This book first examines the writer/performer with the longest career, Julia Davis. Despite her longevity, she has remained a footnote in comedy – her name frequently squeezed between the men she has collaborated with. For instance, Richard Wallace uses Simon Cottle's notion of ‘production ecology’ to understand how Davis and a group of male comedians worked across different channels in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Production ecology is ‘the idea that different groups of programme-makers working in the same field, but for different media institutions, inflect their programmes in different ways depending on a range of industrial factors’, and Davis is perceived as belonging to ‘a pool of talent including Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan […] Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris and their associated production companies (most notably TalkBack Productions and Baby Cow Productions)’. As Cottle argues, these comedians ‘created a number of mockumentary versions of established non-fiction television formats’ and have collaborated frequently (2018: 12). Davis toured with Steve Coogan, appearing in, and writing for, a number of his series; she was cast in Chris Morris's dark comedy/horror hybrid Blue Jam on BBC Radio 1 (1997–9) and then starred in his most critically acclaimed TV series Brass Eye (Channel 4, 1997). However, the first TV show Davis created was Human Remains (BBC Two, 2000) with Rob Brydon, produced by Coogan's company Baby Cow and described as a ‘macabre comedy masterpiece’ (Nicholson, 2009). This series paved the way for Davis's critically acclaimed series Nighty Night.

Wallace admits that this list of comedians is overwhelmingly male, arguing that it ‘raises particular questions about the gendering of the mockumentary’ (2018: 12).