Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon

Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon are a British comedy writing team. They were head sketch writers on BBC Radio 4’s Jo Caulfield Won’t Shut Up and BBC1′s Live and Kicking, and also wrote the TV comedy shows Slightly Filthy (LWT) and The Ornate Johnsons’ Edwardian Spectacular (BBC4). Yet their main work is in the theatre. Their plays include Spy, Moonlight over India, Eurovision, Seven Studies in Salesmanship,The Opinion Makers, Those Magnificent Men and the multiple award-winning Big Daddy Vs Giant Haystacks.

The author and illustrator Philip Reeve, a friend and collaborator, has written: 'Two of the best writers I know are friends of mine from my Brighton days; Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon.Their expertly wrought comedy sketches decorate many an Edinburgh Festival and improve a few otherwise lacklustre Radio 4 comedy shows, but to see them at their finest you need to seek out their plays.'

Brian Mitchell also managed the Brighton Open Air Theatre during its first season in 2015.

Mitchell and Nixon met at primary school in a colliery village in Derbyshire, and started to write plays together when they were just fourteen years old. In 1988, Mitchell, a talented musician, moved to Brighton, to study composition at the University of Sussex. Nixon, following a degree in American Literature at the University of Essex, also moved to Brighton in the early 90s. It was in Brighton, in 1992, that they founded The Ornate Johnsons, a sketch troupe named after a character they had created in a Damon Runyonesque play set in 1920s USA. Mitchell told Time Out that their aim was 'to bring back energy, drama and extravagant performances to the world of sketch comedy; and to do stuff that wasn’t political or PC. People forget how oppressively right-on everything was around 1989. All the shows have tended to be a collection of loosely linked songs and sketches that make no point beyond raising a laugh.’

The original members of the Ornate Johnsons were Brian Mitchell, David Mounfield and Laurence Relton, and they first performed at the Marlborough Theatre Brighton, in January 1992. They were later joined, at various times, by Glen Richardson, Paul Putner, Louise Law (née Judkins), Beth Fitzgerald, Jo Neary and Clea Smith. Nixon, familiarly known as ‘the unseen Johnson’, does not perform, 'although he makes an occasional Terry Gilliam-like appearance in a show.'

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