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come up with ways of dressing sketch shows up as other things – giving them ‘themes’. Maybe all the characters know each other, or do the same job, or are related, or live in the same place? Maybe the end of one sketch leads into the start of another? Maybe there’s a theme of ‘modern life’ or ‘relationships’ or ‘food’ or ‘totalitarianism’?
For ages we’d bought into the notion that a sketch show needs something like this – something unifying to make audiences keep watching, like they do with a sitcom. But, by 2002, we’d realised that was nonsense. No sketch show theme can ever give it a through-line which will attract anything like the audience loyalty that you get for a sitcom. In a sitcom, you can properly get to know characters and follow their lives – a good one like Cheers inspires huge audience love and support. People will keep watching just to spend time with those characters, even in patches where the scripts aren’t as good as they could be. In terms of repeat-viewing appeal, even the most heavily themed sketch show is hugely outgunned by the most lazily-plotted sitcom.
The only way a sketch show clings to viewers is by being funny and by providing variety – so, if an audience member dislikes one sketch, they’ll have some faith that the next might be different and therefore preferable. An overarching theme hampers both of these potential strengths: it makes the show less varied and it precludes some jokes. In my experience, you’ve no sooner decided on your sketch show concept than you’re frustrated by the discovery of a nugget of comedy gold that doesn’t fit in.
So, if you want audience loyalty, write a sitcom. If you’re doing a sketch show, accept the limitations of the form: you’re only ever as funny as your last joke. To try and deny that truth is like putting on a ballet and complaining that all the performers have to dance the whole time. But, when discussing radio pitches with Gareth, we were almost shy to say that we wanted to do a straightforward, theme-less sketch show. But he was fine about it, saying the theme could be that ‘every sketch has one of David Mitchell or Robert Webb in it and sometimes both’. That suited us, and theme-less it was. We could have a pair of snooker commentators, bemoaning the teetotal approach of modern players:
PETER: Look at John Parrott sitting there, staring mournfully at his water.
TED: Look at that. You could put a goldfish in that glass. And it wouldn’t even die.
Some eager party hosts reminiscing about the tremendous fun they’d had hanging out with Hitler:
ROBERT: I love it when he goes off on one. It’s so funny, and not a little persuasive.
DAVID: I know. But some of the things he was saying about Tube workers. I mean, we know him, so we know it’s not racist, it’s just very very clever irony.
Or an animal charity appeal:
Soft-spoken voiceover
For the price of a cataract operation which would restore this Sudanese woman’s sight, you could fund months of trawling up and down motorways looking for kittens. For the £3 a month that could equip an Ethiopian farmer with seeds and tools, you could be providing a lifetime’s doggie biscuits for this Labrador that wees itself every time it hears the Hoover.
After recording a pilot at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, Radio 4 commissioned a series.
In some ways this was more promising than Peep Show. As an opportunity, it had fewer possibilities but it was a more established, respectable achievement: our own comedy show on the old Home Service, rather than a late-night Channel 4 experiment that might disappear. It was a good thing for my parents to tell their friends about. Also, it was a show Rob and I were primarily writing ourselves. Getting laughs both for your material and your performance isn’t just twice as good as one or the other. It is roughly 3.2 times as good. I have done the maths on this.
The recordings, held at the Drill Hall Theatre off Tottenham Court Road, were very exciting occasions for me. I invited everyone I had an e-mail address for – this was our chance to perform comedy professionally in front of friends who’d seen us monkey around for years as amateurs. The consequent atmosphere was warm and supportive,