It’s unwatchably bad, in short. Not ‘so bad it’s good’, just dreadful and unfunny. The Guardian has only been able to summon up the courage to give it three stars out of five on the typical reactionary grounds that seeing Mitchell and Webb together again is ‘comforting’ and that the cast includes some ‘fresher faces’ including the made for Gogglebox black-British token ‘comedian’ Kiell-Smith-Bynoe.
It’s so bad that it seems both Channel Four are actually embarrassed about the content they have produced and are barely advertising it at all, the only promotion being tweeting out an airport sketch where the security are shouty and rude towards passengers. As soon as I saw this video on X I knew it would be a disaster. Comedic writers resort to ‘aiport humour’ when they have run out of ideas, hence the stereotype of a hack standup comedian - ‘what’s the deal with airplane food?’. It’s the best you can come up with if your life consists of touring from city to city when you are cashing in on your reputation and have nothing new to say or experience.
Why has it failed so badly? This is a very important question to answer because the failure of ‘Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping’ is going to convince television executives that sketch comedy - which this show has been sold as a revival of - is a dead art form which should remain dead and cannot be revived.
Which is the wrong conclusion to draw. Harry Enfield’s sketches from the 90s are still regularly reuploaded on YouTube and draw in millions of views. Philomea Cunk is the only product that British comedy has managed to make a success of in the past decade, apart from that it has been cheap panel show crap that has no imprint in cultural memory and random BAME flourishes such as ‘Famalam’ which nobody, especially the audience it is purported to be accessible to, watches.
There are rational explanations for why several media products have died since the 2000s. The broadsheet press’s circulation has declined because of the internet, yep, News of the World cannot be recreated because the tightening of libel laws as press regulation means that the business model of digging up dirt using private investigators to sell copy is no longer profitable (too many legal challenges). The very interesting life of Jonathan Rees belongs now to a forgotten world.
There is no such plausible explanation for why sketch comedy has died a similar death except that it is cheaper to mass produce panel comedies such as ‘Eight of out Ten Cats’. The BBC and Channel Four have an artistic responsibility to invest their public grants into expensive to produce television which will has some semblance of a cultural legacy, not ‘Lee Mack absolutely loses it’. So with the future of British comedy in mind let us try and explain why this show is a unique failure and not a symptom of an incorrigible malaise.
It could be put down to Woke, and I am tempted towards this analysis. The worldview behind most successful comedy is, to some extent, ‘right-wing’ inso far as most funny things are slightly subversive. Nigel Farage on Harry Enfield, ‘The Bankers the Bonuses’ etc. Jesse Armstrong’s Peep Show, which made the career of David Mitchell had a clear anti-woke streak throughout it (‘a little chicken with a pill’), a trace of which made it into Succession. Mitchell and Webb did a sketch on TV execs and diversity years ago which attacked diversity and inclusion. Look at Armstrong and Miller’s pilots sketch. Harry Enfield’s Parking Pataweyo.
The character of Alan Partridge provides a useful proxy for a robustly centre-left audience to enjoy politically incorrect jokes, once they are placed in the mouth of a man we are invited to laugh at; the same trick was also played with David Brent in the Office.
It is not that comedy has to convey a political message, but humour itself is smothered when there are political guardrails which remove suspense. Nothing in Mitchell and Webb’s show could ever be accused of ‘going too far’ because it never really goes anywhere.
‘Mitchell and Webb are not helping’ belongs to the world of Olivia Coleman, it is indeed a ‘Colemanite’ show of the late 2010s, where black people wearing period costumes are brilliant (see Ghosts), and swearing is funny; in one sketch the entire joke is David Mitchell doing an Australian accent and swearing at people. I generally dislike swearing so found the liberal use of ‘See You Next Tuesday’ especially grating to the ear. To do comedy in a country like Britain which is caught in a transformative political crisis without reference to controversial contemporary events leaves you with ‘fuck’ and ‘middle aged women like drinking wine’.
Where are the grooming gangs? Or even something milder - a black woman in multiple different professions (lawyer, doctor, nuclear engineer) who can never be fired from her job thanks to the Equality Act leading to many outrages and hijinks. A better sketch show in 2025 would not be a platform to push ‘anti-woke’ narratives about Trans a la the hideously unfunny stand-up of Andrew Doyle, rather, it would playfully touch upon genuine taboos and push the boundaries thereof - instead of resorting to swearing and sex in a failed attempt to shock the audience.
Woke undoubtedly plays a part in why the show has failed, but another explanation which holds more water is that Mitchell and Webb themselves are not talented comedic writers. Mitchell and Webb’s early career was one of failure, the shows to which they were credited for writing failed. Bruiser (2000), which Mitchell and Webb wrote before Peep Show, fell flat on its face and was cancelled after a single season. The old clips give you some idea of why. There’s a sort of Pythonesque stab at absurdity which doesn’t land, the same writ ‘Numberwang’ in that Mitchell and Webb look.
After Bruiser failed, Mitchell and Webb were stuck in career limbo until they were approached to star in Jesse Armstrong’s ‘Peep Show’, where they were limited to playing characters instead of writing. David Mitchell very cannily profited from the success of the show by turning the character of Mark Corrigan, which he did not create, into his television personality; angry, ranting reactionary man that would star in ‘David Mitchell’s soapbox’ - later having a regular role on various panel shows. His talent is as an actor, not a writer.
Robert Webb’s subsequent career has been meandering, he never became ‘Jez’, who would clearly not work in a panel show format. His only notable intervention that Mitchell and Webb look was cancelled was attempting to cash in on ‘Men’s Mental Health’.
David Mitchell’s Back Story (an autobiography that was published in 2012) has an interesting section in it where he discusses how he came to resent Robert Webb (whom he had been friends with since University) for failing to advance his career as he had in the early 2010s. This is an understudied aspect of the human experience, how often do we read about the shining coming to dislike the outshone? An uncomfortable contrast between the pair can be seen in this Graham Norton interview from 2009 - Mitchell is able to do his epic ‘angry rants’ about various topics whilst Webb is mute and awkward.
David Mitchell has an unearned reputation as a comedic talent, he is really a creation a Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who also wrote much of that Mitchell and Webb look (cancelled after four seasons). Simon Blackwell attempted to recapture the magic of Peep Show with ‘Back’ in 2017; again starring Mitchell and Webb - which failed miserably.
It was a categorical error to pin the hopes of a revival of British sketch comedy onto two people who are not very good at writing comedy. The chance should have been given to two spunky young men with a thriving satire Substack. Scene One: The Dead Parrot Sketch reimagined in a kebab shob in Blackpool. The real life Lawrence Newport being chased by ravenous Bully XLs across Streatham Common. As ever, the conclusion we are irrepressibly drawn towards is that more money should have been given to me.
Thank you, that was an excellent read. Peep show was terrific at its peak.