In their first post-Peep Show outing, David Mitchell and Robert Webb are back with Back, a ghost-story about two brothers in a country pub. They rant about cream tea, the perils of Twitter – and whether sitcoms are doomed

Peep Show, with its agonising social encounters and undercurrent of despair, painted a bleak portrait of modern life. But according to stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb, it’s got nothing on what they’re working on now. The duo’s brand new sitcom Back, which starts tomorrow, is literally run through with “themes of death and meaninglessness”. Mitchell, bearded and distinguished when I meet the pair for lunch, explains: “A dead man haunts the whole series.”

Part sitcom, part ghost story, Back follows grieving son Stephen (Mitchell) in the weeks after his father’s death as he deals with the suspiciously timed return of his foster brother Andrew (Webb). The ghost is Stephen’s father, Laurie (Matthew Holness with talcum powder in his hair), who Andrew remembers as a kindly man – and Stephen recalls as a miserable git. The show repeatedly flashes back to the boys’ early years, their younger selves played alternately by child actors and Mitchell and Webb themselves, a ploy that injects the adult versions with a pathos while also providing a background hum of mild childhood trauma.



Back’s premise (in the first episode, nearly every joke is about death) might be grave, but Mitchell and Webb have no truck with the idea that TV comedy is getting weightier. “There’s always been a lot of darkness in British comedy, you can see it in Fawlty Towers and Dad’s Army,” says Mitchell. “Reginald Perrin is a show about a breakdown. All good sitcoms are about something serious. You can’t do a joke about funny things; you do a joke about serious things.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘All good sitcoms are about something serious. You can’t do a joke about funny things; you do a joke about serious things’ … Back. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel 4



Set in the English countryside, Back draws on the kind of eccentric locals and claustrophobic social circles that have previously been parodied by the likes of the League of Gentlemen. It’s also the sort of place where the idea of “Britishness” constantly rears its head. Wary of making it “sound incredibly fucking dry”, Webb explains that the show uses the family business, a traditional country pub, to explore the British obsession with heritage. “As a country we ask ourselves a lot, ‘is this the real thing, am I having a real country cream tea or is this one for the tourists?’” Mitchell expands. “‘Is this a real pub or a chain pub? Is a chain pub real?’”

Character-wise, Stephen is standard Mitchell fare: anal, seething, reluctantly moral. He’s prone to the sort of furiously logical diatribes that have characterised most of Mitchell’s comedy creations – and that feature heavily in the conversation of the man himself. When discussing the show, Back’s writer Simon Blackwell (whose credits include Veep, The Thick of It and Peep Show) described recreating the “David Mitchell rhythms” – the actor’s particular ranty cadence – which “cross all the things he’s done”. It’s likely the first thing you think of about Mitchell, yet, surprisingly, he claims not to know what Blackwell is talking about. “I had no idea he gave it that much thought,” he says, baffled.

If Mitchell is the recognisable anchor, Webb’s Andrew is the unknown quantity. Fostered by Stephen’s parents for five months in the late 80s, he infiltrates and wins over the family with his purported business acumen and apparent geniality. But it’s unclear why he’s really come back, says Webb, explaining that sometimes he’d do two takes – as “Mr Evil and then Mr Nice Guy” – and leave it up to the creators to decide which to use. He also worked hard to distance himself from his best-known creation, “making sure that Jeremy from Peep Show’s petulance doesn’t seep through in a way I’m not in control of, because I’ve been playing this extremely aggressive and sarcastic character.”



Back is the duo’s first post-Peep Show acting project, and will come as consolation to a nation still mourning the loss of the most relatably dysfunctional men in sitcom history. Judging by the amount of times Mitchell and Webb bring it up, they clearly need something to take the edge off too. And the fact that even they view Back through the prism of Peep Show is a reminder that everything they do is destined to be compared (probably unfavourably) with that beloved sitcom. But it’s also true that the prospects for new comedy in general aren’t exactly rosy. I mention Ben Elton’s recent BBC lecture on how new sitcoms are torn limb from limb by both critics and social media users in a matter of minutes. “There will be people live tweeting every joke as it happens,” says Webb in anticipation of the reaction to Back. “It’s this weird rapid response thing … at least get to the end of the first half an hour before you have a hot take.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘To do a comedy show is a noble endeavour’ … Peep Show. Photograph: Channel 4

“The reason we gun for comedy in the press and on social media is because fundamentally we care about it more than other genres,” says Mitchell. “But we mustn’t let the fact that as a culture we love comedy so much make us destroy all of our comedy.”

It’s hard to tell if the decline in new comedy is a result of mean reviews, slashed budgets (“a comedy programme takes a huge amount of money to make and effort, [yet] the viewing figures are always far below what you get for a second-rate new cookery series” says Mitchell) or a wider shift in society. The duo began their comedy careers in the Cambridge Footlights and say that the added pressure students have now isn’t conducive to producing the comics of tomorrow. Huge fees, says Mitchell, mean “people think very differently about university; you don’t think of it as a place of exploration to find yourself – that seems an environment where the goodness that comes out of pissing around will be eradicated, except for people who are already wealthy.” Tellingly, it was hard to ignore the number of children of famous comedians, from Ruby Wax to Ian Hislop, who took shows to the Edinburgh fringe this year.

Mitchell and Webb may be fixtures of the comedy firmament, but they still have that hypercritical public to contend with. How do they steel themselves for negativity? “I try and remind myself that to do a comedy show is a noble endeavour,” says Mitchell stoically. “And it doesn’t become ignoble if it doesn’t necessarily work.”

Back starts on Channel 4 on 6 September at 10pm.