David Mitchell and Robert Webb are to return to Channel 4 with a new sketch show, backed by Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Lara Ricote, Stevie Martin, and Krystal Evans. Here David Mitchell talks about why sketch fell out of favour, how generations approach the world differently and changing tastes in comedy…
How did this show come about?
Ian Katz, who's the head of Channel 4, approached us because he'd had a conversation with [Peep Show co-creator] Jesse Armstrong about sketch shows and how he liked them, and Jesse mentioned that we always loved making a sketch show, and we were sorry not to have been able to continue. Ian, according to Jesse, went, ‘Really, do you think they'd be interested?’ and of course Jesse said yes, and Ian approached us.
We went for lunch and talked about it, and talked about why the genre had disappeared, and our slight puzzlement at that, particularly in a world where so many things that you would basically call a ‘sketch’ are being made for the internet.
So, what I was saying to Ian, and hopefully this is how it will work, is that they’re popular online as sketches, so there has to be a world in which they will be popular as a show on TV as well.
Why do you think sketch shows fell so out of favour? Industry people often talk about the expense of making them: is that why?
That’s what they say, but it's not really expensive. There's a problem in comedy: when the starting point for budgets was agreed back in, I imagine, the 1950s, there was an expectation that comedy shows – be they sitcoms or sketch shows – would be made entirely in studio with a live audience, and that dramas would be made on location with a single camera.
As a result, to this day, negotiations for a drama budget start at double the figure compared to a comedy. Sketch shows like The Two Ronnies, or most of Monty Python, would be made almost entirely in studio on flimsy sets in front of a studio audience, because the TV audience were content to suspend their disbelief and we were all happy to watch things that looked a bit theatrical on television.
But the problem is that visual form looks wrong now. People won't accept it anymore. You can go into a theatre and watch a scene in a black box set between two people and you buy it. You follow the story. You don't go, ‘What are they doing standing there in the darkness, where are the radiators and walls?’
Similarly, you could watch The Two Ronnies in a pub that's basically a wall with one picture of a horse on it and that's fine, but nowadays a modern audience expects comedy to look real, so it's got to be filmed in a real pub, or at least a set that's much more expensively constructed.
Upstart Crow and Not Going Out are pretty much the last studio sitcoms around:
most other sitcoms are filmed on location which means they’re scrambling to make a single camera shoot on half the budget of an equivalent drama, even though it's not like cheaper things happen in sitcoms.
How did you enjoy working with the new younger writer-performers?
They were a great team; we really loved all four of them. They’re very funny in different ways.
Gareth Edwards, who produced the BBC show before, always has his ear to the ground in terms of new people coming through, and Channel 4 also had people they wanted us to work with, and between the two of them, these four people emerged.
I'd met Kiell [Smith-Bynoe before on Would I Lie to You? but I didn't know him well, and I hadn’t met any of the others. I’d seen Stevie [Martin]’s sketches online, and thought they were very funny. I met Lara [Ricote] and Krystal [Evans] through this process, and it's been so rewarding.
Kiell is like a pitch-perfect comic actor; there are moments in the show I feel he's conjuring an extra laugh out of nowhere. Stevie is a great writer-performer in a similar tradition to me and Rob; I think she has the same premise-led approach to sketches. Krystal's got a very dark sense of humour: she wrote a sketch about someone who thinks they’ve found their long-lost father online, but is essentially being duped by their own need to think that, which absolutely mines the depths of human hope for comedy. I love that approach.
And Lara might be one of the most naturally funny people I've ever met – and I’ve met some very funny people! Every time she's on screen, she's bringing more laughs than are on the page, and that's the thing you look for: someone whose performance lifts the material. If you're lucky, you work with people and they bring something extra to it without contradicting what's on the page, and that’s what they all do.
Where do your ideas for sketches come from?
I think our starting point is always something that we find illogical or wrong, although we’re not crusaders against the main problems of the world. We just find that the starting point for a lot of material.
Can you talk a little about the behind-the-scenes sketches set in the writers’ room, where you make self-deprecating jokes about your age?
What's interesting is that there have been times when that wouldn't have been a very interesting topic of conversation. There have been eras such as the 1990s and 2000s where there hasn't been such a generational divide in terms of attitudes about the world, but now we are much more generationally divided as a society, and so that has an edge.
It’s a generalisation, of course, but the difference between the world views of people in their 20s compared to people in their 40s and 50s is quite marked in a way I’m not sure it has been before. The generations have very different attitudes, while both thinking themselves quite modern.
So, it's a very good time to satirise that, and obviously that debate is always laced with mortality, because that's the thing the young have got over the old: the old have experience and what they’d call their wisdom, but they’ve also got death bearing down on them.
We really enjoyed dramatising that with these comedians. We had a good range because Rob and I are around 50s, Lara’s in her 20s, and the others are in between, so it was really fun.
Do you feel different now, compared to when you first made the sketch show?
I definitely feel less pressure, because we thought we'd never do another sketch show and so this was an absolute bonus. We both felt more relaxed.
This time round we just thought, ‘Oh, lovely.’ We haven't written sketches for years, so they came quite easily. First time around, we used to meet up in the afternoons and slide into the pub, but this time we met up in the mornings, wrote for a couple of hours, did two or three sketches, and then went off to do other things.
‘When it came to the filming, we were in it a lot but not as much as if we didn't have a featured supporting cast, so that really helped too. It just felt light and fun.
This commission signals a potential revival of the sketch show: are you optimistic about the future of comedy?
I've never been worried about the future of comedy, really, whether people make sketch shows or not. The future of the sketch show was in doubt for a bit, and still is.
But I think in general, people love comedy in this country more than anywhere in the world. It’s why comedies get so savaged by the media when they don’t work: because people really care and they’re offended by comedy being bad or not to their tastes. If a drama doesn’t work, they just move on, but we’re passionate about comedy.
'Because everything is quite heightened at the moment, people are very easily offended by everything, but people will always need to laugh. The lines may shift and move but the fact that the nature of debate and the nature of society is different now from when we were last doing a sketch show, doesn't make the comedy harder. It just makes it different.
People talk about needing comedy more during difficult or turbulent times. Do you agree with that?
Yes, I think so, although the thing that I celebrate in comedy is the impish urge to do the thing you’re not supposed to do. That’s why in the past you’d have so many jokes about sex, which was taboo.
There’s a very human urge to be naughty: the naughtiness of putting a whoopee cushion under the teacher's chair, the naughtiness of saying the word you're told not to say, or nearly saying it. The fundamental urge to do that is, I think, a great thing about the human spirit. That’s what drives me to watch comedy and to make comedy.
