Mitchell & Webb

That Mitchell & Webb End of Series Quiz

As the producer of That Mitchell and Webb Look I often imagine what it would be like to have thousands of fans clamouring for an end-of-series-four quiz.

Motivating Mitchell and Webb

As the producer of That Mitchell and Webb Look I'm often asked if it's as much fun working with David and Rob as it is watching them. The answer is of course no.

That Mitchell and Webb Format

Any amateur historian with a bit of initiative and a metal detector will have discovered that That Mitchell and Webb Look is a spin off of David and Robert's radio show That Mitchell and Webb Sound.

Mitchell & Webb Special Effects

As the producer of That Mitchell and Webb Look I've had a lot of make-believe questions about the special effects we use. Here are the ones I've decided I hear most often.

Some answers about Dog Poker

That Mitchell and Webb Look Episode Two features some dogs playing late night poker, and as I'm the producer, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by the huge number of imaginary emails I've had about this part of the show, so I thought I'd use this blog to respond.

That Mitchell & Webb Look episode 4.1 review

This opener for the fourth series was underwhelming, and it irritated me that David Mitchell and Robert Webb have chosen to stick with the Get Me Hennimore and Remain Indoors sketches, which both ran out of steam halfway through series 3. Still, as usual, Mitchell & Webb's work never patronizes its audience and doesn't rely on recycling jokes and catchphrases, so for that I'm grateful and will still be tuning in.

That Mitchell & Webb Look review

This new series won't disappoint fans but it's hardly likely to attract a new audience who have become suspicious of the sketch show as a genre following its sophisticated deconstruction in Chris Morris' Jam and Channel 4's Green Wing.

That Mitchell & Webb Look Returns

The excellent Mitchell & Webb return tonight on BBC Two at 9pm. Gareth Edwards, the producer of the show, gives an insight into just how unique the filming is.

How vividly we remember when and where we hear special things on the radio, staying in a car to hear the end of a football match, being in a garden and braving hay fever not to miss a word of a play. Six Augusts ago I remember walking round the Italian Garden in Hyde Park, listening to the very first episode of That Mitchell and Webb Sound and laughing so much my glasses steamed up and I couldn't see the fountains.

They were just starting off in Channel 4's Peep Show then but had been around on the comedy scene long enough to have established their act and attracted the BBC. Radio's tiny cheques (but careful fostering) helped them to a BBC TV series. As with Dead Ringers, however, radio fans who followed them found the same jokes but with pictures, slower, still funny but not exactly fresh. Last Tuesday evening they began their fourth Radio 4 series and it was simply brilliant.

Twelve sketches, written by an encyclopaedic list of writers, lit up the air. Caesar, with a spin doctor. The iReckon, a device to enjoy the thoughts you want in the order that suits you. A reprimand to employees for using their extraterrestrial portal as a dustbin ("What must the aliens think of us?"). A parody of an interview where there's nothing to say but they won't be let go until they say what the producer wants. Parodies of TV ads and BBC formats. A look forward to 2040 and Sky BBC12. Their rapport with the studio audience is remarkable, their supporting cast is first-rate. Will I mind if all these jokes turn up again on television? Not really. If it were the other way round, TV first, I would.

Peep Show? Brilliant. David Mitchell on any of the roughly 795 radio and TV panel games he's adorned with his presence? National treasure-in-waiting. But if his reputation rested on his TV sketch shows with Robert Webb, the two of them might well be known as the Anna Kournikovas of comedy: famous, but useless at the thing they're famous for.

The problem with the sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Sound (which the lads mostly write), as opposed to Peep Show (which they mostly don't) is that they're clever but not very funny, a slight handicap for a comedy programme. Each situation is replete with comic possibilities and progresses with savage twists of absurdity. It should be drop-dead hilarious. It's the kind of thing, though, you watch with an expectant grin - but no belly laughs.

So I listened to the new series of the radio version with some trepidation, but although not everything was a palpable hit, there was enough to be going on with. Some of the ideas were spot-on, such as the orthopaedic suppliers with an inter-dimensional portal on the shop floor ("gentlemen, the stargate is not a bin"), or the iReckon, Apple's new gadget ("I can download all my thoughts from the internet!"). And Caesar being coached in referring to himself in the third person was pure The Two Ronnies.