Not Going Out’s Lee Mack says there are certain things he 'probably wouldn't say now' if he was writing a sitcom again
A fair bit has happened since 2004. The USA elected its first Black president in Barack Obama, the UK narrowly voted for Brexit, and our notion of what it means to be a 'brat' was entirely disrupted by one Charli XCX.
But as Lee Mack notes, "some things never change". His BBC sitcom, Not Going Out, in which he plays a fictionalised version of himself as a hapless bachelor, then married father, returns for its 15th season.
That's all the more impressive when you consider that it was nearly shelved for good by the broadcaster in 2009. But fans launched a petition and it was subsequently renewed for another two instalments, making it the second longest-running sitcom in British history, behind Last of the Summer Wine.
To mark the show's 20th anniversary – which is being celebrated with standalone documentary 20 Years of Not Going Out – we sat down with Mack and his on-screen wife, Sally Bretton (Lucy), for Radio Times's Two's Company, where they reflected on the show's past, present and future.
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When asked if there's anything he'd change about Not Going out if he could do it all again, Mack joked, "That series 2 casting," referencing Bretton, who's still laughing at her co-star's gags two decades on.
But there are a couple of tweaks he would make.
"Look, 20 years of doing a sitcom, there's obviously things, if I go back and watch them, I go, 'Yeah, probably wouldn't say that now.' Times do change in 20 years. Tastes change. My own taste has changed. So I do occasionally look at the odd line or the odd story, and go, "It's of its day, of that time.'"
"It's nothing majorly controversial," he clarified. "It's just perhaps a quick one line that you wouldn't now do."
Mack also revealed that originally, he wanted to cut to the audience laughing on screen.
"I thought, 'Why can't we accept there's an audience here? Why can't we see them?'," he said. "If you saw a play being filmed...in the old days, they would film it and then sell it on DVD, and I'm sure you used to occasionally see the crowd laughing. You certainly see it in stand-up. If you see a stand-up comedy gig, like Live at the Apollo, they will cut to the audience laughing.
"But there's a sort of argument that you can't cut to the audience laughing in a sitcom because you're breaking the world. You're supposed to be in this world. But I've always thought everyone knows and accepts that it's not real, and in fact we buy into the fact that we're not real because why would we be stopping every 10 seconds for people in the background to laugh?
"So why not just show them? It'd be something different, wouldn't it?"
So that idea "was poo-pooed immediately".
"'You cannot do that,'" he recalled. "And actually, I have subsequently seen it done. I thought we should have done that. It's too late now."
Not Going Out is available to stream on BBC iPlayer, with new episodes arriving from Wednesday 23 September 2026.
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