Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Charlie Hartill wrote plays and sketches, performed stand-up, acted, was a brilliant designer of posters and programmes, organised the Pleasance computer system and was a director of the Edinburgh Fringe for eight years. He was often an inspiring leader for Footlights and he was an intensely loyal friend. Sadly, that was only one side of him. The other was dominated by an unfathomable anger and unhappiness that were the root of his less impressive and dependable periods of behaviour, his heavy drinking and ultimately his suicide in 2004.

  Charlie and I were both fans of John Buchan novels, both for the exciting plots and the slightly laughable boys-own adventure style. After a mixed run at Edinburgh for Colin, in which Charlie had been by turns fun, funny, supportive, irritable, busy, absent and drunk, he wasn’t my favourite person in the world. Then, soon after the end of the Fringe, he gave me a beautifully preserved copy of John Buchan’s autobiography in which he’d written, rather formally: ‘To David Mitchell, With gratitude and fond memory for Colin! Charlie Hartill’ – and I forgave him all. I treasure it and yet it’s probably the saddest object I own, reminding me not just of Charlie’s death but of the times when his behaviour led me to resent or avoid him, not realising the time limit on our friendship. The book’s title is Memory Hold the Door.

  The Edinburgh run of Colin was a slightly muted end to my first year as a theatre-obsessed student. While the Festival itself was a dazzling event, the reality of trying to sell a mediocre show starring nobody anyone had heard of was even more of an uphill struggle than the sweaty walk across Edinburgh from the flat to the Pleasance. We sold a respectable number of tickets but, having spent the year playing to full ADC houses of enthusiastic students in Noises Off and What the Butler Saw, doing some patchy new writing in front of fifteen indifferent punters was an anticlimax.

  But when Rob asked me to do a show with him, it more than made up for that. I was incredibly excited. He popped the question in the Pleasance bar on a very drunken night which ended with my having a long row with Richard Herring about Eric Morecambe. Richard Herring had come over to say that he’d enjoyed Rob’s performance in the Footlights show and we’d got talking and I was hammered. I’m not sure how the subject of Eric Morecambe came up, though I fear that I probably introduced it. My feelings of insecurity about the Edinburgh comedy world, on which I was dismayed not to have immediately made an impact, led me to be dismissive of it. These transient stars of the Fringe are nothing compared to the great treasures of the golden age of television, I thought bitterly. ‘You can’t beat Eric Morecambe’ was basically my argument.

  Richard Herring didn’t refute this, but contended that other sorts of comedy were also valid. I’m afraid that line of reasoning was slightly too sophisticated for me after so many lagers and I became incensed and basically accused Richard of saying he was funnier than Eric Morecambe. Eventually Richard managed to extricate himself. I should have apologised when I saw him at the Pleasance the next day, but to do so would have been too much of a tacit admission about my own behaviour. It was many years before I was comfortable admitting even to myself what a dick I must have seemed to him. Having worked with Richard on several occasions since, and always found him a very nice and funny guy, I hope he’s never made the connection between me now and some spotty kid who had a drunken go at him in Edinburgh 1994. If he has, he’s a very forgiving man.

  Despite my embarrassing him in front of someone off the telly only minutes after our double act was formed, Rob remained willing to stick with the plan of doing a show with me. And I was hyper-keen. Rob was a Footlights committee member, star of the tour show and the next year’s vice-president. Doing a show with him meant I’d arrived.

  My own credentials, for a first-year, weren’t bad. I’d been in the panto, taken part in smokers and written material for both the Spring Revue and the tour show – including the worst sketch they performed. This was an item entitled ‘Most Feet Competition’, the details of which you can probably make a reasonably accurate guess at. I felt that I was unlucky to have written the worst sketch in the show. The material was chosen from a huge pile, so to be the worst that made the cut it had to be well above the average standard of what was written. Yet, because it wasn’t great but had to be performed dozens of times, the cast hated it, while they fondly remembered worse items that failed to make the cut at all, and consequently didn’t die a death every night at the Wimborne Theatre.

  I had also organised my own sketch show, Go to Work on an Egg, with Robert Hudson (now a novelist and my flatmate) and a few others. It had gone down very well. I, if not gorged, at least heavily snacked on that joyous sensation of getting a laugh from my own material which I’d felt at my first smoker.

  One of the sketches in that show was the first thing I ever wrote with Rob, entitled ‘War Farce’. We’d written it for the tour show but the director, Mark Evans, had refused to include it on the basis that it was terrible. Nevertheless I foisted it on the Go to Work on an Egg team because of its glamorous associations with a member of the Footlights committee. Rob had come to see the show and (‘War Farce’ apart) pronounced it very amusing and congratulated me in a meaningful way which, what with Rob’s whole metrosexual earring-wearing schtick, a man more sexually and less comedically confident than I might have taken as a come-on. But I knew it meant he thought I was funny, in a way that he hadn’t particularly in Cinderella. Aglow with the triumphs of such sketches as ‘Date Date’, ‘Librarian’ and ‘Use Them as Trestles’, I knew that he was right.

  And now he was suggesting we write a whole show together! We didn’t start work for a few months after that, during which time I was able to narrow the gap a bit between me and my glamorous comedy senior. Most of the old Footlights committee had graduated; only Rob, Charlie and Tristram were still around, so Matthew Holness and I were quickly co-opted to organise smokers, reel in freshers and hold panto auditions. I realised how green Rob must have been feeling when I’d met him at the Cinderella recall audition a year before, and had an important epiphany: ‘knowing what you’re doing’ largely involves pretending to know what you’re doing. Or, at least, it does in showbusiness. I choose to believe that it isn’t like that with surgery or nuclear power.

  Alongside these exciting new responsibilities, I played Mr Worthy in Ellis’s shit production of The Recruiting Officer and wrote a musical with Ellis and Adam Cork (a brilliant and now Tony Award-winning composer) called Stud in which I also acted. (I didn’t play the title role.) And in the panto that year, Rob and I were the leads, playing Dick Whittington and his cat respectively.

  We didn’t really know how to write our own two-man show, which, in retrospect, was a good thing. We didn’t, for example, start writing self-contained two-man sketches, which would have led to a stop-start show with too many blackouts. Neither did we approach it in the sort of two-man stand-uppy way of which I’d seen a lot around that time – where the two men address the audience alternately along a theme such as ‘A History of Love’ or ‘A Guide to Being a Dick’. We just sat down and started a silly story. It was about a Victorian inventor and a semi-alcoholic rustic programmer travelling through time to try and foil the apocalyptic ambitions of a crazed Welsh super-computer.

  This was to be how all the stage shows of our early career were formatted. Pairs of characters would talk to each other, hopefully in a funny way, and then separate. Another pair of characters would do the same. Then maybe another. Then they’d start to mix pairings, in a way that was obviously limited by who was playing which character. Only by cheesy theatrical sleight of hand could anyone Rob played ever meet anyone else Rob played. We milked these limitations for laughs. As the show progressed and our stupid, often James Bond-style plot became dafter, any consequent slackening in audience interest could be made up for by the frequency, speed and desperation of our costume changes. The story didn’t have to be gripping if they were entertained by the sight of us frantically trying to tell it with inadequate resources.

  To put it anothe
r way, it’s funny when people fuck up. That’s what we learned in our first attempt – the Innocent Millions debacle. From memory, we occasionally got a laugh from a pre-written joke, but largely our desperate attempt to struggle through the story and be wearing the right costume at the right time was what the audience were enjoying. At the end, they clapped and cheered like they’d properly enjoyed it. It felt like we’d done something good.

  We learned a lot that night, some of which did us good. We learned that we worked well together as performers – that we were somehow greater than the sum of our parts. We learned that an audience wants to hear jokes or be told a funny story by people they’re enjoying watching and that not much else about a comedy show matters – that sometimes it’s okay, as Mr Sleigh at New College School tried to tell me, for the giant rabbit to take its mittens off. And we learned that our approach to writing material was basically sound.

  But some of the other lessons we took from that night were harmful. However often we told ourselves in the years to come that rehearsing wasn’t just for pussies – and that this year, finally, we were going to take a slick and professional show up to Edinburgh – neither of us could quite shake our infatuation with winging it. We knew that hard work and professionalism were important in the career we’d chosen – and yet we couldn’t forget the first night of Innocent Millions when we’d wandered on stage with only the barest clue of what we were doing and it had gone down brilliantly.

  - 23 -

  We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back

  I don’t get pants in the end. I go in there. I negotiate my way through the massive shop, avoiding getting stuck like Father Ted in the lingerie section, and find the bit where men’s pants are on sale – beside massive photos of toned stomachs above snow-white-panted wholesome genital shapes. But there are lots of people and a massive queue, so I leave again. I hope someone isn’t murdered in there around now. I mean, I hope that in general, but I particularly hope it because there’ll be CCTV of me ‘behaving suspiciously’ – in both senses of the phrase. The police would be suspicious of a man walking into a department store, hanging around watchfully for a few moments and then disappearing. In fact, I only left because I myself was suspicious – unsettled by my surroundings, worried that I might be observed or even laughed at as I attempted to obtain the wherewithal to conceal my balls from work colleagues. ‘There’s nothing suspicious about it,’ I’d say. ‘It’s just that I was suspicious so I left.’

  Now I’m walking west down the scuzzy end of Oxford Street towards Marble Arch. This is the route the condemned were taken when public executions were held at Tyburn Tree, more or less where Marble Arch is now. It’s a cold corner, busy in a threatening way, like the parts of London round railway stations: there are burger joints and overflowing bins and bureaux de change, multilane traffic and a couple of monolithic hotels, the Cumberland and the Thistle which, though large, lack the opulence of the Park Lane hotels stretching to the south. Not happy places to stay – just hundreds of cubicles of necessity from which to look out on the ceaseless traffic.

  Better that than the subways under Marble Arch, though – built to facilitate access between traffic islands, pavements, Hyde Park and the Tube station but, for decades now, an icy concrete home for the homeless. A place of mouldering mattresses and shifting piles of cloth in which the desperate are seeking rest.

  As a child and teenager, this was my entry point to London, where the coach from Oxford let you out. It felt dangerous and hostile and it frightened me. London, it made me think, was a bad place. There were great things there – excitements, opportunities, theatres, museums – but it was no place to live.

  My final year at Cambridge was over-shadowed by the prospect of London. That was where I had to go, I realised. That was where Rob had gone, and Jon Taylor and, after a few months working for a computer firm in Cambridge while trying to maintain his undergraduate lifestyle, Ellis too. They shared a flat in Swiss Cottage, to which I went for the occasional party. It felt very grown-up and sophisticated, appropriate for the president of Footlights, to be ‘popping up to town’ for parties with friends who were now professional writer-performers. The reality, when I arrived, was less impressive. My friends were drinking cans of lager in a dump they could ill afford, their professional status largely being that they didn’t have jobs. It was fun to go and visit them – and Rob and I had plans for another two-man show, which we would take to Edinburgh – but I was apprehensive about the future that awaited when the sluices of graduation released me from the small pond of Cambridge.

  That’s if I managed to graduate, for which I’d have to do well enough in my final exams to get a degree. This was touch-and-go to say the least. Not that it should have been a problem. I was supposedly there to learn about history, my favourite subject at school. In my year off several people had told me that you could get a very good degree just by doing four hours work a day and the rest of your time would be free for hobbies and socialising. ‘Well I think I can manage a bit more work than that,’ was my response, ‘and still have lots more time for fun than I did at either school or OUP.’

  We were all wrong. You can get a good degree in history from Cambridge if you do as little as two hours of work a day, if you really do it every day and then cram for exams. Four is for maniacs. One would probably suffice. Unfortunately, after the first few weeks, I was incapable of doing even that. I’d stopped handing in weekly essays, which is all you have to do to remain part of the history course at Cambridge – that and turn up for your weekly ‘supervision’. I was squandering my privileged access to a renowned university’s world-famous one-on-one teaching system. What I quickly learned, instead of the economics of medieval England, was that if you hadn’t written an essay, you could ring up your supervisor and postpone, in some cases even cancel, the supervision. There was basically nothing they could do about that, other than express concern – which they wouldn’t do for the first few weeks because they’d totally believe you, or be nice enough to pretend they totally believed you, about whatever excuse you’d given: being ill, depressed, having lost a fifth grandparent. (Saying that you were feeling ‘down’ or ‘weird’ made them back off PDQ – the poor sods were terrified of students bumping themselves off, because the press then have a field day about the demanding Oxbridge ‘hothouse’ atmosphere. I know it happens, but the idea of killing yourself at Cambridge due to pressure of academic work seems as unlikely to me as dying of a surfeit of fillet steak in a North Korean jail.)

  None of this solved the problem of exams, however. Back at the end of my second year, as exam time approached, my college (which treasured its reputation for excellence in history) had sensed there was a crisis brewing. So Dr Adamson, a bye-fellow of Peterhouse, took it upon himself to give me special supervisions on my essay technique. This was a suggestion which I considered to be useless and offensive in equal measure. The technique with which I wrote essays was fine – it was their complete lack of factual content that was the problem. More infuriating still was the first supervision itself, in which he’d clearly decided to be incredibly rude in order to knock some sense into me. He took an essay which my supervisor and director of studies had considered to be perfectly adequate and discussed it as if it were a dirty protest.

  I suppose I deserved it. I was letting the college down. I was wasting my chances of an education. But he didn’t seem angry, hurt or concerned for my academic progress. He was just enjoying making me feel small and I resented the pleasure he took. ‘One day,’ I thought, ‘I’ll call this man a cunt in a book.’ After the supervision, I wrote to thank him for his help and explain that I wouldn’t be needing any more of it. I think I said something bullshitty like it ‘doesn’t fit in with my revision schedule’, as if I had any such thing other than three weeks blanked out of my diary for panicking.

  Those second-year exams – my Part I’s, as they were known – could have gone worse: I got a 2:2 – a long way off a fail, but below the 2:1 which Peterhouse
considered the minimum requirement for its historians. I was called to see my director of studies, Dr Lovatt. They couldn’t throw me out of the university – I hadn’t failed an exam – but they could make me swap to a different subject which the college cared less about and which could have meant having to study for a fourth year. This idea appalled me as it would mean Rob had two years out in the real world before I could join him. He’d have his own show on BBC Two by then, I thought. I’d be left behind.

  As part of my dressing-down, Dr Lovatt mentioned my having written to Dr Adamson but, as he did so, I swear he smirked. I think he liked the fact that I’d done that. As he balanced up whether to let me carry on reading history, which he eventually did, I’m pretty sure that letter weighed in my favour. It’s not uncommon for academics to be at each other’s throats, and I have a feeling that even Gandhi himself would have made an exception for Dr Adamson.

  People often ask me how much like my character from Peep Show I am. Well, this is a clear point of difference. Mark Corrigan is obsessed with history. At university, he dutifully read Business Studies, but he would have loved to do history and would, I’m sure, have cherished the opportunity. I can’t claim to have a fraction of Mark’s fascination and passion for the subject.

  I do like to bang on about it, though. Any of the bits I’m keen on – late eighteenth-century British politics, the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna, the Treaty of Versailles or the Second World War – are subjects on which I dearly love to hear the sound of my own voice. I will go on and on and on about it, often stopping to ask people whether I’m going on too long or being boring, and then, horror of horrors, believing their expressions of continued interest even though I know that politeness would prevent them saying anything else.