Mitchell and Webb are back on TV

David Mitchell and Rob Webb specialise in comic outsider angst – that turns out to have mass appeal

The Times February 9, 2008
By Janice Turner

Meeting David Mitchell and Rob Webb, it is hard not to presume I already know them. From their roles as flatmates Mark and Jez in the cult sitcom Peep Show, through their Bafta-winning sketch series and the recent ad campaign for Apple computers, they essentially play out the same comic yin and yang.

Mitchell is always systematic, conventional, pompous; Webb is cooler, looser, inclined to “vibe” through life. Mitchell is horrified by modernity; Webb craves entry into the new confessional, dress-down, smoothie-drinking Zeitgeist. Mitchell is a contemporary Prufrock, too hamstrung by embarrassment to reach for what he desires; Webb grabs it. These aren’t just tensions in British culture, but the warring voices in our own heads.

Anyway, David Mitchell arrives, punctually, first. He has lately cornered the comedy market in pop-eyed middle-aged bombast, both fictionally and as a prolific panel-show guest. But in person, with his neat side-parting, well-pressed navy needlecord shirt and digital watch, he looks more boyish than 33. He could be treasurer of the sixth-form chess club, the one with algebraic functions on his calculator. Rob Webb, 35, languid in unironed cheesecloth, looks older than his narky, for ever-teenage screen persona, male-pattern baldness at work on the crown of his simian head.

They are palpably close, finishing each other’s sentences, and treat each other with elaborate courtesy, which I doubt is for effect. They have worked together since Cambridge, through years of Edinburgh Fringe penury, never-broadcast pilots and cable obscurity until Peep Show – written for them by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain – began their rise to ubiquity in 2003.

Ricky Gervais described it as “the best thing on TV” and indeed if you missed it, as I did, download it (legally for free) from the Channel 4 website. Peep Show is the darkest, funniest, filthiest explication of modern living, a rare British adherent to Seinfeld’s sitcom dictum, “No hugging, no learning.” Mitchell plays Mark, an uptight loan manager, Webb is Jez, a freeloading, deluded musician. But both share a creeping fear that everyone else is happier, that they’re somehow locked out of the party. Comedians routinely make commercials. But when Mitchell and Webb did the Apple campaign last year, the outcry of sell-out was a measure of how deeply fans felt they understood and championed their own outsider angst.

Now the duo could afford not to write sketches for their BBC prime-time show sitting side by side in the bedroom of Mitchell’s ex-council flat in that anonymous, dreary, very Peep Show part of North London, Kilburn High Road.

Webb: “But it’s amazing what you get used to.”

Mitchell (defensively): “It’s quite a big bedroom, but it is still a rather bed-dominated office. Ideally, I’d have two rooms. I have a two-bedroomed flat, but I have a flatmate and he doesn’t let me write in his bedroom.”

Webb: “He’s got the bigger room.”

Mitchell: “No, he hasn’t. He’s just got less crap. Mine’s full of bags full of crap freebies I got from the Comedy Awards three years ago which I put down drunk.”

Webb: “A broken printer…”

Mitchell: “No, that’s gone. I had a clear-out.”

Webb: “I hadn’t noticed.”

Mitchell: “I hate to throw anything out that once was precious to me. Basically, I should move to somewhere larger, but I can’t be bothered. First I’d have to get my flat into a state where anyone would buy it. The kitchen floor is wobbly, the kitchen cabinet above the cooker has gone a bit melty. People are f***ing fussy about these things, I’ve seen it on the telly.”

They tried working at Webb’s, but Mitchell – who does the typing – says Webb’s computer is set up wrong. (They use Macs, since I ask. Webb: “We had them anyway, but Apple did give us a couple of computers.” Mitchell: “And money. Mostly they gave us money.”) Their writing ritual begins with tea and daytime TV.

Mitchell: “It’s like, hey, we still haven’t got proper jobs! Look, we can literally turn up and the first thing we do is switch the telly on. That’s living the dream!”

Webb: “We are so not in an office, sister!”

Mtchell: “Even if it’s a day when we’re busy and we’re sitting in front of the telly slightly sweaty, we have to get this tea down us…”

Webb: “…Dreading that the other bastard is going to go, ‘Shall we start?’”

Besides, as Webb says, “If I didn’t watch crap, where would I get my material?” Much of their sketch series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, is pastiche of vet programmes, boozy Seventies snooker commentators, cheesy American legal dramas or, in their incomprehensible quiz Number Wang, idiot game shows. Unlike Little Britain, which has thrown up grotesque but recognisable archetypes such as single-mum Vicky Pollard or wheelchair Lou and his carer Andy, their show has less satirical bite. It is gentle, arcane and prone to whimsy: an anxious Nazi realises his skull and crossbone insignia means he’s a “baddy”.

It must be strange when a sketch that began as a scribbled half of A4 becomes the business of a huge crew and extras in silly costumes.
Mitchell: “The first time we saw all that, we were like, ‘Oh, it’s only a joke!’”

Webb: “I remember a very early sketch in which our main characters had a neighbour whose house had mock-Tudor beams that looked like a Nazi swastika and when we turned up on set…”

Mitchell: “…it was perfect!”

Webb: “Someone was actually paid to go up some scaffolding and glue it to a wall.”

There is something intrinsically jejeune and undergraduate about sketch shows. Writing them is, as Mitchell points out, a young person’s game. “I think your writing brain works differently as you grow older. You have fewer ideas, but you use them better. As a student, I had many more thoughts, but most of them were rubbish. These days, the unusable stuff doesn’t even get passed on to my conscious mind. You lose the idea you can do anything. My attitude now is everything is difficult and it’s mostly shit.”

On screen, Mitchell’s milk-bottle shoulders atop a rotund body make him perfect for his series of angst-ridden comic losers. Although, like Victoria Wood, in person he is not fat at all. But the Peep Show team admit that his personality has influenced their writing of Mark. “We were talking about people pretending to have food allergies,” says Jesse Armstrong. “And David said if he really had a wheat intolerance he’d simply suffer for the rest of his life rather than have to explain he had something so stupid and faddy. That’s going in the next series.”

Mitchell’s parents ran hotels, then became lecturers in hotel management at Oxford Brookes University. “My brother and I were swots. I was top of the class until I was 12, when I moved to a larger school [Abingdon] where I became bitterly aware that I wasn’t in the top few. I realised I would never be as good at physics as this boy who has physics hardwired into his brain. Maybe I’d be better off doing debating or being in a play where I had a chance of being the best. Although that sounds terribly arrogant.”

Which he isn’t at all. In fact, Mitchell is an odd mix of forthright opinions, expressed in perfect, modulated sentences, and squirming vulnerability when discussing his private life. There is a sketch in the new series in which Webb gives Mitchell a ludicrous Lycra vest to make him look gay: “That way no one will think you’re single because you’re unattractive or you smell. You can say you haven’t got a girlfriend because I made you wear this.”

In relationships, Mitchell admits, he is more reticent even than Mark who, although he thinks of women in terms of Nazi occupations – “Sophie’s Poland, manageable, won’t put up too much of a fight. Toni’s Russia: vast, mysterious, unconquerable” – does marry (after a bleak fashion) at the end of series four.

“I haven’t actually gone out with anyone for six or seven years,” Mitchell, says, pinkening. “And had only the odd fling since. But I’m sort of all right on my own. I don’t want it to be for ever, but the fundamental thing is I’m all right alone.” Is he propositioned by fans? “I did have a huge pair of knickers thrown on stage in an ironic but flirty way. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with someone who approached me because I’m on the telly. But maybe a few more years of grinding loneliness and I’ll change my mind on that.” Later he says, sweetly, like a diligent boy who’s underperformed in a Latin test: “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your relationship questions very well.”

He seems to neglect his emotional life rather as he neglects his flat. He is either engrossed in comedy or doing nothing at all. Unlike Webb, he is not a huge reader, dislikes music. His heart’s only real desire is for a flat big enough for a table tennis table. His last holiday was in Italy with a big gang of college friends – including Rob – where he lay around all day and got drunk every evening.

When busy or stressed he gets very anxious and has diagnosed himself with OCD: “I realise saying this diminishes the pain of people who have a real problem and keep all their wee in jars.” At school he was always making sure his locker was shut; now he repeatedly checks his front door, his gas rings. “It’s a pantomime leaving the house. I’m a bit careful not to let that happen.”

Mitchell met Webb at Cambridge Footlights in the mid-Nineties. Webb, a second year and member of the committee, auditioned him for a panto. “He was immediately very funny. I thought, he reminds me a bit of me, the scene-stealing bastard.”

Although he has a gorgeous, cigarette-ripened, thespy voice, Webb is the son of a coal merchant from rural Lincolnshire, the first member of his family to go to university. His parents divorced when he was five and his mother remarried. As the baby – until his half-sister was born – he was hugely spoilt. His two older brothers received a joint Easter egg and shared a room; little Rob got his own. While his brothers went secondary modern – eventually becoming a potato wholesaler and a bus fitter – Rob went to the local grammar. He always felt apart, weird; his accent began heading down the A1 in his teens. “I learned to self-censor when I wanted to use a longer word.”

He was in the lower sixth when his mother died of breast cancer. “I was keeping a diary and there was a massive amount of teenage narcissism. I didn’t make a suicide attempt, but there was one night that I thought hard about it. That thing, ‘Oh, you’re so brave,’ is in fact you noticing there is no other choice. So you make the best of it.”

Webb moved in with his father, whom he hadn’t lived with for 14 years, and, with his friends long gone, resat his flunked exams. His face lights at the memory of his results. “I invested so much in it. It was Footlights and it was university and it was getting away from Lincolnshire and being around people who made me feel comfort-able.” He was 20 when he reached Robinson College. “I went mental. I was so impatient for life to begin.” His mother’s death emboldened him: the worst thing imaginable had already happened. He felt unintimidated by dons, or posher, more confident peers or, crucially, of failure in his ambition to be a comedian.

He is more actorishly look-at-me than Mitchell, swans around naked at some point in every series of Peep Show and in the movies Magicians and Confetti. Like his deluded slacker character Jez in Peep Show, he is inclined never to pass a mirror without a quick glance and can lack motivation, “which is why I have David here”.

He jokes that Mitchell’s perpetual bachelor state means “because I have a wife and a nice flat, I look the well-adjusted one, which I’m not”. Last year he married Abigail Burdess, a comic actress. (Mitchell was best man.) “We’re quite supportive,” he says. “Unless she’s trying to write her Edinburgh show and asks for a suggestion and I give her one and she rejects it and I get my Bafta and wave it in her face and say, ‘Who’s right? Who’s right?’ and then we’re less supportive. I only did that once.”

Mitchell says their double act works because “We have superficial differences and underlying similarities. We pretty much agree about what we think is funny. But we come across differently. We get on really. And together we’re greater than the sum of our parts.”

A shared trait is an avoidance of conflict. They avoid each other socially – tricky, since they have a shared pool of college friends – to avoid over-familiarity. But they have never had a row. “We’ve always suppressed our differences,” says Mitchell. “And I think that’s fine. You don’t have to aspire to the smoothed-out, all-truths-shared working relationship. We’ve always felt that if we have a shouting match, one or other us will say things that could not be forgotten.”

This repression is as English as their snaggly teeth and lack of desire to parlay their success into piles of dollars.

Webb: “Maybe I should be in a juice bar in LA, hobnobbing with Ricky Gervais and all those A-list stars who don’t seem to like him.”

Mitchell: “I’ve been to LA once and I didn’t like it much, because the job of being a comedian or on telly is not interesting. It’s what everyone does. So if you get into this for a bit of attention – and fundamentally everyone does – you get more here than in LA.”

Webb: “I’d have to get a wig. I’ll wait until I can play a butler.”

Mitchell: “Hugh Laurie has done well, but I think when House is over he’ll come back. I can’t see him drinking pina coladas with Eric Idle. You get paid more for a crappy cameo in a terrible film than for something worthwhile here. But it totally destroys the point.”

More likely they believe their sketch-writing flow will eventually coagulate into narrative comedies. “You want to be in Kingdom, don’t you?” Webb accuses Mitchell, referring to the ho-hum mainstream Stephen Fry vehicle. They are both accomplished, often oddly touching, actors with greater range than Gervais or even Steve Coogan.

But it turns out that despite a solid five years of success, both still feel Peep Show levels of unease. “We’re both terrified by the fact that television seems to be dying and being replaced by YouTube,” says Mitchell. “There are all these people who say we should be enterprising with new media. But we don’t want to be enterprising! Make a viral… No, show a clip of the thing we spent time and effort and money making. We want people to commission a programme normally and it to go on one of the four channels – because why do we need any more than that? – so people have got to watch it.

“We’re in the helicopter now,” he says, only half-joking. “It’s time to pull up the ladder.”

That Mitchell and Webb Look starts on February 21 on BBC2 at 9pm