Second thoughts | 7 September 2017

I had planned to review David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s new Channel 4 sitcom Back without constantly referring to their last one Peep Show. Not only did it seem too obvious a way to go; it also felt a bit unfair to compare a deservedly revered programme that ran for 12 years with a single episode that went out on Wednesday. But then I saw that single episode.

It’s possible, I suppose, that one day Mitchell and Webb may head in a completely different sitcom direction. Mitchell may not play an uptight, well-meaning loser, or Webb a preening, conscience-free charmer. For now, though, it’s pretty much as you were.

Webb’s character Andrew was first seen airily dispensing romantic advice to a taxi driver, who agreed as a result that he would, indeed, leave his wife for his goddaughter. Meanwhile, Mitchell’s Stephen was walking through a small English town anxiously wondering if he’d bought enough sausage rolls for his father’s funeral and trying hard to avoid being hugged by a sympathetic friend.

Luckily, it didn’t take long to establish that another thing Back has in common with Peep Show is a fantastically sharp script — this time by Simon Blackwell — crammed with lines that manage to be both character-based and worthy candidates for any dictionary of humorous quotations (with the added bonus that, unlike quite a lot of entries in my experience, they’re actually humorous). At one point, Stephen was asked when he’d last told his dad he loved him. ‘I don’t think I ever did,’ he replied. ‘It never came up.’

There is, mind you, one big difference from you-know-what — and that’s a proper plot. The two main characters finally came together at the graveside of Stephen’s father, where Stephen was attempting to mumble a declaration of love and where Andrew introduced himself with the unexpected sentence, ‘I can’t believe dad has gone.’