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Defending the double act, fellow comedian Dom Joly, of Trigger Happy TV, questioned the BBC’s “censorship” of itself.
Joly told The Times: “I totally get it if the BBC is putting out something really racist, which is laughing at and encouraging other people to feel that it’s OK to do that.
“But it’s so clear that Mitchell and Webb are not doing that. Their intent was not to be racist.”
Jimmy Mulville, the co-founder of Hat Trick Productions, which makes the satirical news quiz Have I Got News For You, told the same newspaper he could understand the corporation’s predicament.
“The BBC are in an impossible position,” he said.
He added that producers had “to be careful”, though, “that this is not the thin end of a wedge where we cut things out”.
Perhaps Mitchell and Webb’s best known sketch, which sees them both dressed as Nazis while begging the question: “are we the baddies?”, remains online.
They are not the first comedians to have had their work edited or removed in recent years, as societal attitudes have shifted. Some artists themselves also began reassessing their work in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ hit show Little Britain was removed from iPlayer, Netflix and BritBox in 2020, after objections resurfaced about some of their characters portraying people from different ethnic backgrounds.
At the time, both the BBC and Britbox noted how “times have changed” since the Little Britain first aired in the early noughties.
The show is now back on iPlayer but, like with Mitchell and Webb, some sketches have been removed.
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