Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Though not a cast member, I was invited to help write for the Spring Revue. The Footlights writing system was straightforward and ruthlessly effective. The writing team would meet at eleven in the morning for a general chat about the sort of material that was needed. Then we would divide up into pairs who would go off for an hour or so, write a sketch or maybe even two, and return at an appointed time to read them out. This process would be repeated in the afternoon. If you do that for a couple of weeks, you’ll generate quite a large pile of material from which to construct a show.

  This system may sound plodding and uncreative, but I am a big admirer of it (or should that be ‘so I’m a big admirer of it’?). In my experience, if you want to write comedy, you just have to get on with it. You have to crash through the invisible barrier caused by the combination of the vast sense of possibility – a sketch could be about anything, could be the wackiest, most surreal, yet most satirical, wide-ranging, specific, general, flippant, profound piece of material ever written – and the terrifying, narrowing, diminishing feeling caused by scratching the first inadequate words of it onto a sheet of A4. As soon as you start to write, you also start to close doors (metaphorical ones as well as the one to the shop where the sketch is inevitably set). The new sketch emerges and obviously isn’t the next ‘Parrot Sketch’ or ‘One Leg Too Few’ but just today’s effort, something that’ll do.

  There’s no point in resisting that or being ashamed of it. Brilliance will strike you, if it ever does, as a complete surprise sailing out of the clear blue sky of competence. The key is to get stuff written down, and this Footlights system forces you to. It gives you a simple, achievable task – writing a sketch in an hour – and a friend to do it with. It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to be written. You can write a funny one in the afternoon or the next day, you tell yourself – your task in any given moment is not to go back empty-handed. Great sketches come out of that approach, as well as unusable ones. But, most precious of all, it produces sketches that aren’t good enough but have the kernel of a good idea which someone else, later in the process, can often turn into something better. When that happens, you’re genuinely mobilising the creative power of a team.

  The best stuff generated by this system went into the show, but anything you wrote that was left over, you were free to use yourself – which meant you could audition it for a ‘smoker’. That’s the name Footlights gives its informal late-night performances. A contraction of ‘smoking concerts’, in the old days smokers were cabaret nights watched exclusively by cigar-smoking men in dinner jackets. By the early ’90s, they were under-rehearsed one-night-only comedy shows made up of songs, sketches, character monologues and stand-up, where smoking was no longer allowed but women were. They played to packed houses of drunken and easily-amused students.

  The first big roar for a joke you’ve written yourself is the best laugh you’ll ever get in your life, the rest of which you spend trying to recapture it. It’s a transformative moment. You are redeemed from your own personal hell and launched into the firmament. There you are, a foolhardy unoriginal idiot who’s engineered a situation where hundreds of people are sitting looking at you, expecting you to say something so good that it will make them spontaneously and simultaneously emit noises of amusement. It felt doable before you wrote the sketch; it felt possible afterwards; in rehearsal there were moments when it felt likely. But in the two hours preceding the performance, it has gradually dawned on you that, of course, it’s impossible – particularly with the irredeemably unfunny piece of material you’ve perversely saddled yourself with. You’ve watched all the other acts, many of which have gone well, and thought of each of them: ‘Of course! That’s the sort of thing to do! A sketch using the word fuck, some stand-up about wanking, that mad thing about a man with a dog called Fisticuffs who keeps getting into scrapes.’ But not your thing – not your stupid, risky, obscure, uninventive piece of nothing.

  And then it works! The joke works! They get it, they laugh loudly, you can feel their warmth, their appreciation. They like you – it’s like a Vitamin B shot of confidence to your whole system.

  My first smoker sketch was about the Samaritans, I’m not particularly proud to say. There’ve been lots of sketches about the Samaritans so I wasn’t at any great risk of originality. Then again, in my defence, putting an organisation with associations of people in despair, who are possibly suicidal, into an overtly comic scenario is a pretty solid approach. You get the credit for being daring and edgy, in a context where you’re not in much danger of causing offence.

  The sketch, which I’d written with a friend from college, Robin Koerner, opened in a risky way laugh-wise. A man (me) is on the phone (probably because the Alan Bennett sketch I’d read out to audition for the panto was on the phone and it had gone well, so I was trying to recapture that success) saying something like this:

  MAN: (on phone, in a dry unconcerned way) Oh. Oh. Yes. Oh dear. Yes, I see. Oh dear. Well, yes, I should go ahead then. Yes, absolutely. I can see why you would. Yes, I completely understand your position. I’d do that, if I were you. Yes. All right then. Bye then. Bye bye.

  He puts the phone down. It rings.

  By this point, as comedy connoisseurs will realise, nothing funny has been said. To be honest, I think the man talking into the phone went on even longer than that but I can’t remember it. Anyway, there hasn’t been a joke. Maybe I’ve got a couple of warm titters of expectation, maybe not. The joke is coming up. Having told you the subject of the sketch, you’ve probably anticipated it. So I hope you can imagine my stress levels, my intense concern at this instant, as I sat under a bright light in front of a couple of hundred people, twenty seconds into my first ever performance of something I’d written. Suddenly there’s nowhere to hide – they either laugh at the next line or the sketch has been a disaster. There’ll be no redeeming it, no winning them round. It’s all or nothing. Not all sketches are all or nothing, you know. You can have material that slowly wins people round and doesn’t stand or fall on one surprising moment. And I knew it at the time. So why had I decided to debut with one that does? Because I am a stupid cunt, I thought in my whirring, self-loathing, idiot’s brain as I tried to time the next bit of the sketch:

  He answers the phone.

  MAN: Hello, Samaritans.

  Massive laugh.

  I know it’s not the best joke in the world, but it worked – I promise you it really worked. The satisfaction of having made an audience think backwards and laugh at the fact that the character had been casually advocating suicide was immense – of having taken a punt, reasoned that people might find something funny and been proved right. I can’t remember any of the jokes from the rest of the sketch but I’ll never forget that moment.

  It was my laugh – I’d thought of the joke, I’d written it down, I’d learned it and I’d delivered it. This is just the best thing in the world, I thought. I want to do this again.

  - 22 -

  Mitchell and Webb

  ‘Bread for the ducks, nice to get ooooouuuuuttttt!’ Rob and I sang, to the tune of the ‘Eton Boating Song’ – desperately but also with a tinge of relief because that was one of the few lyrics we were confident on. Somehow the crowd sensed that and laughed. But was that why they were laughing? No, we were somehow out of sync with the music – it was ahead of us, or behind us. Only now was it doing the ‘Nice to get oooouuuttttt!’ bit, so we sang that again. And the audience laughed, screamed, howled.

  Now we couldn’t hear the backing track at all. I was supposed to sing the next verse. I think it was something else about a duck – I’d known it earlier this afternoon, but my brain couldn’t multitask to this extent. I was simultaneously trying to listen through the screams of audience mockery for the moment to come in, remember the hastily learned lyrics, compose my features into a look other than that of absolute bafflement and defeat, and work out whether the fact that we were getting laughs was basically good news, or whether our having completely lost
control of why we were getting them undermined the achievement entirely and disqualified us from taking any credit.

  This was the first night of Innocent Millions Dead or Dying – A Wry Look at the Post-Apocalyptic Age (With Songs), the first two-man show I performed with Robert Webb. It was a late show at the ADC and, by mid-afternoon of the day we were to open, panic was setting in. We’d just remembered that we needed props. Usually, in shows, someone sorts out all the props. What we’d just discovered was that, for that to happen, someone else has to ask them. A low point had been during the technical rehearsal when Ellis had popped in to see how we were getting on and said:

  ‘Yeah, you’ve got a bit of work to do, chaps.’

  Ellis had said that. The personification of the ‘it’ll all be fine – let’s just kick back and get pissed’ approach. He had a look in his eye of concern, but also of respect. ‘These guys,’ he was thinking, ‘have managed to fuck themselves even more royally than I could have done in their place.’

  All was not lost, though. We were thanking our lucky stars that we’d been too disorganised to put any posters up, because we reckoned that would cancel out our having been too disorganised to learn our lines or rehearse the show. A handful of mates might turn up and we could do a sort of open rehearsal in front of them – it was all going to feel very casual and relaxed, a work in progress. That’s what we hoped.

  But, no, the theatre was almost full. This was unheard-of for a late show other than a Footlights smoker. There was nowhere to hide. Except the wings. Which would leave the stage bare. Which would mean they’d ask for their money back – and we were both secretly totting up the amount of money we stood to make and what that bought in Kronenbourg. Backstage beforehand, we listened to the auditorium filling up excitedly and were conscious of a huge opportunity that we were about to screw up.

  ‘But what’s going on?’ you may be asking if you’re in the habit of talking to books. ‘A minute ago you were doing a short and derivative sketch taking the piss out of people so unhappy they want to kill themselves. Now you’re fucking up a show with Robert Webb. What happened in between?’

  I’ll tell you. The genesis of this flawed theatrical creation, or conception of this sickly comic child or the botched laser surgery behind this fuzzy humorous vision, had occurred six months earlier. When we were both in Edinburgh for the 1994 Fringe, Rob asked me if I wanted to do a show with him. Rob was one of the stars of that year’s Footlights tour show, The Barracuda Jazz Option, and I was there in a play called Colin, written by Charlie Hartill, the new Footlights president and starring Robert Thorogood, the old one. I was just a lowly first-year but I found the whole presidential vibe very exciting and hoped it augured well for me.

  As a play, Colin was fine but nothing special. It was about a man called Colin, but the main reason it was called Colin was because the writer-performers of the previous year’s Footlights tour had been prevented from calling their show Colin by … well, the story goes that it was the tour manager and the techies, but I don’t really believe that as, in my experience of Footlights, the tour manager and techies were never consulted over the name of the show. I suspect it was the director and then the tour manager and techies agreed. The view was that you ‘can’t’ call a show Colin – the joke that Colin is more usually a name for a human or pet than a comedy revue would not come across. So the show had been called Some Wood and a Pie instead. How bizarre that Some Wood and a Pie is deemed a sensible, apposite, appropriately wacky name for a sketch show but Colin is seen to be taking the piss – but not taking the piss in a good way. Taking too much, or the wrong sort, of piss.

  I’m not sure that the joke of calling a sketch show Colin would have worked – but jokes in show titles seldom do. They’re hilarious when you think of them and then they get printed on everything and read constantly and have the mickey taken out of them by hostile reviewers, and the joke slowly and painfully dies while you helplessly listen to its screams – like a fridge-magnet joke, impaled there by physics, miserably catching your eye every time you go for the milk, losing its humour at a hundred times the rate that the natural light can bleach the writing.

  But Some Wood and a Pie is a terrible name for a comedy show. It reeks of unthinking, artless, unjustifiably self-confident wackiness – the very thing that Footlights is always accused of and should be doing everything it can to distance itself from. It’s an off-the-shelf kind of revue title; the people who insisted on it must have thought that (even if it wasn’t amusing) it was safe, a usual sort of comedy name. But audience members or reviewers will assume that the writer-performers think it’s funny – not just appropriate but actually comical. They’ll imagine those young people pissing themselves at the hilarious randomness of ‘Some Wood’ and ‘a Pie’, these two unconnected things, ho ho ho, how simply mad – and consequently hate them. That’s not the end of the world – some people will hate you whatever you do, particularly if you’re an enthusiastic Oxbridge student, but they might as well hate you for something you actually find funny, not something that you think is a bit of a lame compromise.

  Calling the show Colin at least would have had an idea behind it. People might not get it but there’s something to get. I think it would work better if they’d given it a surname – called it Colin Jenkins or even Mr Jenkins. But it would definitely have been preferable to Some Wood and a Pie.

  You may wonder why I’ve got so much to say about the controversy over the naming of a Footlights show I was never in and didn’t see. It’s because I think it’s illustrative of an interesting and maddening phenomenon in creative circles: fundamentally unentertaining people trying to make things like other things that have gone before. They believe that properly creative people, who actually have ideas, will try and drag a project off track. So, a student sketch show should have a wacky name, a TV programme should begin with the host saying: ‘This is the show in which …’ and then summarising the format, a pop song should be three minutes long, people will be more entertained by daytime TV if the presenters constantly use puns, a TV detective should always have an assistant who relentlessly questions his judgement and books should be described on their covers as ‘rollercoasters’.

  Conventions like these are clung to and defended by people who have no real ideas of their own, and lack the self-knowledge to forge careers using other skills such as their efficiency, diplomacy or application. They want to make things that are like other things – to ‘play shop’, which means you’ve got to have a till and a brown coat and a counter with a shelf of tins behind it like in real shops. When they hear something that diverges from that – say a series of aisles with all the produce and then a bank of checkouts where people pay – they instinctively oppose it because they can seldom tell the difference between a properly original piece of thinking and a mad divergence from sensible practice. As in this case. There is no earthly reason to consider Some Wood and a Pie more appropriate than Colin as a name for a random collection of sketches – but one title has an unsettling air of originality which this type of person shrinks from, apparently without realising that such originality is where comedy comes from and therefore exactly what they should be attracted to.

  Charlie Hartill was a man very much of my mind in this regard, and called his own play Colin as a sort of revenge on the dullards who overruled the comedians the previous year. (Of course, it was a completely hollow revenge. The play was about a man called Colin. The title wasn’t off-kilter at all. The Some Wood and a Pie advocates would have been fine with it. If he’d really wanted to rattle their cages, he’d have called it Some Wood and a Pie.)

  Unfortunately it was a pretty patchy play. It had some good bits, some good lines, some nice characterisation, but the story didn’t really cut the mustard. My main memory of it is a scene where, while the hero is talking or doing some work or somehow otherwise engaged, my character, an argumentative, tweedy man, reaches into his inside pocket and removes a large battered sausage which he then proceeds
to eat. We’d hoped people would laugh at this more than they did.

  But Charlie was a talented man, albeit one who combined moments of frightening drive and intensity with long periods where he lost focus. He could be very funny in an angry, analytical way, which influenced me enormously. I remember his doing a long analysis, as part of a stand-up routine, of the rhyme ‘See a penny, pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck’ which ended with him emphatically saying: ‘And a penny isn’t worth making yourself blind for, is it?’ I can’t recall how he got there but it involved dog shit.

  As president of Footlights, he could be withering in the face of incompetence. Rob told me of an occasion at a production meeting for the 1994 Footlights pantomime Dick Whittington, to which Charlie arrived late to find an argument going on. He interrupted everyone, saying, ‘What is the problem? I shall solve it instantly’ – and then did.

  Charlie adopted a lot of his managerial technique from his mentor Christopher Richardson, who founded and ran The Pleasance, an all-conquering Edinburgh Fringe venue where Charlie had a summer job. My favourite quotation attributed to Christopher Richardson, said in the context of a technical rehearsal in a theatre, is: ‘I find these inexplicable delays intensely depressing.’ If I were the sort of person who got phrases printed on T-shirts, that’s what I’d go for. It so perfectly encapsulates my feelings for about 60 per cent of the time I spend working in theatres, television studios or on location, where getting up early and then waiting around for hours is the order of the day. It’s also a fairly appropriate general response to life.