The round was “If the answer is 700 billion, what’s the question?”
“What do our ratings have to reach before someone at the BBC admits they made a mistake?” suggested comedian Ed Byrne. He swiftly followed this with a dig at the show’s new home: “How far down the channel menu is TLC?”
Welcome back, Mock the Week, a programme that’s perfectly happy to mock itself.
Having been canned by BBC Two in 2022 after a whopping 17 years on air, the topical panel game has been unexpectedly rescued from the broadcasting wheelie bin by obscure cable channel TLC – previously home to reality trash but now free-to-air and focusing on entertainment. The show was looking distinctly dog-eared by the time it was axed. A four-year break and a few format tweaks have given it a new lease of life.
It helped that there was plenty of juicy news for the panellists to sink their satirical teeth into. Cue gags about everyone from Donald Trump to David Walliams, from Andy Burnham to Brooklyn Beckham, from Nigella Lawson to Jeffrey Epstein.
Original host Dara Ó Briain – looking exactly the same, he joked, thanks to cosmetic surgery in Turkey – will be joined during the nine-part series by a revolving cast of comedians, with Rhys James as a regular panellist. They were joined by Byrne, Angela Barnes, Sara Pascoe, Ahir Shah and original stalwart Russell Howard, returning after more than a decade away.
“The last time I did this, Andrew was a prince and Phillip Schofield was married,” he noted. As Pascoe added, “I just feel bad for the viewers. When they bought back Gladiators, they had fit, young, sexy, new ones. They didn’t just bring out the old ones again.”
The set was the same. So was the theme tune, News of the World by The Jam, now accompanied by a godawful CGI title sequence. Many of the old rounds remained, with the addition of “Audience Question Time”, in which punters posed questions to the panel. Guests were happy to bite the hand that feeds, with regular pops at TLC, including a reference to one of its previous flagship properties: MILF Manor.
Barnes said of Trump’s Board of Peace, which numbers Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán among its members: “It’s like having Huw Edwards and Prince Andrew on your PTA.” Some pundits hoped the show would be liberated by its new home and able to be more risqué. “Freed from the leftie shackles of the BBC,” as Byrne put it. Potshots were aimed at both ends of the political spectrum. If anything, Keir Starmer got a rougher ride than Nigel Farage.
Ed Byrne quickly slotted back into the familiar old panel show – Dani Riot/TLC
The problem nowadays with topical TV comedy, of course, is that it gets beaten to the timely punch by social media, which can react to events almost in real time. This episode was filmed on Tuesday, five days ahead of transmission. With today’s fast-paced news cycle, such a time lag feels self-defeating. Even venerable old Have I Got News for You works on a 24-hour turnaround.
The show was once criticised for its bear-pit atmosphere and male-dominated line-ups. Comic Milton Jones called it “seven white blokes telling jokes”. No longer. Not only was the cast more varied, but they were less sharp-elbowed and more collaborative, displaying collegiate spirit and camaraderie.
Indeed, this was the main improvement, thanks to the extended episode length. Its BBC running time was 28 minutes. Now it was 44 minutes if you don’t include the ad breaks, enabling the editing to be looser and less frenetic. We had more extended riffs, ad-libs and asides. Byrne sneezed violently. Pascoe got the giggles. Amid the quickfire one-liners, such unguarded moments added a welcome sense of spontaneity. Mock the Week was back, bigger and better. Perhaps its ageless host had taken the show on a rejuvenating trip to Turkey, too.
Mock the Week continues on Sundays on TLC at 9pm and is available to stream on Discovery+
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