Trivia / Mock the Week

• Accent Depundent: "Hello, I'm Sue Barker. You may remember my father, Chewbacca."
  • Hugh, Ed Gamble, and a few other panelists will sometimes affect "posher" accents than they normally speak with, in order to get a joke to land properly.
    Hugh: Henry Tudor!^note pronounced "chyu-dor" But why did he chew her?
• Colbert Bump: The show has been the first or one of the first television appearances for many comedians who are now very well-known.
  • A 2013 episode saw Ed Byrne make a Running Gag out of buying "Farming Simulator 2013" instead of Grand Theft Auto V. The very next day, Amazon had nearly sold out of "Farming Simulator" and was showing it as being frequently brought together with GTA.
• Corpsing: James Acaster fails to tell his "Unlikely Exam Question" joke out of laughter, three times.
  James: Which of the following is a quote by Winston Churchill? A: We will fight them on the beaches, B: God damn I love these peaches, C: (loses it)
• Creator Backlash: Some performers don't look back on the show very fondly:
  • Since leaving the show, Frankie Boyle has criticised both the show's production team and The BBC Trust. He claims that the show did not cover enough major news stories, was too restrictive on his risqué comedy act, as the producers, the BBC Trust were afraid of "frightening the horses" and it was "going through the motions".
  It was all bollocks. Especially, when you consider we're fighting two wars, there's fucking swine flu and the global economy is going down the toilet. People expect you to talk about this - and what do the production team send us? A picture of Rebecca Adlington. I mean what are you going to write about...The tracksuits they're wearing? The shutter speed the photographers were using? The No 1 priority in TV comedy today is 'don't frighten the horses', and it's probably No 2 and 3 as well. If you look at the scheduling nowadays, it's all just celebrities meeting meerkats.
  • In 2013, Rory Bremner stated his reasons for leaving the show, criticising the way comedians like Linda Smith were treated by new comedians, who "are like prize fighters":
  I felt that there was a new and highly competitive and quite aggressive tendency there and felt uncomfortable. But I've since found out that very few people have felt comfortable doing Mock the Week.
  • Jo Brand, while criticising the male-dominated genre of comedy panel shows, said in 2009:
  I don't do Mock the Week anymore and neither do some male stand-ups I know who have tried it once. We just don't like the prospect of having to bite someone's foot off before they let us say something.
  • In 2015, Andy Parsons said:
  I'd like to thank all of the people I've worked with over the years on Mock and from the BBC. However, when "Unlikely Things to Hear in a Superhero Movie" comes around for the 4th time it is probably time to move on. [...] Perhaps this will be an opportunity to make a female comedian a regular.
  • In 2020, Katherine Ryan revealed her reasons for stepping down:
  I had to stop doing it because I knew that every time I was booked on that show I was taking food out of the mouth of another woman. I was never taking James Acaster's spot, I was never taking Ed Gamble's spot on that show, I was always 100% of the time taking a job away from one of my female peers. [...] As much as I loved to do it – it really helped me open up a fresh audience, I loved to go on there and play with all the other comics. But I couldn't do it anymore because of that fact alone – "No, Mock the Week doesn't have a problem with women, look, Katherine Ryan's on the show". Nuh uh. And now look, they will let two of us on in the same week! [...] I wasn't allowed to do the stand-up round, apart from once. And they always made me sit in the same chair.
  • Also in 2020, Dara himself spoke out to say that he understands why some comedians were reluctant to do the show because of how competitive things used to be (Frankie and Russell in particular) - and in fact he nearly quit the show at one point because of this:
  Certainly were years where I was all I was doing was traffic cop. Because there are seven people talking and it wasn’t a chance for me to make up stuff and mess around. There were years where it wasn't as much fun as it could have been. [...] Genuinely, I remember sitting down once while one of the rounds was on and with a piece of paper, cause I have nothing to do at that point, writing out the next four years of my career. Going, "Do I need to tour? Do I need this?" [...] I would never guest on this show, it’s a terrible show to do. It's not a show that you can just drop in and talk a bit of shite on. We all love those shows and we also have to be able to do those shows. But it's not one of those, unfortunately.
• Distanced from Current Events: An episode in 2016 was postponed by a month due to the murder of MP Jo Cox. Although the episode made no mention of it (having been recorded before the event), there was much discussion about the then-upcoming EU referendum, which was thought to have played a huge role in the murder (she was a supporter of the EU, and her murderer, who had links to far-right groups, saw people like her as "traitors to white people") - a theory proven to be correct at the murderer's trial.
• Orphaned Reference: The first episode of Series 12 features a Scenes We'd Like to See round on "Unlikely Things to Hear on Doctor Who". At the time, Chris Addison was being touted by the press as a candidate for the next Doctor (Matt Smith had announced his decision to leave the role a few weeks earlier), and there had been a whole section on that earlier in the show on the possibility which culminated in Addison dressing up in Tom Baker's scarf and hat. The link was lost when that segment was cut entirely from the broadcast programme.
• Production Posse: Inverted - Nish Kumar, Ellie Taylor, Felicity Ward and Rachel Parris all work together on The Mash Report before appearing here.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "News of the World" by The Jam. One of the Hilarious Outtakes reveals that Dara has to try very hard not to dance along to it as the credits are rolling.
• Release Date Change: The final series was due to premiere on September 16, but was postponed to the next Friday when the death of Elizabeth II caused nearly all comedy programming on the BBC to be suspended until after her funeral on September 19, 2022.
• Star-Making Role: For Dara Ó Briain, Andy Parsons, Frankie Boyle, and Hugh Dennis (of course, all were successful stand-up comedians beforehand).
• Technology Marches On: Zoe Lyons with her more subtle take on reusing "Scenes we'd Like to See" suggestions:
  "Unlikely Small Ads"
  Zoe: Wanted: the Internet, as I seem to be the only person in Britain still using the small ads.

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