Photo by Rob Parfitt / Channel 4
Like fax machines, Woolworths and names like “Barry”, the sketch show and the comedy double act have had a rough 21st century. Comic couplings of the past – Morecambe and Wise, Fry and Laurie, even Monty Python, which is truly a coincidence of multiple double acts – have the air of old family heirlooms. Prized heritage assets for sure, among the finest jewels in the national treasure chest. But when will we unearth a new duo?
It was a noble endeavour, then, for David Mitchell and Robert Webb to revive a dormant tradition. Dormant for us and them: despite their friendship, the pair have not acted together since 2021, in the Channel 4 sitcom Back, and have not written together since their previous sketch series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, was wound up in 2010. The hiatus was not elective. After that show’s fourth series, Mitchell and Webb recently told Radio Times, they were taken out for a heave-ho luncheon by a BBC commissioning editor. “I sat there like an eight-year-old boy,” recalled Webb.
You can forgive his disappointment. Much like Peep Show – which remains Mitchell and Webb’s finest work as actors even if they did not write it – 15 years on, “Look” is in some ways more popular than when it was on television in the late 2000s. It’s certainly more quoted. Take the “Are we the baddies?” sketch, in which, observing the surfeit of skulls on Nazi regalia, a conscientious Schutzstaffel officer experiences the dawning realisation that he might not be on the right side of history. The scene has become a piece of internet folklore. And deservedly so. The sketch is a perfect anti-parable: if not a lesson, then a spotlight on unexamined ironies.
Mitchell and Webb Are not Helping has some continuities with its predecessor. The title sequence calls back to Look, and Mitchell and Webb retain their fondness for breaking the fourth wall, cutting regularly to a writers’ room where the preceding sketch and the stars’ public personas can be held up for further ridicule. But more vitally, and thankfully, the same sense of humour captains this new series, evidently born of Mitchell and Webb’s shared taste for the bittersweet spot between mordant and morbid.
Alongside pop-culture piggybacking (there’s a mock trailer for a TV drama about the making of two rival dramas about Emily Maitlis’s Prince Andrew interview), the classic Mitchell and Webb sketch involves a ruthless reductio ad absurdum, with social conventions exposed to an angry logic that lays bare their inconsistencies. Hence their fondness for historical anachronism: the opening sketch features a Georgian household in which the patriarch (Mitchell) tries to get others to make proper use of the new indoor toilet. Privacy, public hygiene and even queueing for the bathroom are hauled in for interrogation. “Wait?” asks Webb’s character. “To do a shit?”
Delivery is pretty much everything in this genre, and both Mitchell and Webb are veterans of the comic explosion, the italicised obscenity. But it should be said that there can be what Clive James called “semantic fatigue” on this score. “Are not Helping” comes after a period in which, thanks to The Thick of It and Succession, comic swearing may have to be temporarily mothballed. (Even now, some desperate wannabe-doctorate is working on a thesis provisionally titled “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off: the rise and demise of creative vulgarity in 21st-century television”.) For this exact reason, a recurring skit in this new series, titled “Sweary Aussie drama”, and featuring nothing much more than a sailor’s stag-do of effing, was far more exhausting than entertaining.
If you’ve seen David Mitchell on a panel show recently, you’ll be familiar with the form. That is why the presence of Webb is welcome, leavening Mitchell’s flurried rants. One new sketch, set during a frustrating therapy session, only carries thanks to Webb’s comparably tender straight-man acting, producing a believably desperate patient. And it makes the punchline – Mitchell’s therapist’s offer of medicinal crack cocaine – darker, and funnier. Their cooperation defines the complementary nature of their double act. As our wannabe-doctorate might say, if society develops through a law of interpenetrating opposites, so – it would seem – does comedy.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Mitchell and Webb Are not Helping
Channel 4
[See also: Why Graham Linehan’s freedom of speech matters]
Content from our partners