Radio Review: That Mitchell and Webb Sound

Mitchell and Webb are back on the airwaves, and very funny with it, says Elisabeth Mahoney.

Good to have them back on radio in a sketch show. Mitchell on his own as a game show host has not exactly proved a whizz though Webb, as a fine performance in a Friday Play on Radio 4 showed, is a very good actor. But together they're funnier than anything in this slot has been for months (not difficult, I grant you) because, combined, they achieve and maintain genuine momentum and their taste in scripts is first-rate. I only hope when you read this you haven't heard the same bit trailed so often you'd rather expire than listen.

How nice to see that, despite an increasing television profile for their sketch show, David Mitchell and Robert Webb have not turned their back on Radio 4. This new six-part series also includes something that was dearly missing from the last TV series - the effortless comic delights of Olivia Colman.

360 Degrees: Mitchell and Webb

Comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb started life on radio, so when BBC producers had to make a red-button package to accompany the new series of BBC2's That Mitchell and Webb Look/c], it made sense to mine their unused Radio 4 sketches.

I wonder if David Mitchell and Robert Webb have many duppy to feed. They're certainly working hard: Peep Show, plus a film, Magicians, and those awful Apple Mac adverts (the duppies could have gorged themselves on that cheque). And now another series of That Mitchell and Webb Sound. Like all their work, I think I won't really like it and then find myself tuning in and laughing like a drain. It's always at the same thing, which is the chubby uncool feller (is he Mitchell? Or Webb?) getting angry. This week he lost his rag about footie fans becoming too immersed in the game, deciding to do the same with Raiders of the Lost Ark. 'At the end we're tied to a stake in the ground, and you lot open the Ark of the Covenant, and the wrath of God comes out and melts your face,' he snarled. Said by Chubby, this was hilarious.

Radio Review

When their sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound, first appeared on Radio 4 a few years ago, they weren't yet celebrities and their show was fresh, funny, inventive, daring.

Mitchell and Webb Review

The radio show features topical humour without trying too hard to be up-to-the-minute, delivers satisfyingly dark material without striving to shock, and has a presiding intelligence that makes you want to weep with gratitude.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb have put together a wonderful radio comedy programme of satirical sketches. The show is a relativly quick-fire montage of sketches, which manages to be topical while not directly impersonating or parodying any specific figures, in the same way the shows such as Dead Ringers do.

The live-in lovers have finally made it to the altar; the groom is reading the wedding vows he wrote himself. We're both well past 30 now, and unless we get married we should probably split up, he says. But I'm buggered if I'm carrying all those books back down four flights of stairs... Will you be my first wife?

This cynical little scene comes from the sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound, a cut or three above most current radio comedy. If you're sufficiently twisted, you'll also enjoy a wicked spoof of those so-serious charity appeals, this time for Hairdressers Sans Frontières: This is Mwerere. She has to walk 15 miles every day to collect clean water... That's why I gave her this short, very manageable look.