Gareth Edwards, producer of new Channel 4 sketch show, Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping, explains in this ‘interview’ how the new show from the comedy duo came about.
Gareth: So you’re the producer of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping?
Gareth: Yes, and so are you.
Gareth: That’s a good point. So if I may start with an obvious question, isn’t it a bit silly to do this as a Q and A when it’s actually just you writing this?
Gareth: Well, ever since I can remember, I’ve loved silliness, and if that silliness is self-referential, even better. That’s actually part of the origin story of Mitchell and Webb are Not Helping. Back in the late nineties I came across David and Rob in a very hot attic (it’s OK, it was the Edinburgh Festival). They were being magnificently silly and self-referential in a sketch show set in space, and I fell in love with their comedy. I left a note in their pigeon hole, because this was the olden days when that was a normal way to communicate, and we’ve worked together ever since.
Gareth: So does that mean the new series is going to be self-referential?
Gareth: Sometimes, yes. Alongside a huge range of sketches in a huge range of settings and time periods every episode has at least one moment in a sort of fictional version of a writers’ room where David, Rob and our core cast, Stevie Martin, Krystal Evans, Lara Ricote and Kiell Smith Bynoe, discuss the other sketches in the show, or in one case an imaginary sketch you never get to see “for legal reasons”. It’s a fun way to push over the fourth wall.
Gareth: So did you have actual writing rooms to create the series?
Gareth: Yes, six of them, with David, Rob, our cast and a handful of other writers, some experienced and some new. It was a lovely process, encouraging a room full of funny people to come up with sketches about anything, set anywhere. It’s liberating. Also exhausting. After about three hours everyone begins to run out of energy (and if it’s a badly ventilated room, oxygen). Then they each take an idea or two they like and write them up, and over the weeks we build up a collection of about 300 sketches.
Gareth: So you just go ahead and film all of those?
Gareth: Haha, bless you, no. David Rob and I boil these down via a lot of debate among ourselves, then with our legendary exec Kenton Allen and the lovely and supportive Joe Hullait and Charlie Perkins at Channel 4, and we have a try out night for some of the material we aren’t sure about. Then eventually we get to about a hundred or so sketches we share with the production team. And that’s when the bright-eyed bunny of the show as we’ve imagined it meets the scary shark of reality.
Gareth: How does a bunny meet a shark?
Gareth: Well, it’s a collision of two very different ecosystems. The “do anything, go anywhere woodland” ecosystem, which is a great place for a writer’s imagination to hop about, and the “OK but we actually have to work out how to turn this into some television” ocean ecosystem where we make the show. In this case we had five weeks to film the whole series due to availability, especially availability of money, and also it was February and we were in a disused printworks in North London…
So that’s where the creative problem solving comes in. Our wonderful director David Sant, our incredibly positive 1st AD Tim Wood, our infinitely patient line producer Jo Alloway and I spent hours working out how to turn the silliest of ideas into actual pictures on screen. Discussions like “Trust me, you do not want to dig a grave in the woods at night.” “Bad news! It’s going to take four hours to turn David and Rob into aliens!” and “OK, the location has a priceless Napoleonic marble table that we can’t move. We’ll have to find a different way to explode the dog.”
Then as the shoot began I watched in awe as every HOD, every department, every individual funnelled their own creative problem solving energy to make the daftness that came out of those writing rooms. We used an LCD screen in the studio to project night time woods and buried David under chocolate cake-crumb soil; our make-up team experimented until they could make an alien in under two hours; and the exploding dog? A handful of fur thrown in the air by the art department, and a lot of gore added in VFX. Every day brought new, ridiculous problems. And every day brought new creative solutions.
And so the “getting it made” shark ended up in the “go anywhere, do anything woods” after all. Did it live happily ever after? Well, watch the show and decide for yourself.
The six-part series is produced by That Mitchell & Webb Company in association with Big Talk Studios (Friday Night Dinner, Back, Ludwig), which is part of ITV Studios, and helmed by the BAFTA-winning duo’s long-standing Producer Gareth Edwards.
Jon Creamer
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