Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Probably not, that would be a bit too much of a coincidence. I walk out of the park and continue heading south.

  - 18 -

  Enthusiasm in Basements

  I hope I don’t bump into Michael Palin. I don’t know why I would, but it’s always possible. He might be standing at a bus stop. Or browsing in a shop window. I hope he isn’t.

  I feel bad about saying that. And thinking it. I was once having a conversation about who was the worst person to bump into on holiday, to find staying at your hotel, and I concluded that, for me, it would be Michael Palin. Not Hitler. Not my worst enemy. Lovely Michael Palin.

  This was my reasoning: first of all, on holiday, you don’t really want to bump into anyone unexpected at all. You want to spend time with the person or people you’re holidaying with – so bumping into anyone is bad news. I appreciate that this is a misanthropic attitude and I’m sorry about that but it’s how I feel. I actually like people, in lots of cases, and want to spend time with them. In a planned way – I’m not up for chance encounters.

  There are various sorts of chance encounter I dismissed before deciding Palin would be worst. For example, there’s that category of acquaintance you’re tempted to ignore when you pass them in the street. Not because you don’t like them or hardly know them but because you know them to just the wrong and annoying extent. You’re not really friends, but you know them well enough for acknowledging them to necessitate a ‘catch-up’. You have to go through the whole ‘My God, how are you!?’ pantomime, as if the fact that you’re not often in touch has been a tremendous and regrettable lapse rather than a tacit agreement.

  Don’t get me wrong: I know the world is basically a better place for these pleasantries and I wouldn’t want to live without such lubricating hypocrisy, but it’s just sometimes easier, when you spot someone whose level of acquaintanceship with you is in this category, to pretend not to see them. They may well be doing the same and I don’t think that makes either person evil – just not particularly warm. And there are genuinely warm people – my mother, for example – who like to have such passing catch-ups with people they would never otherwise think about. They enjoy those little purposeless chats, the moment of human interaction and contact. Such people, I freely admit, are better than I am. But I won’t become one by pretending.

  Now, on holiday, almost anyone unexpected falls into this category. If you met a real bosom buddy, which is unlikely because you’d probably know the holiday plans of anyone that close, it might be okay. You could have a meal together one evening and otherwise continue with your plans. But everyone else is trouble. The oddness of the circumstances would be so unavoidably worthy of remark that you’d have to chat fully with people you’d barely speak to in the context that you know them from: ‘Oh my God, you work in that shop round the corner from me, I see you there a lot, we’ve never exchanged more than a nod and now you’re in exactly the same Portuguese hotel and it’s so weird we have to say hi and chat for a bit – and because we’re beside a swimming pool we’ve now seen much more of each other’s naked flesh than either of us is comfortable with. Hooray!’ The ‘My God, how are you!?’ hypocrisy levels are sky high.

  So it would be worse to bump into someone you’re neutral about than someone you hate. In the latter case, you’d have to assume the hatred went both ways and you’d naturally avoid each other on the beach, in the restaurant and going round the interesting local church. If you hate them and they don’t hate you, just behave like an arsehole when they say hello and you’ve killed two birds with one stone.

  Back to Michael Palin. For me, he’s the nightmare scenario: someone I massively admire and would feel incredibly self-conscious in front of. It would ruin the holiday. A different sort of person would love it: they’d think, ‘What a great opportunity to become friends with my hero Michael Palin!’ and merrily set about ruining Palin’s trip. I’m no such optimist. Why should Michael Palin want to be friends with me? I’m sure he has enough friends. And so do I, actually. How would Palin–Mitchell socialising work? He’s much older than me. He’s a big star. What would we do? Would I go round to his house and play board games? Would we go to the cinema? Would I hold dinner parties for all my university friends and Michael Palin as well, sitting in the corner being exactly, uncannily, off-puttingly like Michael Palin and making everyone worried about their table manners?

  As things stand, I get to enjoy Michael Palin’s work while satisfying my friendship needs with people who aren’t part of the Monty Python team. Knowing him won’t make The Life of Brian any funnier – in fact, if familiarity breeds contempt, it might make it less so. What a disaster that would be! I’d lose the pleasure I derive from some of the most brilliant comedy ever made, and get saddled with a friend my parents’ age who makes me feel self-conscious. Perhaps you begin to understand why the Michael Palin encounter would be my holiday hell – and I’d get no help from the British consul.

  Or you might be wondering why I can’t just ignore Michael Palin on this theoretical Portuguese beach. Not an option.

  Perhaps I should explain that I have met Michael Palin before. I was in the pub in Kilburn with my friend Toby, on an ordinary Saturday night about four years ago. I was unshaven and greasy-haired – I was getting pissed at my local, which felt like an extension of my living room. I didn’t feel like I was ‘out in public’ – I was probably comfortable enough to scratch my balls without thinking about it – when suddenly Michael Palin walked into the pub, came up to me and introduced himself.

  Can you imagine how weird that was? There was no seeing him across the room and hoarsely whispering:

  ‘Is that Michael Palin or just someone who looks like him?’

  ‘I think it’s him – maybe you should say hello? You’re on TV.’

  ‘No! That would be really annoying of me – he won’t want to be pestered by fans. Besides I’m not presentable and I keep scratching my balls!’

  Toby and I had no such opportunity. Instead we got an instant ‘Hello, I’m Michael Palin – I’ve seen you in Jam and Jerusalem, which I really enjoyed.’ Or something like that – something nice. He definitely said ‘Michael Palin’. I heard Michael Palin say ‘Michael Palin’, live in the Black Lion in Kilburn.

  And of course being a weird, shy and socially maladroit fan, I don’t think I was very nice to Michael Palin. I wasn’t rude – I was just quiet. I said hello, I introduced Toby, and Michael Palin went away to sit with his friends while I interrogated the part of my brain that seemed to think Michael Palin would have minded if I’d said, ‘I’m a huge admirer of your work.’ Exactly how had I come to the conclusion that this remark could wait for the next time Michael Palin came up to me in the pub? Obviously I was thrilled and amazed – one of my biggest comedy heroes had recognised me and said hello. Yet the thrill and amazement was dwarfed by shame at having dealt with the situation so poorly. So I was left with the strong net feeling that I’d rather the whole thing hadn’t happened. But at least I wasn’t wearing trunks and trying to drink out of a coconut.

  I’ve met Michael Palin again since, in the building I’m just passing now: BBC Broadcasting House, at the bottom of Portland Place. That’s probably why I’m jumpy about bumping into him again. We were both on an episode of Loose Ends. This encounter went much better, I’m relieved to say. But then I was ready for him. Broadcasting House is the sort of place where you expect to meet people, where you don’t go without having your shit together. So, having managed to give a reasonable account of myself with Michael Palin at last, why on earth would I want to bump into him under a palm tree and cock it up again?

  In a tweedy way, there’s something momentous and sacred about BBC Radio Comedy. It’s a world in which new performers and writers, aspirant and broke, desperate to turn promising Edinburgh Fringes into ways to pay the rent, are thrust together with some of the grand old men of comedy. Never is this more apparent than at the BBC Radio Comedy Christmas party. The tatty clothes of the skint and keen are
punctuated by the occasional gleaming blazer of the likes of Nicholas Parsons or Barry Cryer.

  There’s a sense of amazing continuity – that an unbroken tradition from the days of It’s That Man Again, through The Goon Show and Round the Horne, into the era of the three great and surviving radio panel shows, Just a Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and The News Quiz and taking in brilliant shows like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and On the Hour, is still alive here. There’s a bookishness alongside a sense of possibility. This is a place where pipe-smoking and ale-drinking sit alongside surrealism and satire – a perfect environment for a conservative who thinks the world needs to change. I love working in radio: it’s quick, you don’t have to learn your lines, they always give you sandwiches and you’re encouraged to go to the pub afterwards. I feel I belong there, and I’m proud of that feeling.

  But that’s not how I felt when I first entered Broadcasting House as a keen undergraduate on a day trip to London. James Bachman, who had already graduated, took Matthew Holness and me to a Week Ending non-commissioned writers’ meeting. This was in a basement ‘Writers’ Room’ which, in 1996, was still equipped with typewriters. The three of us sat quietly in a corner as a harassed and tubby script editor or producer, wearing round glasses and a bright waistcoat, went through the news stories they were looking for sketches about, while a handful of braying smart alecks chipped in and announced their writing intentions.

  It was not a happy atmosphere, probably because we all knew that we were the bottom of the heap – most of the material would come from the commissioned writers who had already been briefed and had taken the juiciest stories. They were on the princely retainer of £50 a week and were gods to us. In the non-commissioned writers’ room, it was intimidating to be a newbie, shouted down by older hands, conscious of how hard it was to get noticed even by one tiny satirical radio show. But it was worse to be an old hand, because there was really no excuse for not having become a commissioned writer by now. Anyone who’d been going to those meetings for more than a couple of years was officially deemed to have failed. And I have to say, from what I heard of the ideas they loudly chipped in with, rightly so.

  But it’s no good getting lost in reveries about Broadcasting House. I have to plan what I’ll say if I bump into Michael Palin. Be prepared, as I didn’t learn in the cubs. I managed to say that I admired his work when I saw him at Loose Ends, but I probably shouldn’t just say that every time I see him. I need something else, possibly urgently. As I turn down Regent Street, I’m amazed by the number of people who, from a distance, could be Michael Palin. It’s crowded; he could come at me from nowhere. By the time he was close enough for me to be sure, it would be too late to plan. That’s one of the many ways in which Michael Palin differs from Mr Blobby.

  Maybe I’d tell Michael Palin about having to play a dancing girl at Mr Fezziwig’s party. He, of all people, might be sympathetic. Michael Palin’s first stage role was Martha Cratchit, daughter of Scrooge’s hapless clerk. He played her at primary school in Sheffield, I’ve read.

  But he was only five and I was ten. Maybe at five it wouldn’t have been so embarrassing to cross-dress and look exactly like a girl? Or maybe Palin’s masculinity shone through? I’d hate to try and swap stories about our shared misery only to find that he loved it, and thus my attempt to bond over common ground with Michael Palin would actually result in the exact opposite. He’d walk away thinking I was weird and incomprehensible.

  Also, I reckon Martha Cratchit’s a better part than Dancing Girl. I bet he had lines. At five! He was a prodigy – he was six years younger than I was when I was finally trusted with ‘Vespasian, centurion’, which I reckon Palin would have made more of and was also, when I think about it, slightly embarrassingly Life of Brian-ey. Thanks, Mr Roberts! Way to make me look like a dick in front of Michael Palin! Yes, it would definitely be better not to bump into him.

  Michael Palin’s first comedy experience at university was, I’ve also read, performing sketches at a Christmas party. That means he waited weeks, months before trying to break into the performing scene at college. Not me; I went to fifteen auditions in my first weekend.

  Yes: following some successful A-level results and an interview, I discovered halfway through my gap year that I’d got into Cambridge. I’d decided to apply there instead of Oxford because, having left school, it struck me as a good idea to spread my wings a little and get away from the place where I grew up – albeit only to somewhere unbelievably similar.

  Getting in felt like more of a relief than a triumph. By then, I’d managed to persuade myself that, after all the years of obsessing about exams, not to get to Oxbridge would be a disastrous failure. Ridiculous though this view is, I felt it sufficiently strongly that, psychologically, I’d probably made it true and, had I not got to Cambridge, I would have slunk to whatever other perfectly good university had admitted me with an irreversible sense of defeat. Or perhaps I would have been stung by the rejection into intense hard work and made billions out of a dotcom. Nevertheless, my overwhelming emotion was of having averted a disaster – which, if anything, feels better than a triumph.

  When I arrived at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in October 1993 it was time for Phase 2 of my plan: reject academe and get stuck into drama immediately. (If my admissions tutor is reading this, I’m sorry. It’s Oxford I was angry with. But I couldn’t take it out on them, because they hadn’t let me in.)

  The two largest drama societies in Cambridge, the Amateur Dramatic Club and Footlights, both held Freshers’ week ‘squashes’ – the Cambridge name for drinks dos aimed at attracting new members. (Cambridge University has lots of its own words for things that there are perfectly good words for in wider circulation. This is one of the ways in which Cambridge University is like sailors.) The Footlights squash was held in its clubroom – a dark, damp, spider-infested room in the Union Society cellars, which had been expensively decorated to the height of fashion in 1978.

  As soon as I arrived, I was offered a drink: ‘There’s red or white wine – I’m afraid the lager’s just run out.’ The significance of that remark was lost on me at the time – more of that later. I joined Footlights; it seemed you didn’t have to audition to be a member, just pay a fiver. However, you did have to audition to be in any of the shows or ‘smokers’ (late-night cabaret evenings). The next show was the Christmas pantomime – I made a note of when and where to audition and then attempted, in a shy 18-year-old way, to ‘work the room’. This involved walking round the room without talking to anyone in it. Finally I managed to introduce myself to Dan Mazer, later producer of Ali G Indahouse, at that point Footlights vice-president and in his third year at Peterhouse, the same college as me. We had an awkward chat and then I left.

  At the Amateur Dramatic Club squash, people were more helpful and welcoming, in a way that immediately made me think less of the institution. I’m not proud of that but there’s no doubt Footlights’ shabby standoffishness, coupled with its fame, projected greater cachet than the ADC’s inclusive efficiency. The ADC welcomed those keen on any and every element of theatre production: not just acting and writing but all the boring ones as well. In fact, those seemed to be the priority, possibly because the ADC had its own theatre and so was very focused on everything you could do with and in it: lighting, set-building, publicity, front of house, costume, make-up, etc. I was slightly put off by all that. But what I was much more put off by was the fact that, scandalisingly, one of the committee members, a student only two years older than me, had a baby – her own baby – which she was sort of wielding like it was the most natural thing in the world. I reckoned that meant she’d definitely had sex.

  Keeping on the opposite side of the room from the girl with the baby, I finally managed to ask someone wearing an authoritative T-shirt about acting and how to get involved.

  ‘The standard,’ I was told, ‘is incredibly high.’ (This was a lie.) ‘You probably won’t get a part in anything in your first year – c
ertainly not in your first term – but you should audition for everything to give yourself a chance.’

  Everything. Right.

  ‘Alternatively, if you’d like to learn lighting design, we’ve got people who can teach you.’

  I did not want to learn lighting design. Undaunted by this evidence of widespread electricity, drill, hammer and penis use in Cambridge drama, I decided to audition for everything.

  Play auditions at Cambridge, in my day at least, were all advertised in Varsity, the student newspaper, and always happened at the weekend so that even students who had lectures all day every day of the week (scientists, basically) could still audition. (Obviously, they’d hardly be able to make any of the rehearsals but that issue was glossed over. Throughout my time at Cambridge, the acting and writing scene was dominated by people reading for arts and humanities degrees because our workload was so much lighter than the scientists’. Those who read Natural Sciences or Medicine practically had full-time jobs, while all I had to attend was one weekly supervision for which, strictly speaking, I had to write one weekly essay although I usually didn’t. All lectures were voluntary and I didn’t go to a single one after week four of my first term. So there was lots of time for messing around in plays.)

  The first weekend of the Michaelmas (autumn) term was the busiest of the year for auditions. In any given week, there are several student shows on at Cambridge University, not just at the ADC Theatre but in many of the colleges: Trinity, Queens’, Robinson, Peterhouse, Christ’s, Corpus Christi and St John’s all had serviceable performance spaces. In the first weekend, when they cast many of the plays for the whole term, there were more auditions than one person could physically go to. I managed to get to 15 and learned a fair bit about Cambridge geography in the process.