ON Thursday the latest series of The Mitchell and Webb Sound started on Radio 4 (6.30pm). If you haven’t heard it, you should try. A sketch show, yes, in a world of them, but one with superior sketches, clever, imaginative and — the magic ingredient — not too long.
If you haven’t heard of David Mitchell and Robert Webb (below left), though, it could be because you only think you haven’t. Let me say just one thing — Peep Show, one of those Channel 4 adult sitcom things that’s been Bafta nominated and is now getting the boys’ names better known.
To be frank, neither Mitchell nor Webb is going to move forward the cause of sketch-based comedy much. They both have those indeterminate voices that talk of intelligence and a decent education, but there’s nothing there to mark them out. One of them sounds a bit plump, and the other taller and woolly-haired, but that’s only because I’ve seen them in Peep Show and that’s what they look like.
So it’s all down to the material. They write a lot of it, but there’s also input from that floating army that fetches up on the shores of myriad comedy shows. This one’s got writers who also sit around being clever for Lenny Henry, Dead Ringers and, yes, Peep Show.
And that’s good, because here they get a chance to think outside all those various boxes. One of them wants to do a piece about an urban fox that hates the Countryside Alliance. How well would that go down on Dead Ringers? Would Lenny Henry go for a sketch about a Second World War German soldier who suddenly realises he’s one of the baddies? Would either show have allowed a running joke about a late-night DJ to have included a song speeded up so as to be introduced as Pinky and Perky singing Radiohead’s Creep? And as for the homo-erotic snooker commentators . . .
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It’s nice to think of That Mitchell and Webb Sound providing a little home for orphaned ideas that otherwise would have nowhere to go.