Back Story

by David Mitchell

  The only hobby I really enjoyed was writing. I developed the habit, whenever we were watching TV as a family and I wasn’t particularly gripped by the programme, of writing a sort of endless fantasy epic. It involved kings and emperors and wizards and dragons and wars. It was sort of cod-Tolkien, I suppose, but even less likely to come to a satisfying conclusion before you lost the will to live.

  I wasn’t a Tolkien fan. I spent the best part of a year trying to get through The Lord of the Rings, finally grinding to a halt halfway through The Two Towers. I don’t know why there are adults who treat its tedious daftness with such awed solemnity. That just makes it less fun. And it’s zero fun to start with. Even something that is a tiny bit fun, like pressing the button to make an electric garage door go up, is infinitely more fun than the endless moaning of a jewellery-obsessed, hairy-footed midget.

  Anyway, I would write and write and write this epic. It wasn’t supposed to be entertaining – I just did it for the pleasure of filling the pages. I wrote it in play form, enjoying the escapism of seeing drab mundanities being exchanged between people supposedly living in fantastical circumstances. It probably read like an EastEnders script except all the characters were wearing armour or capes or crowns or wizards’ hats. Like an EastEnders Hallowe’en special.

  I also loved the look of the playscript format: writing the character’s name in capital letters with the dialogue next to it and how they might say it (‘angrily’, ‘quietly’, ‘waving his wand’, ‘dropping his axe in horror’) and putting all other business in stage directions. I sat there, night after night, filling page after page, gaining satisfaction merely from there being more of it, with no thought of it ever being staged or even read. No wonder my parents encouraged me to join the cubs.

  Family: Yes, I had a family, who loved me and whom I took completely for granted. My brother Daniel was born when I was seven and a half, which was an event I was more or less against to be perfectly honest. His arrival was an unsettling experience. I was too old to display a toddler’s resentment that my place at the centre of the universe had been supplanted, but I still experienced those feelings.

  Years later, when I was best man at his wedding, this is what I said about it in my speech:

  Unlike most best men, I can take the story of the groom right back to the beginning. Well, almost. I’m not going to start discussing my parents’ love life of the early ’80s. That never goes well on occasions such as these. But I do remember when I was told, at the age of seven, that I was soon going to have a little brother or sister. I think my parents were concerned about what my reaction would be because they presented the news as if it was an event entirely designed to please me.

  ‘You know how you like having friends round to play? And you get annoyed that that can’t happen more often?’ they said. ‘Well, soon there’ll be someone for you to play with all the time!’

  I was good at maths. I did a quick calculation. This sibling, I reasoned, was still some months away and I was getting older all the time. So, when this new person was nought, I would be seven and a half. When I was nine, he would be one and a half.

  ‘Someone for me to play with?!’ I exclaimed to my parents. ‘I don’t play with people who are six! People who are eight don’t play with me! How long will it be before he can talk?’

  ‘A year and a half,’ ventured my mother.

  A year and a half?! That was more time than I could imagine. And presumably, even then, my one-and-a-half-year-old brother wouldn’t exactly be a sophisticated conversationalist. It appeared that my parents’ well-meaning ‘get David a friend to play with’ scheme was hopelessly ill thought-through.

  ‘Is there any way it can be stopped?’ I asked. I must be one of the few best men ever to have toasted the marriage of a man he initially advocated aborting.

  That’s not to say I didn’t love him as soon as he arrived. I did. I worried about him. I wanted to protect him. It would have been awful if anything had happened to him. That all came naturally to me. But I’m afraid I had the imagination to realise that, had Dan never existed, I logically wouldn’t be able to miss him – and neither would I have had to deal with all the changes to our circumstances: the noise, the nappies, the tiredness of my parents, the necessity of moving house. I resented all this even if I didn’t resent him for it.

  And I had a strong sense that the standards my parents expected of their offspring were dropping. He seemed to get away with stuff that I didn’t (even when making allowances for infancy – I wasn’t envious of his right to shit on the go). For example, I was pretty convinced that I was never allowed to draw on the walls. When going round the supermarket with Dan and my mum, he would be given a packet of crisps to eat for which we had not yet paid. And we had to leave Santa Claus: the Movie halfway through because he was screaming blue murder. I still don’t know how that ends.

  But I hope you’ve inferred from the fact that I was later to be best man at his wedding that our relationship improved after that. By the time he was five, I was properly pleased he was there. I realised I’d be lonely without him. By the time he was 11, I was leaving home and sorry to be abandoning him. Not that he needed my help with our parents, of course. They let him draw on the bloody walls.

  Dan still lives in Oxford, where he works for a hedge fund as their ‘official historian’. I don’t know what he tells them other than that, in the long run, you’re fucked whatever you invest in. I don’t see him as often as I’d like, but when I do we generally go to the pub to drink and talk about real ale. We both enjoy that. Deal with it.

  The other major change our family underwent while I was at New College School was Grandpa dying. I was ten. In some ways, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It’s definitely the worst thing that ever happened to him.

  He was relatively old – 73, I think – which is about par for a death in the mid 1980s, I believe. Not strictly a tragedy, anyway. And I think he’d had a happy life. His marriage was incredibly happy and he loved his daughter and grandchildren very much. He was also properly and unselfconsciously religious which, as a muddle-headed agnostic, I rather envy.

  We were very close and I officially considered him the best person in the world. I remember he was a bit fat and he wore black-framed glasses. I remember that he smoked Silk Cut and would send me upstairs to fetch a new packet from a cupboard in which he had also secreted Lindt chocolate animals. I remember that he made very good chips and swam in the sea with a slow, confident crawl. I remember that he was a big fan of Minder. But mainly I remember a feeling of being loved by someone kind and special, who knew that the important things in life were fish and chips, ice cream and the seaside. Had he lived another ten years or so, I would have undoubtedly seen him differently, he wouldn’t have remained perfect in my eyes – no human could. But I would like to have known him with an older brain.

  I cried for hours when I heard the news. I went over the awfulness of it hundreds of times and instinctively wrung grief out of myself. It was the most emotionally healthy thing I’ve ever done in my life and, as a result, saddened and oddly aged though I remained as a result, I genuinely came to terms with his death. What worries me about this is that I never cry these days. I lost the ability at some point in my late teens which makes me fear that I’m now emotionally unfused. Or perhaps it’s just because nothing as bad as that has happened to me since?

  How ridiculous is it – how absurdly blessed am I – that the death of my grandfather in the middle of my childhood is the worst single event in my life? I’ve had a tremendous run of luck for which I am enormously grateful, but I’m also enormously fearful of it running out.

  Friends: I was all right for friends – it wasn’t just aqua-Slater. In fact, I made some very good ones. I’m still in touch with some of the other boys from Form VI, and a few of them are proper friends – people you have things in common with other than your past.

  Obviously I didn’t get together and play football with Leo, Ed and H
arry. Neither did we dress up and pretend to be The Professionals. Although I’d quite like to do that now, which I must remember the next time I see them. I’d reached the stage where we mostly just sat around and played board games, which wasn’t as exciting as watching Knight Rider – but unfortunately Knight Rider was only on for an hour a week. That’s partly why I was so resentful when my parents complained that I spent ‘all my time’ watching it.

  Home: We had dry rot. If you’ve ever had anything to do with dry rot, I know that will have got your attention. ‘Bloody hell, dry rot!’ you’ll be saying like someone with a bad back hearing about a bad back. (If, like me, you’ve had a life blighted by both dry rot and a bad back, my God you must be enjoying this book.) If not, let me tell you, dry rot is a nightmare. It is literally the worst sort of rot.

  We had moved house to a place round the corner which was definitely better but in a much worse state of repair. My brother was changing from an incredibly unruly baby, who seemed never to sleep, into a fearless toddler. As a result of having to eradicate the dry rot, my parents were short of money, which worried me. It felt like the writing was on the wall – but that was Dan’s fault. I didn’t want us to become like Lacey’s family from Cagney and Lacey. I wanted us to be like the Bellamys from Upstairs, Downstairs.

  But, other than the dry rot and the felt-tip on the skirting-boards, I liked being at home. It was where the television was.

  - 14 -

  Play It Nice and Cool, Son

  I’m at the top of Primrose Hill. You get an excellent view of London from here. Everyone likes views. They’re an extremely mainstream form of entertainment, yet one which nobody considers beneath them – other than literally. They have universal fun appeal, like food, drink, fireworks and mammalian cuteness – and unlike comedy, where the things that are widely appealing and enjoyed by the majority are perversely off-putting to fans of the niche comedy that only a minority get.

  This is frustrating for comedians. You want to be popular, you want people to like you. But if too many do, those who liked you most intensely at the outset start to turn away – they think you’ve sold out. They don’t realise that, in one sense, you were always trying to sell out but now you’ve got more buyers. It’s bad stagecraft for a comedian to seem eager to please, but that doesn’t mean we’re not. The primary aim of even the most edgy stand-up is to get laughs from whoever will listen.

  Early fans’ sense of betrayal is no more justifiable than that of a man who sees another man walking off with a hooker he once enjoyed paying to fuck. Except the whole situation should be much less charged with the potential to feel betrayed, because this isn’t an intimate physical act we’re talking about, but just the telling and hearing of jokes. Dark or light, satirical or wacky, message-bearing or surreal, comedians are just fools capering for a king’s pleasure. We shouldn’t get above ourselves, but neither does the king have cause to complain if we also raise a smile from an emperor.

  I was slightly disappointed by something the comedian Stewart Lee once said on this subject. I think Stewart Lee is very funny. But a routine he did on his BBC Two show cut right to the heart of something I feel very deeply about comedy – and about life in general. It’s about being cool.

  This was a long rant in which Lee hyperbolically expressed his frustration that the bit in Only Fools and Horses when Del Boy falls through the bar was voted the funniest clip ever on British TV. He found it incredibly depressing that such a mindless moment of slapstick should have so caught the public’s imagination – that in a world of such comic sophistication, this should be the moment they consider most brilliant.

  But what I feel is: the audience don’t find the clip funny just because it’s a good piece of slapstick – they find it funny because it’s happening to a character they feel they know. Del Boy, by being in a popular and long-running sitcom, has achieved the status in millions of households of a friend – that friend who’s funny down the pub, the friend who gets into scrapes. The person you say should be a comedian.

  Slapstick on its own is never more than fleetingly amusing. To really get the belly laughs, it has to be surrounded by character. This is why Peter Sellers is a genius and Norman Wisdom is not. Wisdom falls beautifully, with acrobatic comic skill, but his characters always look like they’re going to fall. They are ready and willing to slip, tumble and crack their skulls to get laughs. Sellers, particularly as Clouseau, has dignity. He comes across as someone who would be mortified to be involved in even the most low-key of pratfalls. Despite his long history of accidents and clumsiness, his expectation is still, inexplicably, that he will meet every new situation with unruffled savoir-faire. It is making that unlikely attitude so plausible and likeable that is the mark of a brilliant comic actor. So when Clouseau falls face first into his hostess’s tits, or puts his hand into a wedding cake to steady himself or has his trousers blown off by a bomb, we believe that he is mortified. It’s not the physical but the emotional pain that really makes us laugh. It’s not about how Sellers falls, it’s about how he gets up.

  Del Boy’s pratfall is far from a cheap laugh. It has years of the writer’s narrative skill and the actor’s characterisation invested in it. It is a culmination – a sign of mainstream comedy’s power to move people, to be welcomed into the homes it initially invaded. This is something all comedians (whether they’re at the dark/cult/niche end of the spectrum like Jerry Sadowitz, or mainstream stars like Graham Norton, or somewhere in between like me) should celebrate. It shows the power of comedy. It’s why television commissioners persevere with it when it’s much more expensive than, for example, cookery programmes. They know how great the potential rewards in audience numbers and appreciation can be.

  Those cool comedy fans, who turn their noses up at Only Fools and Horses, never sneer at Basil Fawlty thrashing his car with a sapling. That scene also usually comes high in the favourite clip polls and, in isolation, is equally unsophisticated. But Fawlty Towers isn’t such a slow-moving target. For all its popularity, it also has comic credibility. When the aficionados of edgy comedy see that clip, they don’t just see slapstick – they see the greatest sitcom character ever created giving vent to his frustration. Yet they don’t give Only Fools and Horses fans credit for appreciating Del Boy in the same way.

  Fawlty Towers is in fact a rare exception to the sell-out argument: the certainty of some fans that cultish comedy gets worse when it gets successful. This argument makes me uncomfortable. While wide appeal is no guarantee of artistic merit, neither is obscurity. The cachet of non-mainstream or obscure comedy is all tied in, to my mind, with notions of what’s cool. And that gets my hackles up. Comedy shouldn’t be swayed by what’s cool. Some people say it’s cool to be funny – if so, that has to remain completely incidental. Let’s not allow the comedy world to become any more infected with empty-headed notions of trendiness, fashion and zeitgeist or we’ll be reduced to the absurdities of the music industry.

  It may be cool to be funny, but people who try too hard to be cool, who make that their primary aim, are laughable. It’s no coincidence that Del Boy’s exact words, before falling through the bar, are: ‘Play it nice and cool, son, nice and cool.’

  People who aspire to be cool are one of the main groups that comedians prey on. But it’s difficult for us to do that if we’ve been reduced to having the same hollow aim ourselves. Far better to aspire to be a mainstream family comedian. The very greatest comedies – Fawlty Towers is a shining example, as are The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Simpsons – are as funny for niche comedy fans as they are for the mainstream family audience. Like panoramic views, they can be enjoyed by all.

  As I stare down Primrose Hill, taking in the London skyline, I feel somehow important and victorious. I’m sure the appeal of high ground is an evolutionary thing. When you’ve got a good vantage point, you know you’re relatively safe.

  By the end of prep school, I had this feeling a lot of the time. Nervous though I was about it, the whole gro
wing up thing was basically going okay. It felt like I was occupying high ground with a good view of a promising future. I wasn’t just a tedious, bookish nerd – I had the beginnings of a personality. I’d also had a tiny but instructive experience of injustice and adversity, and been given a few ideas about how to cope with it.

  I’m a bit worried about telling this story because I’m not sure it reflects very well on me. I might come across as a little shit who bears grudges, and that is the last thing that even little shits who bear grudges want to come across as. Well, I say last – it’s preferable to ‘paedophile’. But it’s not ideal. Still, I’m going to take the plunge because one of the things you’ve presumably bought this book for is to find out what I might actually be like. So even if I reveal truths that make you think less of me, you’ll also think more of me for revealing those truths honestly, right? I might end up about evens, in terms of what you think, and a quid up for what you paid for the book in Poundland. Unless you’ve borrowed it from a library – but fortunately, libraries are all being closed down while Poundlands are opening everywhere. I think it’s to do with the Big Society.

  Okay, here we go then. There was an annual academic prize called the ‘Form Prize’. In my second year, I won it. In my third year, Butch called me into his study to explain that, while I deserved to win it again, they’d decided to give it to another boy because I’d won it the previous year and they wanted to spread around the encouraging book tokens. Magnanimously, I thanked him and said that I understood.

  The following year, I once again did best in the exams and was not awarded the prize – but neither, on this occasion, was I granted an explanatory interview with Butch. My mother went spare. She had a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the school’s attitude, you see. She thought that it was biased in favour of boys whose parents were dons at the university and slightly scornful of the likes of us – former hotel managers, now lowly polytechnic lecturers. The father of the boy who won was an English fellow of an ancient college. Furthermore, a boy in another form whose family also had university connections had won a prize every year. There was no talk of giving it to someone else to spread the love where he was concerned.