That Guardian Review Thing
Brian Logan
Tuesday October 24, 2006 The Guardian
It’s been a meteoric year for David Mitchell and Robert Webb. The sitcom in which they star, Peep Show, has attained a cultish popularity, and their Radio 4 sketch show last month flitted to BBC2. But there’s no sense of a distinctive new voice in comedy, on the second night of this touring live set. Smart and watchable though the duo may be, The Two Faces of Mitchell and Webb is a highly conventional sketch show – with the conventional ratio of hits to misses – that leans heavily on the barely established catchphrases of their month-old TV series.
Certain TV sequences are recreated verbatim, and little effort has been made to re-imagine the format for the live arena. It’s just a succession of largely unrelated scenes, the sum of which isn’t big enough, in terms either of laughs or theatricality, to fill venues such as Southampton’s cavernous Guildhall. The only overarching narrative features Mitchell and Webb’s co-stars James Bachman and Abigail Burdess who, in a series of interludes, imply deep frustration with their supporting status. It’s a provocatively near-the-knuckle gag that, like much else in this show, stops just short of being funny.
The sketches, meanwhile, vary in quality and subject without ever suggesting what unique perspective Mitchell and Webb are bringing to the comedy table. Sometimes, they are scatological. Sometimes, they are plain silly – as with the spoof game show Numberwang. The cannibalising of pop culture continues with Big Talk, a sub-Brass Eye spoof on highbrow TV, and a running skit, by which I was nonplussed, about two loose-tongued snooker commentators.
I don’t think populist catchphrase-peddling plays to the pair’s strengths. They are far funnier when satirical or unashamedly erudite, as when Mitchell punctures Sky TV’s football hype (“Massively mattering to someone, presumably!”), or when two Nazis discuss the semiotics of their uniform (“Are we the baddies?”).
This show may find its feet on the road. For now, it’s an only sketchily successful transfer from small screen to stage.
What have we learned from this interview? The warm-ups went well. The tour starts tomorrow. They’re filming the 
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