Mitch Benn is a large¹ Liverpudlian comedian known for his amazingly well created (usually) songs about the world around him.

Early Life

Mitch Benn was born on 20 January, 1970 in Liverpool. He was educated at Dovedale Primary School² and The Liverpool Blue Coat School before going to the University of Edinburgh. As so often happens, it was at University that he really got into comedy, joining the Improverts improvised comedy troupe.

Career

After cutting his performance teeth in Edinburgh, in 1996 Mitch moved to London and quickly established his credentials on the comedy club circuit, also becoming a favourite on university campuses. Since then Mitch has created songs for many well known satirical radio and TV shows, including BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show – which he has been contributing to since 1999 – and It’s Been a Bad Week, and occasional pieces for the Channel 4 series Bremner, Bird and Fortune, starring fellow satirist and impressionist Rory Bremner and professional 'Grumpy Old Men' John Bird and John Fortune. He has also created and starred in The Mitch Benn Music Show for BBC Radio 7 and Mitch Benn’s Crimes Against Music For BBC Radio 4, of which there has now been three series.

During the Summer 2009 Series of The Now Show, Mitch performed a series of songs about Twitter, after he realised that if everyone listening to The Now Show were to follow him on Twitter he could overtake Stephen Fry as 'King of Twitter' (the user with the highest number of followers on the site). This went on for the entire series with only one or two weeks where he didn't mention Twitter. On the last episode of the series, he wrote a song about a dream where he saw Stehphen Fry telling him to stop being so childish and get on with other things, which included lines spoken by Fry himself.

He frequently tours the country and occasionally finds time to put on a show for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe³. His 2007 show was odd in that it was set up like an ordinary stand up show, two hours with an interval. this is because he would be taking the same show on tour for the rest of that year⁴. There is slightly less frequency, however, to his updating of the podcast on his website which occurs randomly at best.

In 2003, Mitch formed a band known as The Distractions, consisting of Kirsty Newton, who plays guitar and keyboard and acts as a backing singer; and a drummer, initially Tash Bayliss, later Milo McCabe and now Ivan Sheppard.

Officially released singles and albums

The albums released by Mitch Benn include:

1. The Unnecessary Mitch Benn
2. Radio Face
3. Too Late To Cancel
4. Crimes Against Music
5. The Official Bootleg Edinburgh 2007⁵
6. Sing Like an Angel
7. Where Next?

He has had two officially released singles, ‘Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now’ - which was not a great success but at one point it was number three on Amazon, so Mitch prefers to refer to that chart over the others - and more recently 'Sing like an Angel' - the version from the album of the same name, featuring Rick Wakeman on the piano - was released on Itunes.

Interesting Songs

Some of the more interesting songs he’s written include ‘Not Everybody has to Imagine’, a look at the hypocrisy in John Lennon’s hit⁶, ‘Rubbish’, outlining how no one really knows that much about anything and it would be better if we just admitted this, ‘My name is... Macbeth’, telling the story as Shakespeare would if he were alive today, as a rap song, and a rock opera in the style of War of the Worlds, but based on a much shorter book, due to time constraints. The book Benn chose was... ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’!

Impressions

Mitch is also an impressionist and does an amazing impression of a Dalek⁷.

Watchdog

In the most recent series of the BBC consumer advice program Watchdog, Mitch Benn was commisioned to write and perform several songs about the issues covered in various shows. They are as follows:

• Episode 1: 'Virgin Bills Dead People' This song was about the story that several customers of Virgin Media were given bills after the account holder's death, even though the family of the deceased asked for their service to be discontinued.
• Episode 2: 'The Yellow Light Of Death' This song is about Sony demanding a lot of money for broken PS3 consoles for a problem which can be easily solved for next to no cost, since Watchdog managed to fix 15 consoles using the same technique of gently heating the motherboards. This causes the solder to melt and fix broken linkages.
• Episode 4: 'How Much Will it Cost Me, Ryanair?' This is about a story that Raynair has introduced a charge for checking in for a flight at the airport.

More Info

For more info, visit his website