Robert Webb on his latest project with David Mitchell

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 Robert Webb talks about the writing process, being an ‘older statesman’ of comedy and how he’s optimistic for the future of the genre…

How did Mitchell And Webb Are Not Helping come about?

We’ve always said that if anyone wanted to do it again, we'd be up for it. We weren’t especially expecting to do another sketch show again, because sketch shows have fallen out of favour, and, we'd already had one pretty massive bite of that cherry – we did four series for the BBC and five for Radio 4. So it was a lovely surprise to be asked to do it again by Ian Katz at Channel 4, and we bit his hand off.

The first thing you do when you get somebody interested in sketches, is that you ring Gareth Edwards. Gareth produced our radio show and four series of the BBC Two show and he’s brilliant. He found some people, and we put together a table read in front of a few Channel 4 – I want to say big nobs? That can't be right. Bigwigs? Anyway, the big nobs liked it, and the show got commissioned, then David and I started writing it.

How did you choose the four new writer-performers who join you on this series?

The idea came from the channel: let's find a bunch of next-gen comedians that we – with our aged, creaking faces – can introduce to a wider audience. I mean,Kiell [Smith-Bynoe] doesn’t need much introduction, but perhaps the other three a little bit.

We liked the idea and then we cast the four best people we could find. Gareth went out and found them, and we did chemistry reads with quite a few. Krystal [Evans] had done a very well received and funny Edinburgh show, The Hottest Girl in BurnCamp,  and I read her book, which is brilliant, and she auditioned brilliantly. She'sa very accomplished comedy actor, and she's written a couple of very funny sketches that have made it into the show.

Lara [Ricote] is hilarious. I saw her stand-up on Live At The Apollo and she's also a brilliant actor, naturally very funny. Stevie [Martin] and Kiell have done a bit more TV and are both wonderful.

You’re both so busy: was it difficult to find the time to write together?

Not this time. If we get to do it again, that might be interesting because David's fantastically busy. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell you what he's doing this autumn, but he won’t be around from then, so the timing of this worked out nicely.

We had these writers’ room meetings with the four brilliant new people that we'recollaborating with, and a couple of other writers, and we'd get in a room once a week. It worked in the same way that we did the previous show, which is that people come in with an idea, or half an idea, or a line, or an idea for a character.

Then, very supportively, we'll throw that idea around and see if it turns into a sketch. Gareth's very good at kicking off proceedings with his own bad ideas, and I often have some bad ideas as well, and we usually get some sketches out of that.

Although, this time, it’s a much more Mitchell and Webb-written show than the last few series of the BBC show.

Was it easy because you had all these ideas in your notebooks from the intervening 14 years that were ready to be turned into sketches?

Not quite, because when you haven’t written sketches for so long, your brain stops thinking like that. My current notebook is full of ideas for a second novel so it's more likely that I'll write things down for that. But once you know you've got a commission for a sketch show, yes, sketches start appearing. 

The universe, for some reason, starts to help you to write the sketch show and suddenly you can see sketches everywhere.

Can you talk a bit more about those initial writers’ rooms?

Hopefully Gareth and David and I set a sufficiently friendly tone and were sufficiently inept at coming up with ideas that were not yet funny enough, that everyone else then felt encouraged to come out with their own bad ideas. After the first couple of minutes, everyone was feeling very relaxed, and it felt like we were just chatting.

The idea of a writers’ room is that hopefully it's a funny chat full of ideas and you start to hear where the sketch might start and where it might finish, and who might be in it, and where it might end up.

The next stage is turning up at David’s house, and he puts the kettle on, and we start talking, which is how we used to do the show without writers’ rooms. As we’re chatting, we're watching for sketches to creep in from the edge of sight, and if they don’t then we've got our notebooks and the ideas from the writers’ meeting that that we volunteered to write up.

Is this show different from your previous shows?

The technical difference between this show and the BBC ones is that it’s on Channel 4 so it’s only 23 minutes instead of 29, so we’ve got less to do and a shorter shoot. 

There's no laughter track or studio. It's all shot on location which is, frankly, much simpler. I love audiences, I love theatre, but I used to dread studio because you've got a split focus: you're trying to please the audience, but you also know that you've got cameras, you've still got to hit the mark, and you've got to not be too big. When there's a live audience there, the temptation is to be slightly bigger because you're standing on a stage, but that'snot what's required from the screen, so it was a delicate art, and I'm frankly glad we didn't have to do it this time. David’s very good at it because he does Upstart Crow but for me, this is easier.

Laughter tracks are massively out fashion at the moment, and it would feel madly anachronistic just now. They’ll probably come back into fashion but doing itwithout the laughter track feels like the right choice now.

Some of the sketches involve you and David playing heightened versions ofyourselves in the writers’ room, and they really highlight the generational gap. Why did you want to do that?

David and I used to write behind-the-scenes sketches where we’d bicker like Mark and Jeremy [from Peep Show] so we wanted to keep that facility of commenting on the sketches. Sometimes you do a sketch, and you find that there's a bit more juice in the idea that you can really bring out in the behind-the- scenes sketch, or you might want to dramatise some of your own anxiety about how this sketch is going to be taken, so it's great to have the option.

And, as you say, it's a good place to bring out generational stuff, although we hadto be careful that the whole thing wasn't about that, otherwise it gets a bit samey.

But definitely there were times we had his completely inability to talk to each other about day-to-day things because of different ways of looking at something and that was nice to reflect.

Did you learn anything from working with new comedians?

Yeah, it’s always good to see a fresh perspective and hear fresh voices and work with different people. It sharpens you up, and it means you want to be on your best behaviour. It’s not like I used to turn up on set drunk and not knowing my lines, it's never been like that, but I don't particularly need to impress David, whereas it does feel this time that I wanted to set a good example.

I do a show called High Hoops with Isy Suttie who was also in Peep Show, and in that we’re surrounded by children, and I’m very aware that I am at my absolute best in that. Coming from that into the sketch show, I've retained this feeling of, ‘I’m this older statesman of comedy now’, and you look around and you realise you’re certainly one of the most experienced people on the set, if not the actual oldest person.

 It means I try to keep my standards as high as possible, and also put other people at their ease. There may be members of cast that might be a little nervous, at least in the first couple of weeks, so it’s all about dicking around and making sure they're comfortable and showing them that this is just a highly organised playground.

Was filming fun?

It really was. We had a brilliant director and a lovely First AD [assistant director]. David, Gareth and I of course know each other well and the stakes just aren’t as high for us anymore. Not that we were a complete nightmare to work with in the Noughties, but there's a lot of mellowness around now.

What’s interesting is that you’ve found an entirely new generation of fans recently: young people are discovering you all the time on YouTube, so you don’t have to work to find them.

Yes, we’ve been really lucky like that that. There’s a scene in an early-ish episode of Peep Show where Jeremy says to Super Hans, ‘I told you the internet would bemassive’, and Super Hans says, ‘We'll see’, and that joke is kind of date-stamped. It wouldn't have been funny a year earlier or a year later. But at the time we had no idea that Peep Show and the sketch shows would have this extra life and become almost immortal, and we didn’t purposely set out to make shows that would live on forever online.

It feels like people will be watching Peep Show as long as we have a civilisation. which has been very nice. It started out with people saying to me: ‘My son likes Peep Show’, and then it was, ‘My dad likes Peep Show’, and now it’s gone back to, ‘My son likes Peep Show’ as a new generation discovers it, and it’s been the same with the sketch show.

People talk about linear TV being dead, and younger generations not being able to concentrate on more than a two-minute sketch: is that rubbish, in your experience?

Yes: they’ll listen to a two-hour podcast. I'm not pessimistic about that kind of thing. People might start off watching a sketch on YouTube, and when that finishes it’s going to suggest another ten sketches you might like, and maybe you watch them, or maybe you end up watching the entire series, but however people find us and watch us, we’re just glad that we’re finding a new audience all the time.

They keep coming back because there’s a timelessness and a prescience to a lot of those sketches.

What you're aiming for is not to have to rely on the news. Obviously, things that are going on in the world and in politics will press upon your consciousness and, inevitably, we've written some sketches that reflect that, but we don't have to talk about the headlines. We don't have to talk about politics unless we’re interested.

I suppose, as you’ve kindly said, there's a sort of timelessness. That's what you're aiming for: something that will keep being relevant. You’re writing the show months before it goes on air, so there’s no point busting a gut to show how up to date we are, because whatever's up to date now won't be in the future.

The sketch show went out of fashion for a long time. How do you feel about the comedy landscape currently?

To be honest, I don't watch as much TV as I used to, I've got two teenage daughters, and we sit down and eat our tea in front of the telly and to be honest – disloyally – we watch a lot of American sitcoms. We're halfway through 30 Rock and before that, it was New Girl, and before that, it was the American Office, not even the British Office. That's how bad it's gone!

But the landscape feels optimistic. I mean, what can I tell you? I'm just so delighted to be doing this show again, and it was such a joy to write and to shoot, and we're really happy with the way it's turned out. So if nobody watches it, well fuck it.

Published: 26 Aug 2025