It has been 15 years since That Mitchell and Webb Look left our screens, but it’s still hanging around like a funny smell. Inexplicable quiz Numberwang springs to mind every time a ludicrously complex gameshow airs; hyperbolic football coverage invariably evokes the show’s Sky Sports parody – “there is still everything to play for … and for ever to play it in!” – even for the broadcaster itself, which recently recreated the skit for promo purposes. It has never been easier to run into the duo online: the SS officer tentatively asking his skull-festooned colleague if they could possibly be “the baddies” has had a second life as a Trump-era meme. Then there are the ones that have seared themselves on to my memory for no apparent reason, like the sketch in which a swaggering marketing team workshop new ways to sell toothbrushes (they can also clean your tongue!).
Arriving just as Peep Show was taking off, That Mitchell and Webb Look didn’t quite reach Fast Show levels of ubiquity, but it was clever, memorable and distinctive enough to infiltrate the monoculture. It was also part of sketch comedy’s last hurrah. The genre’s 00s TV heyday wasn’t always edifying (see the social poison pedalled by Little Britain and Bo’ Selecta), yet its almost total eradication – a sketch show hasn’t been Bafta-nominated for over a decade and there is no longer any category that could feasibly accommodate one – has robbed us not only of a particular source of joy, but an important mechanism for digesting the world.
The return of David Mitchell and Robert Webb, now in their early 50s, is perhaps not what those yearning for a new wave had in mind. Still, the self-deprecating title – Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping – precludes any saviour narrative, and they’ve chivalrously held the door open for some fresher faces, including actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe and standups Stevie Martin, Krystal Evans and Lara Ricote.
The duo remain front and centre, however – and it is comfortingly surreal to see them side-by-side again. In fact, from the quirky animated title sequence to the pair’s trademark strain of pedantically logical observational comedy, the whole endeavour feels very 00s. It’s easy to imagine the show’s opening sketch – about a group of 18th-century poshos who can’t see the advantages of a toilet over defecating in a pot and chucking it out the window – airing 20 years ago. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially considering the duo were never exactly bleeding-edge in the first place: Mitchell’s whole shtick is bewildered fogey, while as Peep Show’s Jez, Webb will always be synonymous with the tragically misguided pursuit of cool. Few comedy double acts are better placed to cruise into middle-age.
That toilet sketch is a decent premise nicely realised. Yet its follow-up – about the changing demands of airport security – is a better idea executed with an energy so cartoonish, shouty and bewigged it wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Little Britain. It is a truth universally acknowledged – even by Mitchell and Webb themselves, who riffed on the topic in their original series – that sketch shows are hit-and-miss. Why, I don’t know – because humour is subjective? Because nobody has ever had enough good ideas to burn through 10 of them in 30 minutes? Or, as Mitchell wryly put it, because “if we didn’t perversely include about 50% deliberately unamusing material” people would be driven to find other faults with them?
Whatever the reason, it does feel fairer to focus on the show’s successes rather than its failures. And after a questionable start, there are some real highs. Precisely which programme Sweary Aussie Drama is parodying is unclear, but this expletive-riddled soap about a family of potty-mouthed farmers makes me laugh a lot. So does a skit about horror fans delighting in their disturbed psyches in post-screening vox pops, as well as a gameshow parody called Hot Seat, essentially musical chairs trussed up as a shiny floor format.
At its best, this series makes a very convincing argument for why we needed sketch shows in the first place. There are certain comic observations about the modern world that don’t fit anywhere else: a great skit about a drama chronicling the making of the two (real) competing TV dramatisations of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview being a case in point.
From Morecambe and Wise to Smack the Pony, you used to be able to trace the history of British comedy, and culture, in TV sketch shows. Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping isn’t novel or timely enough to carry that torch – but it is proof this criminally neglected genre still has legs. I hope it runs and runs.