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\n Photo by Rob Parfitt \/ Channel 4 <\/p>\n
\n Photo by Rob Parfitt \/ Channel 4 <\/p>\n
Like fax machines, Woolworths and names like \u201cBarry\u201d, the sketch show and the comedy double act have had a rough 21st century. Comic couplings of the past \u2013 Morecambe and Wise, Fry and Laurie, even Monty Python, which is truly a coincidence of multiple double acts \u2013 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s fourth series, Mitchell and Webb recently told Radio Times, they were taken out for a heave-ho luncheon by a BBC commissioning editor. \u201cI sat there like an eight-year-old boy,\u201d recalled Webb.<\/p>\n
You can forgive his disappointment. Much like Peep Show \u2013 which remains Mitchell and Webb\u2019s finest work as actors even if they did not write it \u2013 15 years on, \u201cLook\u201d is in some ways more popular than when it was on television in the late 2000s. It\u2019s certainly more quoted. Take the \u201cAre we the baddies?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 room where the preceding sketch and the stars\u2019 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\u2019s shared taste for the bittersweet spot between mordant and morbid.<\/p>\n
Alongside pop-culture piggybacking (there\u2019s a mock trailer for a TV drama about the making of two rival dramas about Emily Maitlis\u2019s 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. \u201cWait?\u201d asks Webb\u2019s character. \u201cTo do a shit?\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201csemantic fatigue\u201d on this score. \u201cAre not Helping\u201d 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 \u201cCome the fuck in or fuck the fuck off: the rise and demise of creative vulgarity in 21st-century television\u201d.) For this exact reason, a recurring skit in this new series, titled \u201cSweary Aussie drama\u201d, and featuring nothing much more than a sailor\u2019s stag-do of effing, was far more exhausting than entertaining.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve seen David Mitchell on a panel show recently, you\u2019ll be familiar with the form. That is why the presence of Webb is welcome, leavening Mitchell\u2019s flurried rants. One new sketch, set during a frustrating therapy session, only carries thanks to Webb\u2019s comparably tender straight-man acting, producing a believably desperate patient. And it makes the punchline \u2013 Mitchell\u2019s therapist\u2019s offer of medicinal crack cocaine \u2013 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 \u2013 it would seem \u2013 does comedy.<\/p>\n
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