Appearing on Mock the Week was something I won’t repeat

Ava Vidal, The Independent

Despite being axed by the BBC only three years ago, the fast-paced satirical panel show Mock The Week is set to return. But, just like EastEnders scriptwriters, comedy commissioners don’t seem to understand that not everything needs to be brought back to life — even by a small Freeview channel like TLC. The TV industry’s collective memory has it that the show, which ran between 2005 to 2022 and was chaired by Dara O’Briain, was not so much cancelled as sacrificed, at a time when the BBC’s comedy output was under attack for being too unequivocally biased against the Tory government. The then director-general and former would-be Conservative councillor Tim Davie was reputed to be keen to redress the balance. Mock The Week promptly disappeared after 17 years, down the same drain as Nish Kumar’s The Mash Report.

I’ve appeared on the show several times, including the 100th episode. As an insider, I have no idea where it got its reputation for being left-wing. Unless that’s a shorthand of saying it was “to the left of Tommy Robinson”.

I think Stewart Lee put it best when he said the show was appropriately named because it really did “mock the weak”. He criticised it for featuring aggressive, competitive humour that showed “contempt for the vulnerable”. The show had a reputation for being notoriously difficult for women – but most of the female comedians I’ve spoken to simply didn’t want to appear on it. During the first three series, Jo Brand did the show half-a-dozen times, but refused to do any more, citing the aggressive, bearpit atmosphere as her reason.

It’s the toughest gig on television, even for the most hardened circuit stand-up. With two teams of top comedians “battling to get the most fun from the week’s news”, it can be a right bun fight. Often, people would be shouting over each other to make themselves heard. I remember how, during one recording, one comedian who’d struggled to get a word in pulled out scraps of paper and read every single joke he had on him, in the hope that one of them might make the cut.

I’m surprised by TLC’s decision to extend the episode length to a full hour. When people would ask me what it was like to appear on the half-hour show, my answer was always: “Long.” Filming would take around three hours, for just 28 minutes of broadcastable material.

It was a nightmare. Stewart Lee said the format helped to “spoil” comedy by encouraging disconnected one-liners over structured craft. During a normal stand-up show, quality beats quantity – which is not the same for TV comedy. When you stand in a room with a live audience, you need to get the laugh immediately. On a TV panel show, you have the magic of the edit. Tell a racist joke about Chinese people that absolutely stunk out the studio? Don’t worry! By the time the episode hits the screens, they will either have cut it – or edited in laughter, and panned in on a Chinese-looking audience member laughing, to give the impression that what you said was okay.

I remember I got hate mail for months — from the tolerant left! – after a male comedian made a tasteless joke about domestic violence, and they cut to me laughing hysterically. I don’t even know where they lifted that footage from, because I don’t remember ever laughing that much during Mock the Week recordings. Perhaps it was of me laughing with relief when they finally yelled “Cut!”. Recording that show would mess up your whole week. You’d be given a list of news topics two or three days beforehand. Apologies to anyone who believed that the comics thought of their material on the spot. You would also be given more subjects on the day. Then they had a team of writers who would visit you in your dressing room and see if you wanted to use any of their stuff.