From Comedy Stalker Supremo Cheryl’s blog:

Last night the Mitchell and Webb gang got together and pretty much took up the whole of the front row to enjoy last night’s last one. We had the the 3 billionaires who ring up randomly selected numbers to announce you have won a massive yacht, the corner shop sketch which was a real surprise for us all, Robert getting naked, Robert shagging Oliva Coleman *does face* and hole in the ring (from the Drill Hall Times). We had good old Lucy Porter last night instead of that woman Julia Morris, who, lets face it, is bloody crap compared to Lucy. Aww she even pointed out Dan and asked how his wedding went. How ace was that? I will meet her one day, I will. Just need to find out when she’s doing a gig and go along I think. So yes overal another fantastic evening all round. The show is due on the tv in September before they go on tour on BBC2 (yessssssss thats where the best ones go). Oh another thing about last night, some of the sketches were filmed during the day. How do I know that? Well thanks to Penny, she bin-dived into this bag right in front of her and found a torn in half piece of yellow paper saying about what sketches had been done during the day so they could show on the VT. I had one half and penny had the other. It was all good and reminded me of the Plesances Times.

Now what will i do on my Friday nights now?

That Mitchell And Webb Look is coming to BBC2 in September… and we went to the final recording session tonight at that BBC place. So that’s seven times we’ve been out to things related to this show. Madness, but worth every minute of it. Apart from a few of the minutes with Julia Morris doing warm-up of course. No rapport with the crowd, you see!

Unlike Dame Lucy Porter, who made her triumphant return to that job tonight and is such a comedy nerd that she sat on the floor and watched the show while she was not warming us up. More like cooling us down due to the weather but anyway… She came on, said hello to me and the husband as we were in the front row because I am a geek, and that made us feel happy and nerdy and self conscious. Being asked about your recent wedding and its best presents (but no wedding gift list, oh no) in front of a studio full of strangers is pretty odd but good. The rest of our lot were happy to have a warm-up with that audience rapport thing. Hurrah! And on with the show…

We had the joy of seeing some brand new sketches that weren’t from the radio series or the various warm-up nights (although we might have forgotten a few things) such as the future classic ‘biscuit telekinesis man’ and the stroppy ‘Captain Pugwash man’ down the pub. I shall say no more about these so as not to ruin them but I nearly laughed myself sick. We also admired the “massive yachts” eccentric phoneline millionaires, the German version of Numberwang, the rare Wordwang, the marvellous heroin sketch featuring a brilliant Gran Christmas present gag, and some visualisations of old radio gems like the cornershop lager man, the new Fuhrer, and the drycleaning business naming sketch. It is, in fact, better than Little Britain. Yes, that’s the show that ran for one series on BBC2 then they made no more! Remember it? It was great! Merchandise? I think you’re confusing it with something else!
The ‘children’ from MySpace enjoyed themselves too! It’s a win-win situation!

Tonight (technically now yesterday) was That Mitchell & Webb Look night two. Following on from night one last Friday, I was a bit worried that it would be overly familiar and with rubbish warm-up (tepid at best, the warmth was outside) and luckily it was better than I had prepared myself for…

I was without Lovely Husband who is in Leicester at the moment. I am now all alone at home on my blog, typing in the fucking oppressive heat in no rush to go to the empty bed. Bah. I am also, shockingly, blogging nude. It’s hot and no-one will be offended. Anyway, he’s not here and wasn’t there and it’s all a bit soppy. We did have the hardcore audience team tonight consisting of me, Mr Bookshop, Mr Bookshop’s wife Wendy, That Cheryl the comedy stalker, Cheryl’s friend who we have named Jenny Eclair Junior, Jenny Junior’s friend who did a silly voice all night for reasons unknown, that Rob from Not BBC and his lady friend, but no Clive as he had to stay home and look after R2D2…

Alas, we had Julia Morris doing her ‘lack of a bond with the audience but fuck it’ version of warm-up where she just did her same stand up as last week and called us ‘kids’ and ‘darling’ a few times. Yuck. But then the main act(s) turned it completely around with a load more snooker commentators sketches. They were based again on the radio sketches but with added props, and this time focused on making cocktails and being gay. Nerdy fans will know which sketches I mean and everyone else will just have to wait until September to see it on the telly…

The other studio-bound sketch series was the triumphant return of Big Talk! It was pretty much a re-shoot of the pilot one filmed with us audience members but it was still rather very good and it brought back Mr Paterson Joseph! Hurrah, Johnson’s returned! He was also in a couple of slightly tweaked Numberwang sketches on VT (including, of course, Wangernumb) which were pretty much the final versions from the second rehearsal night at Ginglik. All bloody marvellous of course!

Other VT stuff included the wonderful Green Clarinet which made Cheryl’s evening and was everything we had hoped for. They had also used the ‘passing time playing solitaire’ in Heaven sketch, the evil vicar from the same series as the evil waiter, some more ‘this is television’ moments, and one of my favourites: The Wacky TV Historian, which had mostly just me and Cheryl in hysterics much louder than anybody else so I shall keep an ear out for the laughter track…

Next week: The final part. Bah!

Look! It’s Webb & Mitchell from that other universe!

A review of the first night of That Mitchell And Webb Look at BBC TV Centre from Clive’s blog:

It’s a new sketch show from those talented men who star in Peep Show, and it deserves to be more popular that Little Britain! Due to my Comedy Connections I managed to push into the front with my blog father. Enough with the confused concept of having blog parents and onto the show. Well it was very amusing, a couple of times it went into Little Britain territory with a series of sketches which involved Robert Webb saying “Not like that, but maybe like that” That was my only real gripe about the show, maybe I’m a little put off catchphrase comedy after the rapid decline in Little Britain (There was only 1 series of Little Britain according to my Blog Parent Dan, I’m more than happy to go along with this!).

I enjoyed the sketches about the social discomfort of using traffic lights and asking for a chair in a pub (I very much identified with this), sketches which were probably all David Mitchell’s creation. Sketches from the radio series were of course given the TV treatment as with all Radio to TV Shows, these were probably the sketches I liked the least (Well what with already being familiar with them) but they added some nice visual bits to them. Favourite sketch? Probably a sketch involving David and Robert both playing Sherlok Holmes in the same film.

Other grumbles? Well the warm up person was rather annoying, one Julia Morris who I cringed when ever they brought her on. A quiet muttering of “No don’t bring her on” Oh and that my buttocks were rather numb by the end of the evening, and that the fat family infront was rather unamused by it, oh and having to wait over 20 minutes for the circle line, I wanted to get home to my lovely student house (I will blog about that, really!).

What happened previously….

As usual, I was the first one to arrive at TV Centre for the inevitable queue for ‘That Mitchell And Webb Look’ (The Actual TV Series Filming Day One). There was a confused old woman standing there too but she wasn’t in a self-contained queue, she was just standing, as they tend to do. Queue person numbers two and three arrived soon afterwards and took photographs of each other standing outside the Beeb for some reason. Queue person number four then arrived, with bad male dyed blond hair and was not part of their group so decided to stand in front of them and therefore behind me. Being English, they said nothing. Person number five was My Lovely Husband and then I lost count for a bit. It turned into a Famerlee Day Out/School Trip eventually, with Mister And Mrs Pub Quiz joining us, followed by our Blog Children Clive (who was the most famous person I met that day) and R2Potato (don’t ask) and Cheryl and finally Ms Bookshop who has no weblink so there’s no clicking on her name…

After the obligatory waiting around and setting off the metal detector (is the BBC an airport? I had to remove my ‘far too metal’ belt again!) on the way in we had chocolate and tea and other beverages before going over to the studio, looking unimpressed about the ‘Celebrity’ Boxing that was being done that evening and then waiting outside studio 4 for what seemed like forever while they let the production guests in first, even though they have their own allocated seating rows that nobody else would take anyway. The proper hardcore prodction guests always turn up late anyway as they’re far too important to queue. Yes, Jonathan Ross’ wife with that pink hair and a group of teenaged girls with similar interesting hair lifestyle choices, I mean you. We got a load of second row seats, which was nice, with a good view of the monitors and a quite startling view of a very very obese woman and what I imagine was her very very obese son and his delightful bum crack as he stood up. A good view inches of actual bum right in front of me. I had to verbalise it but I don’t think he heard over the munching of the crisps that I am sure he had stored in his mother’s hair. Probably. God only knows how they coped with the tiny chairs as I felt like I had several deep vein thromboses (what’s the plural of thrombosis anyway?) by the end of the very very long evening…

We expected a sparkling warm-up with a rapport with the crowd who would make those boring moments where they set up shots fly by with titters and guffaws. But Lucy Porter wasn’t there. This upset the ladies behind us who turned out to be the very same noisy rowdy (but in a good way) girls who shared the audience limelight with me at the ‘That Mitchell And Webb Look’ pilot recording. The tiny world just shrunk a little bit more. Is it global warming? I blame the Chelsea Tractors. Anyway, I digress as usual. We got Julia Morris as warm-up. She hadn’t read the manual. A burst of her stand up routine at the beginning, nothing wrong with that, and then she buggered off a lot between the main funny bits. Occasional returns to do more ‘observations’ about PMT (comedy for girls!) do not make the audience warm to you, Julia! I shall forgive her as she was pregnant and was probably weeing a lot. Not in the corner of the studio as there are way too many cables for such a health and safety faux-pas…

So, Mitchell and Webb themselves? Good stuff as usual. As we had been to four evenings of this material already the novelty was wearing off in places. They filmed a few sketches but they were mostly radio ones made visual and some of them were the same ones they filmed in the studio for the pilot. Snooker Commentators, Party Planners and the one that goes “Not cancer but like cancer but not cancer, yes, it’s cancer” were performed in front of us and all were good but we’d been there and done that before. Still love them though and it’s going to be a brilliant televisual sketch show on the telly one day. The VT stuff got better reactions from me anyway. They filmed Chip & Pin! It’s their ‘Pirate Memory Game’ in my opinion. A majority of the VT sketches were from the rehearsals (but not the weird garden centre sketch which was new and great) as expected and some of them were re-shot pilot VTs, meaning that Patterson Joseph isn’t in the show anymore! This is an outrage! He’s probably off making a film or doing Shakespeare or something anyway…

And then we left the BBC at some crazy late hour. We lost Cheryl and her friend who had got their late but not too late, so Clive went to Paddington on his own. Everybody else got their tube but we had to go on the other branch bit so waited. All was well until we got one stop along the line and had to get off due to a person under the train. How flipping careless.

Now we know why Paterson Joseph’s scenes from the That Mitchell And Webb Look pilot have been re-shot without him: He’s been filming a new BBC 1 comedy pilot with Johnny Vegas in Canvey Island! Yes, the hometown of My Lovely Husband has been busy with the comedy recently. They have been making Fire Station at a fire station (whatever next?) in Canvey (although they had to use a pole in Leigh On Sea) and also in a studio somewhere less grotty aka TV Centre last night. And no, I didn’t go see it. Bah!

But the bigger question is… is he in Peep Show 4?