Do not adjust your sets. Mitchell and Webb are back on the TV tomorrow and it’s not a repeat. Sketch comedy is back! But not exactly with a vengeance. At the launch of their new series, Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping , the two explained: “It’s a perilous time for the industry and so it’s our hope that relaunching the trickiest genre of comedy is a brilliant piece of counterintuitive commissioning.”

OK, so they’re joking – but only partly. The concept of sketch comedy really started to stretch and then virtually disappear in the early 2000s. It hardly helps that two of the biggest sketch shows of that time – Little Britain (2000-2006) and Bo’ Selecta (2002-2009) – now come under the banner of “you had to be there.” Plus, many of the comedy highlights of that era ( Green Wing

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