Are Mitchell and Webb the baddies now? It's not quite that simple | Brian Logan — SkimNews
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- BBC pulled 11 sketches from the 20th anniversary rerelease of "That Mitchell and Webb Look" on iPlayer, drawing loud condemnation from Britain's culture-war commentators
- The removed sketches include jokes about Jimmy Savile, Robert Webb playing a rude Gandhi in skin-darkening makeup, and two scenes involving blackface
- In both blackface sketches, Mitchell and Webb depict white people (battle re-enactors trying an African skirmish) wearing blackface rather than people of colour, and one character repeatedly asks "Are you sure that this isn't racist?"
- Mitchell and Webb themselves reportedly sanctioned the sketches' withdrawal
- Comedy producer Jimmy Mulville said the BBC is "in an impossible position" — the most widely praised comment on the row, per Logan
- Logan compares the move to the long-standing withholding of "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" and the Roald Dahl "updated texts" controversy, noting that, unlike the Dahl edits, the unexpurgated Mitchell and Webb originals remain freely available
- Logan argues the more important question for the licence-fee-funded BBC is whether it keeps commissioning new comedy equipped to grapple with shifting norms
Why it matters: This is an isolated pruning, not a precedent, and the comedians themselves approved the cuts — so the loud culture-war framing overshoots the actual stakes. The material question for the BBC isn't which vintage sketches to excise, but whether it continues investing in new comedy that can probe today's faultlines as irreverently as Mitchell and Webb once did.
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