Back Story

by David Mitchell

  As I prepared for Edinburgh in 1997, failure felt both unthinkable and inevitable. There’s a lot of crossover between those two qualities – probably because there’s not much point in thinking about the inevitable. That’s my view, at least – I would never have made much of a philosopher or priest.

  I tried to suppress the panic I felt whenever Rob had to go off for an audition or a meeting or to have photos taken. Those trappings of an actor’s career properly starting were terrifying, so best not contemplated. I just had to hope that something would come out of that year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where we were doing two shows: a rewritten version of Innocent Millions and, as I mentioned before, a production of the Stephen Fry play, Latin! To save money, we didn’t hire a flat of our own to stay in but slept on the floor of Rob’s girlfriend Leila’s brother’s friend’s living room.

  Latin! was a success. I think it was a good production and Rob and I played our parts well, but most of the credit should go to Stephen Fry for the very funny script he’d written nearly two decades earlier and for the draw of his name. But we enjoyed good reviews, packed houses and, most excitingly of all, an answerphone message of support left on Christopher Richardson’s voicemail by Fry himself. We were fucking thrilled. I know there is considerable televisual evidence that I have both met and worked with Stephen Fry lots of times, but that was all years ahead of me at this stage – so being in a show he knew about and was enthusiastic about was a crumb of affirmation on which I feasted.

  The fact that Latin! was a hot ticket that year had surprisingly little knock-on effect on sales for Innocent Millions. But then the play-watching, Radio 4-listening Stephen Fry fans attracted by Latin! probably weren’t in the market for new comedy from the unheard-of, especially when they’d already seen them in one show and were in the perfect place to watch new comedy by the very-much-heard-of. Rob and I, as history attests, weren’t even soon-to-be-heard-of in 1997, unlike for example that year’s Perrier Award winners, The League of Gentlemen.

  The other thing Latin! audiences, and Edinburgh punters in general, weren’t really in the market for was a show that started at 11 in the morning. Neither were we, of course, but it was the only slot the Pleasance offered us. And, we reckoned, peering for the bright side with the desperate super-luminosensitive eyes of deep-sea fish, we wouldn’t be up against any of the big shows.

  Well, that was certainly true. All we were up against were children’s shows and the noise of cleaners hosing the previous night’s beer and sick off the cobbles of the Pleasance courtyard. At the Edinburgh Fringe, 11am is like dawn. The early birds might see it as they’re brushing their teeth but they’re not out doing anything yet. Our venue seated up to 100. On the night – sorry, force of habit, morning – when the all-important Scotsman reviewer came, the audience numbered only two. And he was one of them.

  Well, just like a Hollywood film, from the jaws of misery, failure and disappointment, through hard work alone, we were able to snatch a small, muted success. You’ve seen Hollywood films like that, yeah? Imagine the strapline: ‘It could have been a disaster, but in fact it went okay.’ The Scotsman review was a warm three-starrer, Rob’s agent Michele Milburn liked my performance in the show and asked me to come in for a meeting in London after the Fringe, and two influential men came and saw the show.

  Yes, it was Bernard Ingham and Gore Vidal! No. Perhaps ‘influential men’ is the wrong way of putting it. They were influential on our lives and they had a small measure of influence in the world that could help us. The first was Nick Jones, a TV director who ‘was putting together a sketch show for the BBC’. It’s a measure of how little we knew that we didn’t know how little that meant. But he had some business cards with ‘BBC’ written on them. Unfortunately they didn’t also have ‘Nick Jones’ written on them, which was disappointing. He was still waiting for his cards to be printed up, he explained, as he scribbled his name and number on one of the nameless ones.

  Sounds like a confidence trickster, you’re probably thinking. Our reasoning at the time was that a confidence trickster would have got cards properly printed up. But we couldn’t deny the possibility that he was an inept confidence trickster. Still, since no one who had both the BBC’s name and their own on a piece of card was showing any interest in conversing with us, we decided to send him some material and hope something came of it.

  The other man was Gareth Edwards, who may have scored 20 fewer international tries than his rugby-playing namesake but was considerably better thought-of by the comedy department of London Weekend Television. Gareth’s card had both ‘LWT’ and his name on it and he left it in our pigeon-hole at the Pleasance with a note on the back saying: ‘I saw your show and laughed. Do give me a ring when you’re back in London,’ or something equally British and understated.

  I’m glad that one of the first producers to show interest in our work was from LWT – it’s like a link to the history of television. It was such a big and successful company for so many decades and now there’s no trace of it. It’s been absorbed into the shrinking giant that is ITV. But I’m glad to have been given a business card embossed and glinting with those three friendly letters, which for years used to assemble themselves from striped lines crawling across the TV screen. It felt proper, in a way a card from something like ‘Lucky Vampire Productions’ or ‘Depressed Spaniel Pictures’ would not have done.

  In those days there were still only five TV channels in Britain. Counting the BBC as two, we’d now made contact with three of them. That was more than half! Surely our big TV breakthrough could only be months away? Just think how that would help with the rent.

  - 26 -

  Going Fishing

  The most evil dog I’ve ever known is my friend Ed’s mother’s dachshund, Brock. He once savaged Ed’s brother and lost his testicles. I should clarify: the dog lost his testicles, not Ed’s brother. To clarify further: the testicles weren’t lost in the skirmish but in a subsequent medico-punitive procedure. I don’t want you to run away with the idea that Ed’s brother is the sort of guy who, in extremis, could bite the balls off a dog. He isn’t like that at all. He worked for the Financial Times for many years.

  Continuing west through Kensington Gardens, I’m reminded of the canine down side to walking through a park. I don’t hate dogs – I’ve encountered several good-natured examples in my time, which have given me some sense of the emotional upside there must be, to compensate for having to feel the warmth of another organism’s excrement through a thin film of plastic every day. For example: the golden retriever of Mr Paine, a history teacher at Abingdon.

  Mr Paine used occasionally to invite boys round to his family home to watch the Varsity rugby match (this was instead of a history lesson, hence the enthusiastic uptake). An entire A-level history set would pile into the living room and the dog would be pleasantly surprised. Boys would sit on and around him, shoving aside his pillows, blankets and chewable objects, but the most the dog would do was stay still with a slightly embarrassed expression, as if to say: ‘This is awkward.’

  But overall I’m not a massive fan of dogs because they’re dangerously delusional. They think they’re in a pack with you and your family, maybe also your friends, but probably not the postman. They think there’s an important team thing going on; they are so convinced of it, they become blind to the evident boundaries of species. They think there is a bigger picture – the survival of this fictional pack – which is of more importance to them than a reliable supply of warmth, shelter and Chum.

  This makes them dangerous. They are capable of self-sacrifice in the name of this fictional pack, this fictional greater good. Stories of dog bravery and dog savagery are both caused by this delusion. It is why dogs will attack strangers, why a small terrier will try and kill a postman. The terrier knows that, in the end, the postman is mightier and will almost certainly prevail, but perhaps it thinks that, if it can only slow the postman down, some of the pack may evade the deadly letters. These delusions make do
gs trainable, employable for our purposes. They allow us to make them care about the safety of sheep despite having no use for knitwear. But they also mean that, if you are a stranger to a dog, you can’t guarantee, however small it is, that it will not suddenly try its very best to destroy you.

  I cannot keep this from my mind when I pass dogs in the park. I don’t think they’ll probably attack me, but I know that they might. Unlike passing a scruffy-looking youth in a dark alley, it’s not rude to give them a wide berth. Their feelings won’t be hurt, as the youth’s are when he turns out to be a socially responsible Guardian reader rather than a flick-knife-wielding smackhead. But it’s wearisome, when walking along, to be slightly aware of all the dogs. I’d rather be looking at the sunlight-dappled trees than following a King Charles Spaniel with my eyes, as assiduously as a toddler who’s spotted a wasp.

  I’ve never really felt the need of a pet myself. I did look after a goldfish once. For about twenty minutes. Then I left it on a petrol pump.

  I was in a car on the A1 when I realised. I was furious. Why did I have to notice?! Or why did I have to notice so soon? We’d hardly gone any distance from the petrol station – my Hula Hoops were still unopened – and it was too easy to go back. ‘Speak now,’ I thought, ‘or be a fish murderer, unmitigated by tartare sauce. But there are hundreds and hundreds of miles to go! All crammed in, with it sloshing around on my knee. It’s panicked most of the twenty-odd miles so far. It’d surely never survive until London anyway. But still …’

  It had to be done.

  ‘Emma. We’ve left the fish at that garage.’

  ‘Oh my God, have we!?’

  Immediate screeching U-turn. It was scarier than a pit bull in an FRP with a sparkler attached to its tail. For the sake of a fucking fish.

  Rob and I were driving back from our successful Latin! stint in Edinburgh with Emma Stenning, a theatre producer with a Ford Fiesta. Princess Diana, we were slowly realising from the sombre tone of the radio DJ, had died the night before in an unrelated incident.

  The car was crammed with props and costumes – the stuff that you should probably just throw away but, having spent a month with these objects as the key to your existence, it’s almost impossible to accept how valueless they have immediately become. You can never forget how deeply, sincerely, all-consumingly you’ve wanted to find a hat, pair of glasses, telephone or other key prop in the darkness of a theatre wing – you’re like Richard III inquiring about a horse. You have to be very unsentimental to let go of all those objects at the end, saying: ‘Too late now.’

  So I suppose it’s understandable that Emma had been unwilling to dispose of the only prop with a heartbeat (as Bruce Forsyth was fondly referred to at the BBC before the final stage of his robotisation). The goldfish had been set dressing for a production of a play called Fugue. It was, I don’t think Emma will mind me saying now, a pretentious play. The cast wore coloured boiler suits and talked archly. The only thing that I can remember happening in it was that the fish got fed.

  When we pulled into the forecourt, it was still there on the petrol tank. The goldfish, unlike Princess Diana, did not die that day.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ said Emma. Rob and I remained silent.

  I tried to get myself comfy in the front seat, moved the nylon wig that was under one buttock, shifted the walking stick that was digging into my side and tried to flatten down the coloured boiler suits that were packed under my legs – and prepared a flat lap for the sparkly little vertebrate.

  Edinburghs roll round rather like academic years – so, as I headed back south, I felt I was going back to Life for the start of my second year. I didn’t have a degree from its University but I was doing a postgraduate course there. I still am. And you’re reading the dissertation I had to hand in at the end of my sixteenth year.

  My second year kicked off with two exciting meetings. One was with Michele Milburn who, as I would have expected from the way she spoke to me in Edinburgh if I weren’t such an inveterate pessimist, offered to represent me. The meeting was in her office, somewhere between Hammersmith and Chiswick. This location was certainly a disappointment. Christian Hodell, and most of the agents I’d written to, were based in the West End. I was nervous of frauds, working out of their living rooms, pretending to be agents but with no way of getting their clients work, merely waiting to take a cut if actors found their own employment.

  But the office seemed neat and prosperous – it felt like a proper business rather than some notepaper and promises. And Michele, rather disingenuously I think now, said, ‘Of course you’ll need time to think about it’ and that I ‘shouldn’t say yes or no straight away’. I nodded sagely and figured that if I got home, went to the loo and then paused for forty seconds, that was about as long as I could wait before closing the deal and being able to say I had an agent – being able to slip the words ‘my agent’ into conversation as if I were really an actor.

  The sense of affirmation from being represented was immense. I wasn’t expecting to get work out of it any time soon – possibly ever. But suddenly I was respectable. Michele Milburn, an adult who actually made a living, had announced that she thought that living could be improved by associating herself with me. She had looked at our flawed and faltering Fringe performances and seen promise – she had believed our hype and, consequently, made it so much more believable to us.

  My other big meeting that September was with Gareth Edwards, the LWT producer who’d left us his card. So, maybe he’ll ask us to make a comedy show for LWT, we thought. Maybe we’ll be on LWT every Friday night starting next January? That’s how little we understood television.

  Gareth Edwards is quite tall and quite thin, with bright eyes. He looks almost elfin and his manner is academic. He wears suede jackets and leather shoes – he’s bookish and reassuring. I don’t think he made many hit comedies for the mainstream ITV audience. He is also, and this makes him very unusual and valuable in his profession, funny. He knows how to be funny – he knows how to write funny things – so he can tell when other people do it and he properly values that skill. (It is an irony that many of those comedy producers who have no idea how to be funny themselves are nevertheless rather dismissive of the ability, as if it were a clerical knack which can be learned on a course and is beneath their concern.)

  We arrived punctually at the LWT building, ‘London Television Centre’ (not to be confused with BBC Television Centre, the iconic headquarters of the BBC), but didn’t get beyond reception.

  ‘I thought we might go for some lunch,’ said Gareth after we’d all shaken hands.

  It was a sunny September day and we wandered round the corner into Gabriel’s Wharf, where there are lots of little cafés and restaurants with tables outside. This is more like it, I thought. This is modern, prosperous, entitled London. This isn’t KFC on the Finchley Road or a Food and Wine selling taramasalata and cheap lager. I’m rejoining society.

  We sat at an outside table and ate burgers and chips. Honestly, we might as well have been given jelly and paper hats. I remember the sunlight, I remember Gareth talking enthusiastically about our Edinburgh show and another script we’d sent him, and I remember Rob pouring sparkling mineral water all over his chips, somehow mistaking it for vinegar.

  ‘Oh no, we’ve been discovered!’ I thought. ‘Nice one, Rob – now the nice producer knows we usually eat out of bins. He won’t let us into comedy heaven now. We’re busted.’ I hadn’t been so sad to see food ruined since John Wilkinson put pepper on my birthday cake.

  But it was almost immediately funny. Gareth was so like a slightly older version of the kind of person we were used to working with in Footlights – not surprising really, considering he went to both Oxford and Cambridge. He’s properly clever, is Gareth. He was going to be an academic but chose comedy instead. Whenever I hear comedy disparaged as an art form – for its silliness, its apparent superficiality, for the fact that people like it, or because unfunny things are less fun so must be more wort
hwhile – I wish Gareth was there to express the fact that being funny is one of the few things in life worth taking seriously.

  Unfortunately – there being an increasing divide between people who make programmes and people who make decisions – clever, funny Gareth was not actually authorised to commission a TV show from us. Had he been able to, of course, he wouldn’t have done. We had a lot to learn first. But he saw that we had promise and was talking to us, and developing ideas with us, years before an actual programme commissioner would even give us an appointment.

  Nevertheless, that lunch with Gareth heralded a golden age of meetings for me and Rob. Thanks to Michele, over the next couple of years we were welcomed into dozens of offices by TV producers and production companies. Handshakes, teas, coffees and biscuits were lavished on us and we were even taken out for the occasional lunch. We would discuss the sort of comedy we liked and the sort of show we might one day want to make. They would discuss the sort of programme they were trying to pitch. Sometimes we’d say we’d send them some ideas or bits of script, sometimes not.

  It took me a long time to realise how little was going on here. I naïvely thought that people in offices were busy – that if you worked in TV, you were constantly rushed off your feet making programmes or having meetings about programmes you were about to make. Occasionally, I thought, you might find time to squeeze in a chat with someone new, someone promising with no track record, but only in order to get them working on an idea that would, in time, become a TV programme.