Another week, another episode. Here’s more of the sketchy list like what I did last week:

Radar 1

Dirty Pantomime

Animal Hospital 1: As first read out loud at the Drill Hall rehearsal sessions.

Radar 2

Numberwang Game: Hurrah! It works!

Tina Two Heads: With actual real CGI!

Colin & Ray 1 – 1471: The second studio recording’s main set. Stage hands came on and moved the clock’s hands forwards between this and the next sketch in the series.

Radar 3

Evil Villain Lair 1 – Builder: Returning charactter from series 1, and tried out originally at the Drill Hall.

Radar 4

Colin & Ray 2 – Porn storylines: The football, bluetooth & time traveller ones are still to come.

Animal Hospital 2: From Drill Hall sessions.

Lazy Writers: Speedo 1

Behind the scenes: Gay t-shirt

Evil Villain Lair 2 – Trap door: See above for more waffle.

Lazy Writers: Speedo 2

Fact! None of this week’s material was from the radio series and the writers were David Mitchell and Robert Webb, James Bachman and Mark Evans, and John Finnemore.

A new series of The Unbelievable Truth is being recorded at The Shaw Theatre on the 16th, 25th and 30th April. It’s the radio show about truths and lies with David Mitchell and not the television show about truths and lies with David Mitchell. For free tickets booking click here.

I couldn’t resist…

From Digital Spy:

‘Mitchell & Webb’ return draws 1.4m
Friday, February 22 2008, 16:31 GMT

By Dave West, Media Correspondent

The first in a new series of That Mitchell and Webb Look attracted an audience of 1.4m, or a 5.8% share. Though this figure beat its previous series average of 1.1m (6.1%), it trailed the channel’s 2007 slot average of 2m (8.6%) and was easily outpaced by BBC One and ITV1.

Ashes to Ashes’ audience continued to fall from the series opener’s 7m to gain 5.8m (24.4%) for BBC One last night. It is also firmly lower than the average of 6.5m (25.5%) for the first series of Life On Mars, but remained 800,000 above last year’s slot performance.

On ITV1 Trial and Retribution earned 4.1m (17.3%) while Five equalled BBC Two’s 1.4m (6%) with Uefa Cup football from 7.30pm to 10.10pm. Cutting Edge instalment My Street drew 2.2m (9.1%) at 9pm for Channel 4.

Here’s the Super Geek Uber Fan Sketch List Thing for that first episode. It might not make much sense to most readers but since when has that stopped me in the past?

Helivets 1-Dog. The first of three that were shown at the first studio recording.

Congo re-enactment: Very David Mitchelly, very good. But a bit racist.

Everard Horne ward: A nice simple (but not in that way) one-off sketch.

Padlockigami: Filmed on 3rd August 2007, so long ago. I swear I can hear specific laughs on that one as we were freaked out at the recording.

Sky Sports 4: Originally from That Mitchell And Webb Sound series 2 episode 1. I’m such a geek.

Reality-based films: Filmed in front of a live (mostly) studio audience on 10th August 2007 with VT inserts from Pinewood recording. Fact!

Sir Digby at the fairground / kids party: A rare returning character due to popular demand. Probably. I am not so sure.

Bronze Orientation Day: Originally from That Mitchell And Webb Sound series 3 episode 1. Available on CD!

The Boy With An Arse For A Face: There are several more of these Sensitive Freakshow characters coming up.

Behind the scenes – Garden.

The Numberwang Code: Actually funnier in its rehearsal form without visuals, as seen (but mostly heard) in May at The Lovely Drill Hall.

Behind the scenes – Garden again.

Extreme Negative Feedback: Good silly bit of slapstick.

Next Thursday: Some other funny stuff. Marvellous.

From yesterday’s Culture Show:

Numberwang guys

Mitchell & Webb are back, with new sketches and – yikes! – a highly eroticised Peep Show. Julia Raeside catches up with them…

Saturday February 16, 2008
The Guardian

Mitchell & Webb are currently entrenched in Operation Fingers in Pies: not only have they finished the second series of their Bafta-winning sketch show, they’re filming a fifth series of Peep Show and writing a book. You’d probably think this Cambridge-educated pair would have little time for daydreaming about one day becoming Doctor Who. But appearances can be deceptive…

The new series of That Mitchell & Webb Look features just two returning sketches from series one…

David Mitchell: We prioritised writing new things from the start. Sketch shows need variety.

Robert Webb: Plus, we’re easily bored.

If you could do a Morecambe & Wise-style Christmas special, which celebrities would you invite?

RW: The Queen. I don’t think we’d get her.

DM: Well, you can get the prime minister these days. Apparently, that’s not beneath the dignity of his office.

The writers of Peep Show say that the new series will be the “dating series”. Does “dating” mean “lots of embarrassing sex scenes”?

DM: Yes, but fortunately they’re a lot easier in Peep Show because of the point-of-view filming thing. All you see is faces.

RW: Yes, a very nice cameraman called Nick Martin bounces up and down on top of you politely.

Can you see Peep Show going on beyond a fifth series?

RW: We always assume it’s the last one. But I think all four of us [Mitchell, Webb and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong] want to carry on as long as people will let us. I think the older our characters get, the more desperate they get and the higher the stakes really.

DM: And when it finally does get axed, 10 years down the line we’ve got a potential commission for…

RW: …Whatever Happened To The Boys From Peep Show?

You’ve a book out in 2009, too…

DM: We want it to be about how to cope with modern life.

RW: Yeah, articles about how to cope with a racist taxi driver…

DM: …or a party where no one knows you.

So now there are two David Mitchells in the publishing industry?

DM: I’m annoyed that this other guy exists. Occasionally people ask me to do a quote for a book. I’ve decided from now on to give grim, vulgar quotes which people might then attribute to him. “Ooh, I’m surprised that rather sensitive novelist said that thing about tits.”

Where do you keep your Bafta awards? Is it the toilet?

RW: The toilet is a double bluff. It’s like, “I’m so modest I keep it in the toilet” – the one room where it’s guaranteed everyone will see it.

DM: If it was in my toilet it would have to be on the floor where piss-splatter could get on it. I have more respect for it than that. I mean, I kiss it good night.

RW: I’ve got a Bafta pillowcase and a Bafta duvet. We’re just really into Bafta now. We’re always hanging out there. See you at Bafta!

You’re film stars, too. Rob, did your family see your big part as a naturist in Confetti?

RW: I’m very embarrassed to say my grandfather’s watched Confetti several times because it’s been going round on a loop.

Is he unable to change channel?

RW: Yes, he’s trapped in front of the TV and he can’t move. Because he can’t walk! I actually went to see it myself. It’s the only time I’ve ever been to see a film slightly in disguise – a hat and sunglasses. There were only a couple of other people there, but you don’t want to be recognised going to watch yourself naked in a film.

And David, you made a film with Michelle Pfeiffer. Did she liquify you with her white-hot sexuality?

DM: She was very pleasant, polite and quiet. I was just sort of freaked out by it. Suddenly you’re doing a scene with Michelle Pfeiffer, then just as quickly this odd thing stops happening and life goes back to normal. Odd.

Your faces have been on massive posters. Was that uncomfortable?

RW: When the Mac ad campaign was in full swing, I quickened my pace as I went past certain bus stops. My wife told me that she loyally took a piece of chewing gum off my nose once.

Why do you think you two hit it off at Cambridge?

RW: I think we laugh at the same things and make each other laugh. And we’re not temperamentally all that different.

Life been quite pleasant for you so far, with all the money and praise…

RW: I’m delighted. But if I told my 18-year-old self that one day I’d have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he’d just drum his fingers and go, “When? How long is that going to take?” “Well, when you’re 35.” “When I’m 30 fucking what?”

What’s your idea of TV hell?

RW: Mine would be a Jeremy Kyle-type show. Where people who are having a bad time are encouraged to shout and cry on television.

DM: But to be honest, if I watched it, I’d get into it.

Seriously?

DM: Well, Trisha maybe. I’m not sure about Jeremy Kyle because he is so odious.

And your favourite shows?

DM: The Simpsons and Inspector Morse.

RW: The West Wing and Doctor Who.

Do either of you fancy being Doctor Who?

RW: I’d kill to be Doctor Who. Maybe they could make the Doctor two people? He has got two hearts after all.

DM: No. I think either of us would happily play the role – alone.

RW: Just to make sure the other one didn’t get it.

DM: And then refuse to regenerate.

· That Mitchell & Webb Look, Thu, 9pm, BBC2

Telegraph, 16th February 2008

David Mitchell and Robert Webb return with a new series of their comedy sketch show. They tell Michael Deacon about beating Catherine Tate to a Bafta and those Mac ads…

Last year, David Mitchell and Robert Webb won a Bafta for Best Comedy Programme, for the first series of their BBC2 sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look. You might imagine that such an achievement would have seen its makers rewarded with a lavish budget increase. Not in these straitened times. For their second series, they wanted to do a spoof of Sky Sports’ gushing football trailers. Then they learnt that a single clip of a Premier League goal would cost their budget for an episode. Their production team offered them some affordable alternative footage, but the pair weren’t entirely satisfied. ‘The feeling was,’ says Mitchell drily, ‘that non-league Northern Irish football wouldn’t quite pass for Chelsea v Manchester United.’

Still, they managed to complete the sketch, with Mitchell, as a boomingly enthusiastic Sky Sports presenter, striding round the pitch of lower-league side QPR, accompanied by no goal footage – and it’s no less funny for it. You can see it in the new series’s first episode on Thursday.

‘It takes me round a fascinating region of the world that I think isn’t in the forefront of everyone’s mind,’ says the 35-year-old reporter. ‘It’s one of the most arid regions of the world – there’s the Kalahari desert in Namibia and Botswana, the Atacama desert in Chile. But it’s got variety as well: the Andes mountains in South America, Madagascar, the beauty of Mozambique.’

That Mitchell and Webb Look doesn’t have a lot in common with the other most popular sketch shows of recent years, Little Britain and The Catherine Tate Show. Though not family-friendly to a degree that would have pleased Mary Whitehouse (the first new episode does, after all, contain a documentary spoof titled The Boy with an Arse for a Face), it’s witty, intelligent and lacking in foul-mouthed grandmothers or projectile-vomiting WI members.

Also, it doesn’t rely on catchphrases. Of series one’s few recurring sketches, only three – those involving the absurd game show Numberwang, the lazy TV script writers and the drunk tramp/sleuth Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar – appear in series two. ‘We looked back at the recurring sketches from the first series, and for most of them we felt, “We’ve done that now”,’ says Mitchell.

One thing that fans will find familiar is that, once again, a lot of the sketches are parodies of TV shows. This, according to Webb, is not so much a matter of artistic policy, as the happy outcome of procrastination. ‘We’ll be watching daytime TV in order to avoid writing,’ he admits, ‘but the programmes will actually give us ideas.’

The pair met at Cambridge in the mid-Nineties, and joined the university’s legendary comedy troup, the Footlights (whose alumni include Peter Cook, Fry & Laurie and half of the Monty Python team). ‘We wrote some shockers while we were students,’ says Webb. ‘I remember a sketch called Sinking Economist, which was about an economist who was on a boat that was sinking, while he was coming out with all these shit economic theories.’ (‘You see the very on-the-nose satirical point we were making,’ says Mitchell.)

After university, they made a sketch series for the now-defunct digital channel Play UK (The Mitchell & Webb Situation), before landing their big-break roles on Channel 4’s gleefully dark sitcom Peep Show. For some time, though, their respective parents fretted about such a financially insecure career choice. ‘I think my dad relaxed when I turned up on Radio 4,’ says Webb. ‘That meant it was definitely going to be fine.’

‘He’s obviously got no idea about the pay scales on Radio 4,’ says Mitchell.

At any rate, last year’s Bafta confirmed their place among British comedy’s rising stars. Much to the horror – or so it seemed – of Catherine Tate, whose show had been shortlisted in the same category. Last year’s cermony was broadcast on TV – and, as the winners’ names were read out, the camera cut to a shot of Tate, looking aghast.

Mitchell is diplomatic about her response. ‘I think it would be a lot better if at awards ceremonies people were honest like that,’ he says. ‘It’s rather insulting to the occasion if you look like you couldn’t give a shit.’

That’s not to say he or Webb are immune to insult – they’ve tried to resist reading internet comedy forums since appearing in last year’s ubiquitous ‘PC and Mac’ advert campaign for Apple. Snootier comedy fans sniffed that the pair had ‘sold out’, although, as Webb points out, ‘We’d never said we wouldn’t do adverts, or that Macs are rubbish, or that advertising is wrong.’

Still, Mitchell is able to look on the bright side. ‘People do get very angry about comedy,’ he says, ‘but that’s fundamentally because they care about it. I don’t suppose you get many people being angry about Holby City.’

That Mitchell and Webb Look starts on BBC2 on Thursday, 21 February at 9.00pm

How… odd.

The old radio ‘All the football all the time’ sketch is coming to a television set near you…

… as the publicity campaign goes into overdrive!

David and Robert are featured in the new Radio Times talking about writing their sketches (about 60% of the show) due to That Mitchell & Webb Look returning on Thurdsay 21st February on BBC2 at 9PM.

They are also on The Culture Show on Saturday 16th February on BBC2 at 7:10 PM. Which explains the above photo of them two with that Grace Dent.

Random fact: David is a guest in the first episode of Lilly Allen’s potetially misjudged chat show Lily Allen and Friends, which is on BBC Three tonight (Tuesday 12th February) at 10:30 PM.

Both Mitchell and Webb were on Jonathan Ross’ radio show last Saturday (8th February) which will be available to listen / listen again / listen again and again on the brand spanking new BBC iPlayer thing. What fun.