Preview of duo's return to sketch comedy

Conventional wisdom has it that the TV sketch show is dead – even as viewers gobble up short-form content online.

It’s an orthodoxy Channel 4 want to challenge – and if anyone can prove there’s life in the old format yet, it’s David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

Indeed their new series, 15 years after the last, even defies that other nugget of assumed knowledge that they have previously parodied: that sketch shows are by their nature ‘a bit hit and miss’. For there’s barely a weak moment in Mitchell And Webb Are Not Helping.

Combining the familiar duo with a group of younger co-stars and co-writers is a savvy move, both reinvigorating the writing and creating an SNL-style pipeline to develop more talent. Plus it provides some grit for the recurring writers’ room sketches between the location skits, in which the stars are viciously mocked for their advancing years or petty middle-aged gripes from a generation wanting to make comedy more meaningful. The ‘word cloud’ scene in episode two is a beaut.

Ghosts star Kiell Smith-Bynoe is the most known quantity – having proved his sketch credentials with his 2022 Blap pilot Red Flag – while fellow Taskmaster  contestant Stevie Martin has earned her spurs online. Meanwhile, the show is another step on the inevitable rise of versatile livewire Lara Ricote, and a huge boost for American comic Krystal Evans, little known outside of her adopted homeland of Scotland despite a well-received 2023 Fringe show about her childhood escape from a house fire.  

Between them, they have created a show with no obvious theme, which in lesser hands could have spelt a crisis of identity, but works here as the Mitchell and Webb brand is well established and pliable.

They have on-point media satires, such as parodying the idea we needed two behind-the-scenes dramas about Newsnight landing the bombshell Prince Andrew interview, or a spoof exaggerating the vacuity of reality TV and the absence of imagination in those who make it.

They also attack what might be sacred cows in the modern landscape – therapy as a panacea for all ills, for example. But a sci-fi spoof is more aligned with the liberal zeitgeist, being a very thinly veiled take on climate crisis complacency.

The airport security scene, which had already been released as an advanced teaser, shows the team’s strongest suit, taking an everyday irritation and magnifying it, in this case heightened by the psychotic performances of Webb and Martin.

Most scenes are one-offs but the recurring Sweary Aussie Drama, above, doing exactly what its title promises, has viral hit written all over it, a chorus of expletives from characters who make Malcolm Tucker look like Mary Whitehouse. 

In fact, whatever the overnight viewing figures show, expect to see many of these skits replay on social media for years to come.

• Mitchell And Webb Are Not Helping is on Channel 4 at 10pm tonight

Review date: 5 Sep 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett