Do not adjust your sets. Mitchell and Webb are back on the TV tomorrow and it’s not a repeat. Sketch comedy is back! But not exactly with a vengeance. At the launch of their new series, Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping, the two explained: “It’s a perilous time for the industry and so it’s our hope that relaunching the trickiest genre of comedy is a brilliant piece of counterintuitive commissioning.”
OK, so they’re joking – but only partly. The concept of sketch comedy really started to stretch and then virtually disappear in the early 2000s. It hardly helps that two of the biggest sketch shows of that time – Little Britain (2000-2006) and Bo’ Selecta (2002-2009) – now come under the banner of “you had to be there.” Plus, many of the comedy highlights of that era (Green Wing, People Just Do Nothing, Toast of London, IT Crowd, all Ricky Gervais’s work, all Julia Davis’s work, The Trip, Catastrophe, Motherland…) are sitcoms or mockumentaries. Not sketch shows.
Nonetheless, despite there being fewer pure sketch comedy series than in the first 25 years of this century than there were in the previous 25, these gems shine through.
Mitchell and Webb – “Are we the baddies?”
In what is surely one of the best sketches of all time, two SS officers suddenly realise that maybe they are not on the right side of history. The catchphrase – “Hans, are we the baddies?” – has launched a billion memes and almost as many serious political commentary pieces about totalitarianism and complicity.
Strongly in the tradition of Monty Python and The Fast Show, this is a sketch that could have existed at any moment since 1945 and always been funny. Hopefully it always will be. One of my favourite things about this sketch is that despite the lighting and the drama of the scene, they don’t bother putting on German accents and simply play themselves.
Horrible Histories – “Literally (The Viking Song)”
Whenever British sketch comedy loses investment and status, it always manages to find a home on children’s TV. Some of the most memorable sketches from the 2010s aired on CBBC.
The team behind Horrible Histories schooled a generation with historical spoof music videos: Charles II as Eminem, Cleopatra does Lady Gaga and Dick Turpin as Adam Ant. The pinnacle of this genre was “Literally (The Viking Song)”, a soft rock pastiche in the style of Whitesnake. The video is populated by Vikings rampaging across forests and sandy beaches whilst crooning moodily into the middle distance: “You’re gonna lose your head, my friend – literally.”
Little Britain USA – Bubbles Devere in the casino
Bubbles Devere was one of the silliest characters from Little Britain. A perpetual inhabitant of a health spa where she has not paid her ever-increasing bill and never intends to, Bubbles dresses in a bath robe or Grecian toga and is always close to the point of undressing, shouting her catchphrase, “Champagne for everybody!”
In this casino sketch, she gambles everything and anything at the roulette wheel, right up to her wig. Put it all on red, Bubbles!
Catherine Tate – Posh family reacts to Northern nanny
Alongside her children Chloe and Thomas, Aga Saga Woman was a character in The Catherine Tate Show, which ran from 2004 to 2009. Aga Saga Woman reacts with horror, disgust, and pure fear at anything that occurs outside of the confines of her Waitrose-stocked kitchen.
When Gina (Jill Halfpenny), a nanny from “the North”, appears in their home, the children cannot understand a word she is saying and Aga Saga Woman is convinced that they are all going to die. Supremely silly and brilliant and every bit as memorable as Nan, the foul-mouthed grandmother, and Lauren “bovvered” Cooper.
Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show – Jennifer Aniston is fine
The Jennifer Aniston impression here is perfect. All-American and psychotically bright-eyed, Jennifer Aniston calls in the middle of the night to insist that she is fine, thus proving that she is absolutely not fine. This was around the time of all the Brangelina nonsense and when all the Friends cast were desperately trying to re-invent themselves.
Katy Brand’s underrated show was broadcast in the late 2000s and featured a dizzying array of ideas, performers and impressions. The Big Ass Show had precisely the kind of sketches we now take for granted as Instagram reels and TikToks.
Trigger Happy TV – The big phone
The big phone from Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV bridged the gap between no-one having a mobile phone in the mid to late 1990s and absolutely everyone having a mobile phone by the late 2000s. Oh how we used to laugh at the owners of the first mobile phones, holding their giant stupid phone-the-size-of-a-brick up to their ears and shouting into the handset so that everyone for miles around would see that they have a giant stupid phone-the-size-of-a-brick!
Big phone man answered his calls in the quietest places possible — libraries, museums, cinemas – and showed us what idiots we were all becoming. Other favourites from this series: anything with Grey Squirrel and the man advertising the ski school on crutches with multiple broken limbs.
Little Miss Jocelyn – Helen gets worms at job interview
This sketch has a wonderful, weird, old-fashioned quality. A woman is being interviewed for a job by a panel of stern-looking office types. They inform her that she has been successful. So far, so 1980s, right down to the Working Girl outfits. You start to think, “I don’t get it. What is this sketch about?” Then suddenly she exits the interview in the most unexpected manner.
Another underrated series that deserved a longer run, Jocelyn Jen Esien’s show ran on the BBC from 2006 and 2008. Other popular characters enjoying a renaissance on YouTube include Jiffy, a demented traffic warden who pops up in random situations to issue tickets for non-traffic-related offences.
Horne and Corden – Champion divers
Long before Carpool Karaoke, there was Horne & Corden. The short-lived partnership of James Corden and Matthew Horne lasted for only one series as it was cursed by poor ratings and reviews – Gavin and Stacey it was not.
But the champion divers sketch has stood the test of time and gives a hint of what might have been. As two divers approach the podium craving Olympic gold, the momentum builds and we know that one or both of them is going to do something stupid. A moment built on the principle of the banana skin, delivering simple and effective physical comedy.
Peter Serafinowicz Show – The Butterfield diet plan
Brian Butterfield is a gloriously grotesque creation: a one-man horror show you can’t look away from. He was born on The Peter Serafinowicz Show in 2007, found his inner pyramid marketeer on CBBC’s Fit in 2013 and lived long enough to complete a nationwide live tour in 2023.
Marvel as Brian shares his diet secrets, including “frilly meats”, “bon bon bon bons” and “one cornflake, toasted, with low-fat spread”. The Brian Butterfield diet plan is the gift that keeps on giving and survives countless re-watchings. As Brian would say: “Don’t forget to rewind your DVD.”
Snuff Box – I have a boyfriend
This is a slight cheat of an inclusion as Snuff Box, starring Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, was more of a sitcom. But the series featured elements of sketch comedy, not least the hugely popular “I Have a Boyfriend.”
This sketch repeats itself multiple times in different locations with different women but the outcome is always the same. Matt Berry approaches the “damsel in distress” (usually carrying a fragile item) and insists on helping her along her way. As they strike up a friendly conversation, he flirts and issues compliments. She mentions casually that she has a boyfriend. Breakages ensue.
Sorry I’ve Got No Head — A thousand pounds
This CBBC series spawned many memorable characters and catchphrases, but one of the most enjoyable was the partnership between Marcus Brigstocke and James Bachman, playing Jasmine and Prudith, ladies of a certain age possessing the temperament and dress sense of Hyacinth Bucket.
The two matrons witter on about nonsensical Middle England concerns in a setting where they need to enquire the price of something. They then always hear the (totally reasonable) price erroneously as “a thousand pounds.” Nick Mohammed was frequently the hapless straight man in these sketches. Beautifully idiotic.
Viv Groskop is the author of I Laughed, I Cried (Orion). ‘Mitchell and Webb are Not Helping’ is on tomorrow at 10pm on Channel 4
