As Mock The Week comes to an end, 21 facts to mark 21 series

Mock The Week bows out tomorrow night after 17 years. Here are 21 facts to mark the 21 seasons the panel show has has run for...

1. Episode one was broadcast on BBC Two on Sunday June 5, 2005.  The line-up was Frankie Boyle, Hugh Dennis and Linda Smith against Jeremy Hardy, Rory Bremner and John Oliver.
2. By the end, there will have been 196 original episodes plus 38 compilation shows.
3. Including a total of 122 comedians have appeared on the show, with Hugh Dennis and host Dara O Briain appearing in every single episode.
4. The next most frequent panelists are Andy Parsons (116 shows), Ed Byrne (73), Frankie Boyle (54), Russell Howard (53), Milton Jones (50), Ed Gamble (36), Chris Addison (34) and Angela Barnes, the most frequent female guest, with 31 appearances.
5. People who have appeared just once include Sue Perkins, John Bishop,  Robin Ince, Chris Evans, Dane Baptiste, Frank Skinner, Clive Anderson, Stephen K Amos, London Hughes and Sandi Toksvig.
6. At 4ft 11in Toksvig is also the show’s shortest guest. 6ft 8ins Greg Davies. was the tallest.
7. Micky Flanagan was the warm-up for many years.
8. More recently, Maff Brown has been doing the warm-up, and in 2020 got to appear as a panellist when Barnes was taken ill at the last minute.
9. The show will have covered seven Prime Ministers –  Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and whoever comes next – plus nine Chancellors. Though four of those have been this year. In a Radio Times interview earlier this week, Dennis successfully predicted the show would ‘out-survive’  Truss - although sadly the last episode was filmed last night, so will not cover her resignation.
10. The show’s biggest overnight audience was 3.8 million in September 2008. Last season hovered around the 1.5 to 1.6 million mark.
11. There have been eight tie-in books, all published between 2008 and 2014.
12. The song’s theme, News Of The World, was one of The Jam’s less successful singles, charting at No 27 in 1978.tIt was written and sung by bass guitarist Bruce Foxton rather than the band's usual frontman Paul Weller, and was never an album track.
13. The oldest performer to make a debut on the show was Clive Anderson who was 53.  The youngest was Jack Whitehall, who was 21.
14. Frankie Boyle was responsible for the two jokes on the show that caused the most controversy. In the 2007 series, during a segment called What The Queen Didn't Say in Her Christmas Message, Boyle suggested: ‘I am now so old that my pussy is haunted.’ And in 2008 he said swimmer Rebecca Adlington ‘looks like someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon’, which was seen as encouraging bullying.
15. In the first ten series, just ten per cent of the panellists were women.
16. It took 12 years for the programme to feature two women among the six panelists, when Angela Barnes and Kerry Godliman shared the screen in 2017. The first 50:50 split only happened last year with Barnes, Maisie Adam and Evelyn Mok on the same episode.
17. In the early days the show was known for its bearpit atmosphere, although in later seasons it became more collegiate. In 2009 Jo Brand said: ‘I don't do Mock the Week any more 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.’
18. In 2015, viewer Rob Ellmore said his family owes their lives to Mock The Week. A fire gutted their home, because he’d stayed up to watch the panel sho, and discovered the blaze.
19. After all this time, people still get the show’s name wrong. In a recent interview, Dennis said: ‘People come up to you on the street and they never go, "Oh you're on Mock the Week, I'm really enjoying Mock The Week". They say, "Really enjoying Mock Of The Week". O Briain added: ‘It's written in huge letters behind me! We should just for one week, rename it Mock of the Week just to see whether anybody notices that.
20. And Dara has revealed that one man shouted at him last year: ‘When are going to bring Frankie back on to Whose Line Is It Anyway?’
21. Mock The Week was created by Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson – who also devised Whose Line Is It Anyway?

• The last episode of Mock The Week airs at 10pm on Friday on BBC Two with panellists, pictured above with Dara, Alasdair Beckett-King, Angela Barnes, Hugh Dennis,  Rhys James, Ahir Shah, Zoe Lyons. And retrospectives will be aired over the following two Fridays looking at the show's most memorable moments.

Published: 20 Oct 2022