Those newspaper reviews
Random review:
Alice-Azania Jarvis in The Independent:
Ah. Another prime-time comedy from the BBC. Brace yourselves, fun-lovers. Actually, this one isn’t bad. It may not be Peep Show, but give me That Mitchell and Webb Look over Kröd and his (not-so)-merry men any day. The problem I’ve always had with sketch shows is the transparency of the thought process. The really great ones are either so extremely astute as to poke fun at something everyone can recognise but no one’s noticed, or they’re so left-field as to be absurd.
Not too worry. Last night delivered, on the whole. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either, and it was a considerable improvement on the rather mediocre first two series. We could, probably, have done without the door-bell replacing, dog-firing cannon, but the hopeless spooks with their floating duck disguises and newspaper peepholes were laugh-out-loud funny, as was the competitive dinner-party chat between rocket scientist and brain surgeon, though I think my favourite would have to be the poor community-support policeman who’s ridiculed for being unable to commit police brutality, only, you guessed it, “community support brutality”. I wonder if that happens? Probably.
Random magazine cover:
Random review:
Tim Teeman in The Times:
The third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look revealed that David Mitchell and Robert Webb (for ever Flashdance respect, Mr W) can flit more deftly than Lucas between comedy series (Peep Show) and sketch show. The first of the sketches encapsulated Mitchell and Webb’s grasp of comic brevity: it gently satirised the conventions of a Poirot mystery. As their unmasking approached, the killer suddenly acquired a villainous voice and cigarette holder. The duo also made a very funny joke out of that thing we do when looking around the house for something, patting both our pockets as we rock on our knees.
Best of all was a satire of The Apprentice, which had the duo as TV executives watching a tape of a show featuring a relatively meek CEO – a Sugar-lite – dismissing a contestant politely and apologetically. But it didn’t quite work, the executives thought, and so rethought the concept. “We deliberately pick 16 idiots – real idiots, arseholes as well,” one of the men said, “and then we watch them screw everything up.” But honestly, who would want to watch that?
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