The BBC has completely cut multiple sketches from 2006 comedy skit show That Mitchell and Webb Look after dumping the Bafta-winning series back onto its streaming service for its twentieth anniversary.
The official line is that some of the old material no longer “works today.” What no longer works, it turns out, is comedy that satirised and mocked the very mindset of racism.
A BBC spokesman said: “This is a 20-year-old sketch show; in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones that still work today and not the ones that don’t.” David Mitchell and Robert Webb have not publicly replied at time of writing.
The sketches were not random gags that aged badly. They were built as self-aware send-ups of the people doing the offending. Yet in 2026, not even this is acceptable.
Eleven sketches have been stripped out, including a skit named ‘How Not What To Look Like / Behind the Scenes: Burqa’, a makeover-show parody in which Mitchell plays a contestant in a burqa.
The scene then cuts to Mitchell and Webb as themselves. Webb asks whether they are “just taking the piss out of people’s sincerely held beliefs.” Mitchell replies: “I think you can worry too much about this kind of thing. I mean, what’s offensive to one person is just good, clean fun to another.” He then pulls off the burqa and is in blackface.
The entire foundation of the joke is predicated on the fact that putting blackface on a TV show is NOT acceptable. But any clever or nuanced factors just don’t matter anymore, because LOOK BLACKFACE IS BAD.
It’s the exact point the joke is making. Yet it still got cut because thinking and considering why something is funny isn’t permitted in 2026.
Hellbound and Down 