but I remember these articles from the end of the last decade noting how hard the format had proven to recapture.

Even so, we know we are in for some kind of comeback, and the scepticism of the long-time fans is well-founded as bringing back a property like this after such a long time always runs the risk of sullying rather than enhancing its reputation. Even this series’ own tenth anniversary special in 2018 was widely regarded as a damp squib. The problem most critical to a story of this kind is the age of the characters: Dawson Casting is routine for productions like this and right from the start the leads played characters a few years younger than themselves*** without straining credibility. Now, however, if you tried to pick up remotely close to where the second film left off they’d be about twice as old as the people they portrayed, and even with digital de-ageing it would be hard to pull off, with the added complication that the setting itself would have to be more than a decade in the past rather than contemporary^. Clearly, if the cast are to unite onscreen again, it would need to be in a “Where Are They Now?” sort of way, catching up with them at about age 35. This is tricky, as inevitably their situation in life will be very different, and that tends to cause existential problems for what is formally called situational comedy. Of course, other genres can also have this problem in their own ways, so here I will briefly change tack.

Dr Philippa Gregory has written a great many novels about English royal history, including a long string of them about the Plantagenets and Tudors. Starz has adapted some of these into TV series: The White Queen in 2013^^, The White Princess in 2017 and The Spanish Princess in 2019-20. TWQ covered the life of Elizabeth Woodville from 1461 to 1485, TWP followed her daughter Elizabeth of York until 1499. Gregory said that these parts of English history were underserved in mainstream fiction beyond Shakespeare, which may be correct. Season 1 of TSP was about the life of Catherine of Aragon from 1501-1509. This part could still qualify since Catherine’s time with Henry in their youth before their marriage broke down is also frequently neglected. When it was announced that TSP would get a second season, fans on their forums wondered just how long Starz intended to string this out, noting that the story couldn’t go much further before becoming a rehash of Showtime’s series The Tudors or myriad other productions including Gregory’s own The Other Boleyn Girl.

When it comes to this proposed revival, the comparison of which to be most wary is, of course, Peep Show, that other Channel 4 cult classic of the noughties. The exact diagetic timeline of that series is not always consistent, but the final episode has Jeremy turning 40 and the first series seems to have them both just shy of 30. The Inbetweeners, if renewed now, would land around the middle of this range. What’s more, a lot of the story ideas floated for the new script — whether by ordinary fans or by people connected with the franchise, feel very PS-esque: I saw musings about quirky flatshares, wedding disasters, failed partnerships and juxtaposed career outcomes. As I mentioned in last month’s post, PS had to end once the main characters got too old for the situation to continue, and any revival now would need to radically change its approach to adjust to the times. There might well need to be a new setting, and the characters to be written in a new way. This would also be the case for The Inbetweeners, and indeed more so given the even greater time gap both absolute and proportionate. It would not be possible to write the characters as the same personalities we remember from 2010, nearly half their lives ago. For sure, you could make arrested development an explicit feature of the story (as it also was on PS, and which would be entirely expected for at least two of the main four) but even then it would come off with a different tone.

My intention here is not to come of as overly pessimistic: I know from Futurama and Red Dwarf that an old franchise can be successfully brought back many times across several decades. It is eminently possible to get an interesting story out of a late sequel, albeit one which will need to be quite distinct from what was written the first time around and with the high risk that a large proportion of the audience will feel disgust at the outcome rather than delight. There is life here still, just not necessarily as we used to know it.

NOTES

*As the whole series ran to only eighteen episodes it was quite easy to finish the whole run on 4OD in a few days.
**I refer readers to this video essay by Stuart “Stubagful” Hardy, in particular where he says “I never got to live a life like the kids on Skins. Most of my teenage years consisted of being made to sit in a series of rooms with adults glowering at me… alright, a drama based on my teenage years probably wouldn’t have exactly made for a compelling piece of television but, in my defence, that was real! You people want real, don’t you.“ and, while it’s actually reviewing a completely different Channel 4 program, Charlie Brooker’s famous line in this Guardian article: “The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It’s easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It’s less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.”
***The four lead actors were born 1982-87 whereas the characters would have been born 1991-92 in order to start sixth-form in 2008.
^The second film already has this problem, being set in 2010-11 but made in 2014.
^^Co-production with the BBC.

Review: Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping

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Almost ten years since the end of Peep Show and just over fifteen since the end of That Mitchell & Webb Look, the duo have returned for another series on Channel 4. A side effect of watching old material over and over again is that it can cause one’s mental cache of another person’s appearance to be skewed many years into the past, leading to surprise when a more up-to-date view is encountered. While I am familiar with David Mitchell’s recent appearance from, among other things, Ludwig (which incidentally should also be returning soon) I had not seen Robert Webb in anything new for a while and so his gaunt visage shook me a little.

It may seem glib for me to point this out, but the leads’ age is an important theme throughout a lot of the sketches: Whereas Peep Show ended with Jeremy turning forty and That Look had a sketch about how they couldn’t be cutting-edge forever, this series picks up with both men in their fifties and a lot of the jokes are about them suffering aches and pains or reminiscing about references alien to their younger co-workers. One of the few recurring sketches is even called Middle-Aged Man Island and consists of them talking about World War II, lightbulbs, Christmas decorations etc.

I’m sure that fans of Mitchell & Webb’s earlier work would have been delighted to know that a new series was happening at all, albeit cautious in their expectations of its quality. Those who were hoping for a whole-hearted revival of That Look will probably be disappointed here. The writing in this one has nowhere near the sharpness of the earlier material and often feels ill-suited to the duo’s strengths. Another of the recurring skits is Sweary Aussie Drama, about an Australian family fighting over the ownership of their enormous farm, with the big joke being that none of them can get through the simplest sentence without a shower of expletives. This could work in isolation as a decent satire, except that so much of the rest of the series’s own writing also tends that way, as well as relying on puerile blue humour in lieu of clever ideas or, indeed, good line delivery. Some of the sketches, particularly one about a workshop for dead relatives’ antiques, felt more like something from Tracey Ullman’s Show a few years back. I can’t see many scenes, or even lines or screenshots, from this production establishing lasting cultural fame the way the older ones have.

The main thing that the scripts are missing is direct interaction between the two leads: We rarely get scenes of David & Rob talking one-on-one, instead this is much more of an ensemble piece where the troupe just happens to include two members who were once in a double act. That could have been pulled off if the supporting cast from That Look or Peep Show could be carried over, but Bachman, Burdess, Evans, Fitzmourice, Hadland, Howick, Joseph, King, Neary, Suttie and Winkleman are nowhere to be seen. Olivia Colman at least manages to return, although only for one sketch and with curiously little attention drawn to her presence. In their place we have Kiell Smith-Bynoe (of Ghosts fame), Krystal Evans, Stevie Martin and Lara Ricote. I can’t criticise any of their performances individually but they don’t have the same familiar chemistry with the two leads that their predecessors would have done.

Overall I would say that Not Helping is passable but not spectacular, and I wouldn’t chose a second series of this over a Peep Show revival, or even more Back. Frankly, it’s just not Numberwang!

That Harrison & Graham Sound

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Exactly when I first saw Peep Show has slipped from memory. I recall watching New Year’s Eve when it was reasonably new, and also remember parts of Mugging from slightly earlier. I binged the whole of the first seven series on 4oD at some point before the end of 2012, and then watched the final two series as they came out.

My experience with Podcast Secrets of the Pharaohs is even more retroactive – it ended two months ago, and I only came across it last week. Blasting through the lot was made more difficult by the podcast episodes being three or four times the length of their televised counterparts, but also easier by being audio-only, so they could be played as the background to something else.

In some ways it is remarkable that a program which ended over six years ago continues to amass a dedicated following, and that so many lines from it have permeated popular discourse.

Tom & Rob’s commentary is at least as good as that by McNeil and Wang for Voyager, the main differences being that they come from one generation lower and they were not insiders when the series they are reviewing was on air. The lower-concept setting also allows that hosts to compare the events of Peep Show to their own lives. As an aside, it always strikes me as a little strange when the hosts of these kinds of review-tainment programs, whose demeanour is otherwise hintless as to age, start going on about their partners or even children. Of course, neither of them ever had to eat a partly-cremated dog, nor wrestle a burglar to the ground while hosting a dinner party, so there are limits to their personal experience. What struck me most was when they wanted to give advice to the characters, comparing the events of the episodes against merely what their own lives had been, but a surprisingly certain and definite idea of how everyone’s life at various stages is and should be.

In addition to episodic analysis, the podcast also features interviews of nearly all the significant cast members, going into great detail about their experiences with the series and their views on the characters they played.

EXTERNAL LINKS

  • Andrxxw – a YouTuber who also reviewed Peep Show in its entirety, albeit in much briefer form.
  • The Peep Show Reviews Blog – a similar review series in textual format, though it was abandoned after just four series.

UPDATE (September 2026)

Two weeks ago the aforementioned Andrxxw has had second thoughts about video-making and deleted most of his reviews, which is a shame. I was really looking forward to his analysis of Mitchel & Webb Are Not Helping but now I suppose there will never be one.