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That Mitchell And Webb Sound - No-One Drowned

Robin Verhagen-Guest
Comedy
YouTube
Cited on HN 3 times, 2015–2026, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

It is used as a joke or shorthand for the prevention paradox, where successful safety work looks unnecessary because nothing bad happens.

A short sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound, the BBC radio comedy, about a safety measure that works perfectly and so gets no credit for the lack of disasters.

1 citations · 2 jokes · Comedy

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@orthoxerox May 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Bollards: Why and What
Yes, we've all heard [0] and probably agreed with the person Mitchell plays, but the cost of bollards is actually really low. I can buy concrete hemispherical bollards for less that $20 a piece. Let's make the total installation cost $50 per bollard. How many bollards does a 7/11 parking need? [0] - [this video]
@mryan Sep 2015 Makes a joke
on HN thread Safe from what?
This reminds me of a sketch by Mitchell and Webb (a pair of British comedy actors). It is a satirical news broadcast, in which Mitchell points out that the fact that there was not a single death from drowning in the local region proves that too much money is being spent on anti-drowning measures. [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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