Here are a collection of James Bachman’s writings about the warm-ups for That Mitchell And Webb Look, from The Drill Hall nights to the funny converted toilet evenings at Ginglik. These are in response to comments on that comedy forum known as Cook’d and Bomb’d…
“Thanks to those here who came to Ginglik’s last night for the try-out, whether or not you liked it. It was very hot, small, smoky and with nowhere to sit for half the audience, so not our ideal venue for trying out material (in my experience a sweaty uncomfortable venue makes people much less inclined to view what you’re doing favourably, something which those of you who have been stuck in small venues at Edinburgh will I’m sure agree with). Anyway, despite that, we all thought that the evening went very well. Some sketches seemed to go down brilliantly, others not so much, but the general level of appreciation was encouraging. Some of the material did suffer from being ‘read out’ rather than performed, but that’s just one of the difficulties of trying out television sketches in this way. Occasionally you discover that you just can’t get a good idea of what people think of something when they can’t reallly ‘see’ it. Several of you have been trotting out the old cliche that the TV series doesn’t look like it’s going to be as good as the radio series, or that sketches that you have seen from the pilot aren’t as good as they were on the radio. You may be right. You’re entitled to your comparative opinion. And if you feel that way my advice would be to wait for That Mitchell and Webb Sound Series Three next year. But some of your disappointments with the way TMAWL seems to be going are I think unfounded. In particular there seems to be a sadness that, against all your hopes, the TV series now looks like it might have repeating characters or recurring sketches in it. Well, you may not remember this, but the radio series had loads of those too: Snooker Commentators, Imagine That, Big Talk, Adrian Locket the late night DJ, Jason the daytime TV presenter, the Lazy Writers, Friends Of… and that’s just the ones I can remember from the last series. A good third to a half of each radio episode was running or returning sketches from earlier in the series, and that’s probably what the TV series is going to be like also. Some of that repeated material will be re-worked radio stuff, some will be new. Numberwang is a case in point – a radio sketch that Mark Evans and I then re-wrote for the pilot, and have since written several more episodes of because we liked it and thought there were more jokes to be had (although admittedly the ‘rotating podium’ reveal in the sketch last night was not one of our best…). Robert and David also like them, the producer likes them, and we all think they should be in the show. You may not, but hopefully enough people will. I feel confident that they will. ”
“Ok, one or two of you have conceded that the radio show had runners, but ‘at least they developed over the series’. I don’t think that’s true. The Snooker Commentators talked about how players were alcoholics, or violent, or possibly gay, all in the same format and structure, in fact in almost an identical way with a good deal of the same dialogue, much as the Vicar version of the Waiter sketch is criticised for, whereas in fact the Vicar sketch only shares a couple of sentences with the Waiter one. Perhaps you just didn’t find it as funny, which is fine, I guess. As for the suggestion that there was too much ‘de-construction’ in the material last night, that is more likely a symptom of when certain types of material were written in the last few months. The previous try-out at the Drill Hall (and remember last night’s was only one of three, and there’ll be plenty of other material that you’ll never see until the actual recordings or broadcasts) contained no such stuff. So don’t worry about it being overwhelmed with that style of sketch – we were just trying out all the ‘behind the scenes’ sketches last night so that they could be sensibly compared against each other. Next. The pilot has not ‘used up all the best material’. If anything that was mainly roughly re-worked radio sketches – the only new material was the behind the scenes stuff and the Chiropractor sketch (God I wish there were more words to use than just ‘material’, ‘stuff’ and ‘sketches’). Since then anywhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty new sketches have been written for the series, and even more adapted from the radio, only some of which you will have had the chance of seeing read out rather unnaturally at these try-outs. Our hope is that when these are dressed and filmed and edited and put into a proper show they will be better than a sweaty read-through in an old Victorian toilet in Shepherds Bush. I think in the end, surprise surprise, some of you are going to love this series, some of you are going to be disappointed, some of you are going to always have hated the very idea of it and this won’t change your mind. Some of you are going to find Mitchell and Webb your favourite new comedians of the moment and come and see the tour and buy the DVDs and come on this board and others defending the show as the funniest thing on television at the moment, and some of you are going to find David monotonous, Robert smug, Olivia whiny and me fat. I hope there are more of you in the first camp than the latter. ”
“I think you take that risk whether you do a sketch that’s been tried out once or ten times. Every time comedy is performed, there’s a chance that it might die on its arse, not just the first. And you’re wrong if you think that TV sketch shows can’t go down badly. There will certainly be sketches that the try-out audiences loved that the studio audience will not laugh at, and will get cut. And there also will be sketches that have never been tried out because the makers of the show have such confidence in them that will fail terribly. Your suggestion that that doesn’t happen anymore is a little naive I think. It sort of assumes that TV is so focus-grouped and bland these days that an audience can never be disappointed, when the truth is that the audiences at recordings (certainly early on in the life of a show when no-one has yet decided they hate it on principle) are also full of strongly opinionated people such as yourself. So if we can’t use these try-outs to accurately predict whether sketches will succeed or fail, why try stuff out? Well because there’s more material been written for the series than we can afford to film or indeed have time for, and once you’ve got a hundred sketches in front of you all of which you think are funny, your ability to judge on your own which are the best without seeing how an audience responds to them goes out the window. But mainly we do them because they give us a bit of a confidence boost about the show. When you’ve been working on something for a long time, it helps to have a bit of an outside reminder that you’re not the only people who think it could be good. Because God knows our confidence in our own material goes pretty quickly without proof. And I’m sure any other comedian, young or old, would tell you the same.”
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