David Mitchell on ‘Back’ Season 2 And Why He Will Not Be Attending Your Online Pub Quiz

The first season of the half-hour British comedy series Back delighted critics and Anglophiles alike, and it is precisely that crowd that will be happy to know Season 2 is now airing on IFC. Although, they may have already binged it, as the full season is also now available to watch on AMC+.

Back reteams Peep Show pals David Mitchell and Robert Webb in the dark comedy that is twisted, sharp, and silly, and as this season proves, quite poignant as well. The series, which is written by Simon Blackwell who also has Breeders airing now on FX, aired across the pond earlier this year and is very much worth checking out for new and returning fans alike. In Season 2, Stephen (Mitchell) is back at his family’s pub after a rehab stint, but must still contend with the presence of his foster brother Andrew (Webb).

I spoke with Mitchell earlier this month via Zoom about the long (and scary) journey of filming this season, the themes this scripted series shares with his panel show Would I Lie To You? (available to stream on BritBox), and of course, the trend Back will surely spark with the genius invention of “hedge vodka.”

Decider: Let’s start with what is most important which is hedge vodka, of course. This comes up in Episode 3 this season, where your character stashes a handy bottle of vodka in the hedges, and since it has already aired in the UK, has this taken off? Have you been met with sponsorship opportunities? What’s been the reaction to hedge vodka?

David Mitchell: No, I haven’t been approached by Smirnoff or any of the major brands. I don’t know why they don’t want to be associated with beardy losers drinking their product fresh from a hedge, like nature intended. And particularly in lockdown. It’s the future of non-viral socializing really, isn’t it? Plenty of air blowing around you, the hedge, the vodka, you’re living the dream.

It inspires people to get out for their daily walks. I see only opportunity here.

Absolutely. As long as you can provide a regular supply of liver transplants, then it’s all good.

I want to talk a little bit about the journey of filming this season because it was exciting to see people in pubs on screen. I wasn’t sure when you filmed this, but in doing my research, it has been quite a journey. I’m glad that Robert is okay and that the pandemic eased up enough that you were able to finish it. But what was that like over the course of a year plus, focusing on these six episodes?

Well, it was very strange, really. We started filming in October 2019, and it was only as a result of the insurance medicals [for] filming that Robert had his very serious heart condition diagnosed. Fortunately, he has now made a full recovery from major open-heart surgery. But still, it was absolutely terrifying, this sort of news. We got quite a lot filmed without him, the operation went very well and he recovered, and we were all raring to go to finish it all off. Rob was looking better than he had for years, it was all tremendously positive. And then COVID and the lockdown struck with about a week of filming left to go. We were hoping we’d get it finished under the wire, but we didn’t. We had to wait until things eased up a bit again and then we finished the series in a huge studio, there was so much distancing made possible by it, and it was done so carefully.

But what’s weird is that when we started filming, the whole notion of being in a crowded pub was totally normal. Yet a moment later in screen time, we are all also thinking, this is like from another time where all these people sit right next to people that you don’t necessarily even know. It was a sort of surreal experience. I’m obviously very glad we got to finish. I’m proud of the show and I’m glad we were able to get a show that came out over here and over there as well, that’s not part of this whole pandemic nightmare. It’s about life unconnected with this. It’s a dark series that provides a sort of uplifting, escapist element and I know we’re all hoping we can get back to a world where we don’t have to think about how many meters away from someone we are. Maybe we’ll be ready for the interesting comedies and dramas about the pandemic in 20 or 30 years’ time, but yeah, at the moment I just want to forget about it.

How do you view working with Robert at this point in your career? Is there pressure where you feel like, oh everyone just wants to see us together again; is it fun where you think, you know what, it’s been so many years, let’s get back together? How do you think about you two pairing up?

It’s really good fun apart from the moments where the person who you know is your closest friend for the last 25 years tells you he has to have his heart cut out. But in general, we do lots of work apart and we’ve kept working together and it makes the work we do together more fun. The work we do apart is also very rewarding and it sort of works perfectly. There was a period when we worked exclusively with each other and we definitely got on each other’s nerves a bit but we were even then aware, let’s not have a row. Let’s just try and not say things that will wind each other up, bite our tongues a bit; because we like each other and we also have a huge amount of admiration for each other comedically and creatively. So it was important to us then, and this is talking about 10 to 15 years ago, that we didn’t have a big row and we kept it civil and we tried to give each other space. But now it’s ideal because we have got space working on other things and when we come and work together it’s just a breath of fresh air, but at the same time familiar. Familiar fresh air, so it’s really great and I hope we can keep this balance.

Season 2 is currently streaming in full on the online platform AMC+, but also airing weekly on IFC — do you think about that when you’re doing the show? Do you have a preference for how people watch this? 

I’m very old-fashioned and I still love the idea of a television program that you watch once a week. For me, that’s the ideal way to watch something like that because if you’re enjoying a series, it’s a treat while you’re watching it and then you’ve got anticipation of the next one. But like everyone else, when I’m into something, if the next episode’s available immediately, quite often just watch it straight away. So it’s totally up to people, but I think one of the joys of the sitcom as a form is that the episodes are short. They leave you wanting more and I think the best way of watching a sitcom is to watch it one episode at a time with a gap and ideally, if we’ve done our job right, when the episode ends, everyone goes, is it over so soon?

The way that this season ends certainly sets up a third season. Are there any even tentative plans as to when that would be ready to film?

No timing plans at all that I’m aware of. We’d all love to make another series. The gap between Series 1 and 2, for various reasons even before the problems that started when we actually started shooting, [was due to] delays because of Simon Blackwell’s availability and various other things. So we hope to follow up sooner than we followed Series 1 with Series 2.

Louise Brealey was really great in Season 2 and you have some really lovely scenes together as well. How did you enjoy working with her this time? 

She’s brilliant and tremendous fun on set, and she’s a great person to talk to and chat to and is always bringing something extra in performance. The dialogue she has is just lifted by her performance tremendously and there’s a sort of electric comic craziness to her performance that I think is brilliant. It’s always fun working with her, yeah. In general, on this show we’ve got such a lovely and brilliant cast and it’s nice to make a show that feels like it’s a real ensemble, that is set in a pub, and there is a sort of gang. That wasn’t the case with Peep Show, the other sitcom Rob and I did. That was very much a two-hander and there were recurring characters but there wasn’t a group that recurred. It’s really nice to have that feeling of a larger recurrent cast and location that some sitcoms have, and I’ve not done one like that before.

One of the other episodes that viewers have really seemed to enjoy is the one around the pub quiz (Episode 4). Are you a pub quiz kind of guy? That’s been tested a bit in the last year where some people are now at their breaking point and refusing to do pub quizzes online. How do you feel about that?

I enjoy a pub quiz. I don’t enjoy a pub quiz online. That’s the key to the pub quiz format, that you are in a pub. And I think pretending you’re in a pub when actually you’re on the internet and maybe providing yourself with some beer and nuts but you’re not really sharing it with other people, for me, that feels wrong. The various attempts to replace things that we used to be allowed to do with online versions, I have not really been open to it. So I would love to go and do a proper pub quiz but the online version, I am not a fan of. There are so many things they say, ‘Oh this is happening online this year!’, And I say, no it’s not happening, that’s what you mean. When they said the Notting Hill Carnival was happening online — a carnival cannot happen online. You should just say, ‘It’s very sad it’s been canceled and so here are some videos we put on the internet to look at to commemorate it.’ It would be like saying that someone’s life is happening underground with a stone. No, they’re dead, this is a commemoration. [The internet can] commemorate the things we can’t do at the moment: let’s remember them and let’s hope we can do them again, but let’s not pretend that it’s in any way a meaningful either continuity or satisfactory replacement.

There was some pressure a year ago at the beginning of this as far as like, oh now we have our time to write our books that we’ve always been meaning to write and all of that. Were you able to be creative over the past year, did you enjoy writing or were you just like, no, let me just crawl back into bed?

Crawl back into bed, in general. I write a newspaper column and I managed to keep that up and not just talk about it. In terms of new creative projects, I find it so difficult to think about anything else with enough concentration to write anything about it on any sort of scale. But I didn’t want to write about [the pandemic] because I’ve felt, firstly, no one’s going to want to see stuff talking about this lockdown. And secondly, we don’t really know what the significance of this on our history is gonna be. It may be in three years’ time, people just don’t mention it and it’s sort of like a blip that we’ve left behind. Or it may be the nature of human interaction has been fundamentally altered in some way in that we’re all a bit more aware of when we touch people, a bit more inclined to wear masks a bit, and frankly, a bit less sociable. Who knows what the impact will be? But it seems very difficult to write anything for the modern world that doesn’t address the grim specifics of the lockdown now that you wouldn’t need some kind of crystal ball to know how society is going to pan out. I instead wasted my time just reading depressing articles about what was going on and watching a fair amount of TV, which has been nice.

One of the things that I’ve literally spent days of my life watching this year is Would I Lie To You?. It’s not really a question, I just need you to confirm for me that you have as much fun doing it as I have as much fun watching it.

It’s huge fun to do, and Rob Brydon and Lee Mack are a joy to work with. The producer, Peter Holmes, who came up with the format and has sort of been running it from the start, just creates a very good environment in which we can all try and amuse. The combination of the guests and the truth, the lies they tell, it’s all very well structured. So it really is a pleasure to be involved with. It was very nice that we were able to make a series in October when the lockdown was slightly eased. We managed to have a distanced audience and think that worked very well. Apart from the desks being further apart, you wouldn’t really know it was done under lockdown conditions. We’ll be doing another run, we’re filming that in June. So it’s lovely to have been able to keep doing that despite the context.

I love panel shows, and I know they’re not a thing that you really have on American TV. But I find that if you get the right combination of people, you give them the freedom to mess around, but also you have an edit so that you can get rid of stuff that doesn’t work, I think you genuinely get a type of material that you couldn’t have written. It’s a different type of comedy and is not better than the best of written comedy, but it’s different. It has its place, and it is maybe silly and escapist at a time when there’s so much grimness in the world. You can just watch people be silly for half an hour.

Yeah, exactly. A show like Back feels, and I do mean this fully as a compliment, so British — do you think about that? Do you think about if it will translate to people over here in the States and abroad? 

In general, I try not to think about the audience. When you’re trying to be funny, you’ve just got to see what amuses you. Then you try and work with other people and see what amuses them. If you think it’s funny, and the people you’re working with think it’s funny, that’s as good as it’s gonna get. Not everyone will understand the joke, and not everyone will like the joke. But you’ve come close to finding something funny as you’re ever going to and if you start giving yourself all the boxes that the joke needs to tick in terms of everyone understanding it… I always think about advertising: you know that the advertisers are desperate for their adverts to be funny. And they usually, totally fail. That’s because it’s not their main aim for it to be funny, their first aim was to tell people about whatever the product is, and not to say anything disobliging about the product. Just that sort of subjugating of the comedy even to second place makes the chances of it working hugely reduced. So I just think if you find that thing you think it’s funny, you just have to go with it, and know that an audience that can understand it will find it. And I think in general, they do. And there are phrases or colloquial phrases that are very much from British English, that Americans might not readily understand. But in context, they probably understand those. It might add to the charm of it to a certain extent, and those turns of phrase to the British audience are always going to be the things that are most amusing to put in in a particularly amusing way. I know watching American sitcoms, that the dialogue is written in a way that I would never speak. But I’ve seen enough of it, I understand what it is. I enjoy the colloquialisms. And I think people have safety in the online age and have seen so much stuff from so many different places; [they catch] on pretty quickly to what a phrase means and sort of like the authenticity with which is expressed. I think if you try and change the dialogue into more standard English, it would end up looking like the safety instructions on a plane.

In thinking about both Back and Would I Lie To You?, what they have in common is they are, for lack of a better term, a mindfuck, in that you’re really trying to figure out if another person is genuine, and if what they’re telling you is true and if you should believe them. What is your take on that?

I suppose trust and honesty are just so fundamental to human interaction that they are bound to come up in comedy. More likely at the moment, when one of the things the Internet has brought us is the undermining of truth, and that you never know quite who to believe and the most terrible, damaging nonsense can acquire a sense of authenticity quite quickly. So I suppose it’s topical in that sense. But I think it’s also fundamental that people lie and people represent themselves falsely, but also it’s a sliding scale: there are the complete, terrifying, sociopathic liars who will just say things that are absolutely opposite of the truth, and then there is the small lying that everyone does to make themselves look more acceptable, and every gradation in between. Both in Back and in Peep Show, I tend to play people who are relatively intelligent but sort of unhappy and unlucky. I think the notion of whether or not they’re being fooled is fundamental to characters like that. A lot of the bitterness in the world comes from people who feel that they’ve been duped and fooled and that there are winners in the system but they’re not winners because of a combination of bad luck and the fact that they were too honest. That dynamic is one a lot of people relate to, at all times, but particularly now when I think a lot of people feel that the world is unfair. And I think whether there’s a sense of unfairness people will look for lies they’ve been told, right?

Stream Back on AMC+