Back Story

by David Mitchell

  I know what you’re thinking: two eligible young men with their own pad in London’s glittering Zone 2. What happened when one or other of us wanted to invite a young lady back? Well, it would be unfair of me to discuss the existence, extent or nature of Robbie’s love life here but, on the rare occasions when I’ve had a one-night stand, and for the brief period when I was in a relationship, I avoided spending the night in the flat – but this was largely because, until 2007, I still had a single bed. Ridiculously monkish of me, I know. But for years, while single, I didn’t like the thought of getting a double because it would feel like I was doing it in the expectation of starting to go out with someone or having more sex. There it would be: all big enough for two people, rebuking me as I lay there alone reading history books. And wanking.

  It was my friend Benet Brandreth who finally made me snap out of this attitude, saying it was absurd not to have a double bed, whether I was alone or in a couple. He took me to John Lewis to choose one – which is (I’m sorry to disappoint some readers), without a doubt, the gayest thing I have ever done.

  That’s not been the only improvement to the flat over the years. I eventually got a shower and new carpets and even, under intense pressure from my parents, a new kitchen. We also got a cleaner. Robbie says ‘she doesn’t clean things properly’. I agree but counter that she’s being paid so that we don’t have to not clean things properly ourselves. I am heartened by the thought that this isn’t an exchange Mark and Jeremy would have. Jeremy certainly wouldn’t care how well the cleaner cleaned but would resent paying for her – and so wouldn’t do it. Mark would both want a cleaner and worry that he was being fleeced. In fact, come to think of it, it’s a conversation that Mark might have with himself, in his interior monologue. Oh God! Maybe Robbie’s just in my head, like in Fight Club?

  After filming that first series of Peep Show, there was a long wait for it to be broadcast. In the gap, Rob and I recorded our other new series: a radio sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound (and there at last is the ‘That’!). This was produced by Gareth Edwards – six years after we’d met him, we were finally working together on something that was going to be broadcast. And it was just a normal sketch show, which was a very refreshing change. For years, since we were in Footlights in fact, Rob and I had been trying to come up with ways of dressing sketch shows up as other things – giving them ‘themes’. Maybe all the characters know each other, or do the same job, or are related, or live in the same place? Maybe the end of one sketch leads into the start of another? Maybe there’s a theme of ‘modern life’ or ‘relationships’ or ‘food’ or ‘totalitarianism’?

  For ages we’d bought into the notion that a sketch show needs something like this – something unifying to make audiences keep watching, like they do with a sitcom. But, by 2002, we’d realised that was nonsense. No sketch show theme can ever give it a through-line which will attract anything like the audience loyalty that you get for a sitcom. In a sitcom, you can properly get to know characters and follow their lives – a good one like Cheers inspires huge audience love and support. People will keep watching just to spend time with those characters, even in patches where the scripts aren’t as good as they could be. In terms of repeat-viewing appeal, even the most heavily themed sketch show is hugely outgunned by the most lazily-plotted sitcom.

  The only way a sketch show clings to viewers is by being funny and by providing variety – so, if an audience member dislikes one sketch, they’ll have some faith that the next might be different and therefore preferable. An overarching theme hampers both of these potential strengths: it makes the show less varied and it precludes some jokes. In my experience, you’ve no sooner decided on your sketch show concept than you’re frustrated by the discovery of a nugget of comedy gold that doesn’t fit in.

  So, if you want audience loyalty, write a sitcom. If you’re doing a sketch show, accept the limitations of the form: you’re only ever as funny as your last joke. To try and deny that truth is like putting on a ballet and complaining that all the performers have to dance the whole time. But, when discussing radio pitches with Gareth, we were almost shy to say that we wanted to do a straightforward, theme-less sketch show. But he was fine about it, saying the theme could be that ‘every sketch has one of David Mitchell or Robert Webb in it and sometimes both’. That suited us, and theme-less it was. We could have a pair of snooker commentators, bemoaning the teetotal approach of modern players:

  PETER: Look at John Parrott sitting there, staring mournfully at his water.

  TED: Look at that. You could put a goldfish in that glass. And it wouldn’t even die.

  Some eager party hosts reminiscing about the tremendous fun they’d had hanging out with Hitler:

  ROBERT: I love it when he goes off on one. It’s so funny, and not a little persuasive.

  DAVID: I know. But some of the things he was saying about Tube workers. I mean, we know him, so we know it’s not racist, it’s just very very clever irony.

  Or an animal charity appeal:

  Soft-spoken voiceover

  For the price of a cataract operation which would restore this Sudanese woman’s sight, you could fund months of trawling up and down motorways looking for kittens. For the £3 a month that could equip an Ethiopian farmer with seeds and tools, you could be providing a lifetime’s doggie biscuits for this Labrador that wees itself every time it hears the Hoover.

  After recording a pilot at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, Radio 4 commissioned a series.

  In some ways this was more promising than Peep Show. As an opportunity, it had fewer possibilities but it was a more established, respectable achievement: our own comedy show on the old Home Service, rather than a late-night Channel 4 experiment that might disappear. It was a good thing for my parents to tell their friends about. Also, it was a show Rob and I were primarily writing ourselves. Getting laughs both for your material and your performance isn’t just twice as good as one or the other. It is roughly 3.2 times as good. I have done the maths on this.

  The recordings, held at the Drill Hall Theatre off Tottenham Court Road, were very exciting occasions for me. I invited everyone I had an e-mail address for – this was our chance to perform comedy professionally in front of friends who’d seen us monkey around for years as amateurs. The consequent atmosphere was warm and supportive, like a heated truss. Rob and I, together with Collie and James Bachman who made up the rest of the cast, had a lovely time. It felt like the first night of Innocent Millions – it had the same sense of excitement and possibility – but this time it was fine that we didn’t know our lines because we were reading them off a script. That is one of the many things that makes working in radio so civilised.

  Even though the radio show hadn’t even been written when we shot Peep Show, it began transmitting first – in September 2003, with Peep Show starting four weeks later. We had a sketch show and a sitcom going out at once – surely the breakthrough that we’d expected at the time of Bruiser four years earlier was happening for us now?

  - 31 -

  Being Myself

  The trendy, scuzzy expensiveness of Notting Hill Gate gives way suddenly to the leafy fashion-proof expensiveness of Holland Park. Whoever was spraying ’60s buildings around wasn’t allowed west of Ladbroke Terrace. From this point, until the end of Holland Park Avenue, the only interruptions to Victorian stucco and brick are elegant London plane trees.

  One of the other things my dad talks about is how London plane trees were the only species of tree that could survive the Victorian smog. He’s told me that several times. But that’s okay – it’s an excellent fact. London was so dense and polluted, such an unprecedented environment, that it had to find its own sort of super-tree that could survive it. Normal trees were too feeble for these circumstances in which millions of humans thrived. I also like the fact that, despite so many of the common decencies of life having been abandoned in order to make the brave new metropolis work – breathability of the air most notable among them
– nobody considered tree-lined avenues to be surplus to requirements. The air was so poisonous that it killed trees (imagine how much weed-killer that would take), but the sheer quantity of airborne herbicide wasn’t a matter of much concern, as long as they could find a tree which, like London, could take it. It’s a perverse but somehow inspiring approach.

  Soon after Holland Park Tube station, there’s a pleasant-looking pub called The Castle around which a semi-circle of drinking, suited people, who have left offices early on this warm spring Friday, has developed. Why don’t they go in? For years, I assumed that pubs with crowds around them must be jam-packed inside, but it’s seldom the case. Some people, those who’ve spent all day sitting in stuffy offices, I suppose, prefer to stand outdoors and drink. It must seem a confusing choice to the tramps in the park.

  The smoking ban has had an effect too. Rather than reducing the appeal of tobacco, it’s given standing outdoors a new cachet. I’ve certainly smoked a lot more since the ban came in. I’m still only a cadger, who’ll go days without one and then have two or three at a party, but for the couple of years before the ban I’d pretty much stopped entirely; I was down to a festive one or two on New Year’s Eve. And I only smoked those for the benefit of nicotine addicts who were making resolutions, to rub their noses in my peculiar take-it-or-leave-it relationship with the drug.

  Post-ban, I’m back up to about five a week – a lot of them smoked outside pubs in preference to staying inside looking after smokers’ bags with the other non-smokers. I’m not saying smokers tend to be more interesting people – I’m sure that’s a nicotine-induced illusion. I think the real appeal is the little trip, to break the monotony of pub drinking: ‘Let’s pop out for a cigarette.’ It’s like going for a quick swim when you’re spending an afternoon sitting round a pool.

  Maybe you can tell but I’m quite proud of my approach to smoking – that I can do it occasionally without getting hooked. You may think I’m a fool; after all, even a few cigarettes aren’t exactly a health boost. But I reckon the amount I smoke is no more dangerous than going for brisk walks along busy roads – although that doesn’t quite answer the question of how I reckon I can get away with doing both. This is the smug and complacent position that many have been in on the eve of a forty-a-day habit – then again I’ve been adhering to the upper stretches of this slippery slope for years now, so I reckon I’m a sort of Spiderman figure in the world of this metaphor.

  But in December 2004, I must have been outside the pub for reasons of space; this was two and a half years before indoor smoke was banned without an associated chimney.

  ‘I’ve got to go in about half an hour,’ I was saying to whoever would listen. ‘I’ve agreed to do a try-out for a stupid pointless thing.’

  This had been my sole topic of conversation all day. It was the afternoon of the BBC Radio Comedy Christmas party which I’d been massively looking forward to. The comparatively brief business of the lunchtime party having finished, everyone had now gone to the pub. In general things were going well for me. Both Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Sound had been given second series and so I reckoned I had a pretty viable career. I felt I was owed a nice relaxing Christmas, kicked off by an afternoon of heavy drinking at this most fun and least wanky of all media events.

  It feels very much like the office party for a lot of people who don’t have offices. Even those not invited to the do itself would wander along to one of the post-party pubs round the corner from Broadcasting House: the Yorkshire Grey or the Crown and Sceptre. I was outside the latter explaining to the umpteenth person that my ‘end of term’ piss-up was basically ruined.

  ‘I’ve been nursing two beers for five hours,’ I repeated sadly.

  The ‘try-out’ that I’d said I’d go to was for a new Channel 4 panel show unappetisingly called ‘FAQ U’. So, a bit like ‘Fuck You’. Splendid. FAQ obviously stands for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, and the ‘U’ for ‘You’ but, as the phrase ‘Frequently Asked Questions You’ makes no sense, it was impossible not to conclude that they’d wanted the show to be called ‘Fuck You’ – that they thought that would be good or funny. So I wasn’t very hopeful about the project, but I also felt that refusing to go to a job audition because I’d earmarked that day for a nine-hour drinking session would be crossing some sort of Rubicon in a march away from professionalism.

  Also, I wanted to do panel shows. Despite being in a genuinely award-winning sitcom and a well-reviewed Radio 4 show, Rob and I didn’t feel like we’d quite broken through. Maybe it was the fact that fewer people had seen Peep Show than read some of its complimentary reviews.

  I really liked the thought of trying to be funny off-the-cuff as part of my job. I enjoyed the warm-up chats we always had with the audience at the beginning of radio recordings. I didn’t want to do stand-up, but I wanted an arena in which I could try and just ‘be funny’ in public.

  I’d had the occasional opportunity. I’d been a team captain in a show called Fanorama which had been broadcast on E4 in 2001 and 2002, long before E4 was a channel with an audience. The two series were hosted by Claudia Winkleman and Lauren Laverne respectively and the other team captain was Rhys Thomas. It was a show in which obsessive fans of bands, actors, celebrities or TV programmes competed to prove theirs was the deepest fanaticism. Rhys and I were supposed to keep it all light. We’d shoot three or four shows a day and get a series of twenty in the can in under a week.

  It wasn’t brilliant but I really enjoyed it and, as I’d hoped, it led to an invitation to appear on a proper panel show on a terrestrial channel. I’m afraid it might not be one of the ones you’ve heard of – in fact I’ve just checked and it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Even Bruiser has its own Wikipedia page. It was called Does Doug Know?

  You get asked a wide range of questions if you’re on TV – particularly since the advent of Twitter – but no one has ever asked me if and when Does Doug Know? is coming back. Neither, to be fair, have they slagged it off. Or mentioned it at all. Most spookily of all, there’s no trace of it on Dave.

  I’m beginning to suspect that I dreamt Does Doug Know? It feels like a dream. I can’t remember a lot of the details – the premise, for example – and there were odd and incongruous people from the telly there including both Jimmy and Alan Carr. I remember that it was on Channel 4, that I appeared on two episodes and that I wore a brown shirt for one of them.

  The choice of shirt was my key creative decision on that show as I had very few shirts fit for national consumption. My non-folding policy had rendered most of my shirts unpresentable even if you tried to iron them. They were beyond ironing now – they’d gone feral. But I remembered with relief that my mother had recently given me this brown one so it was still in acceptable condition. What I didn’t know, and have since learned, is that if you turn up to do a panel show looking like a dog’s breakfast they give you a shirt anyway.

  I don’t remember Does Doug Know? being a huge humiliation, but it can’t have been a triumph because I wasn’t invited on another panel show for three and a half years. I hadn’t had a single invitation between then and the pavement outside the Crown and Sceptre (which a lot of people call the ‘Hat and Stick’ to convey familiarity; you may find that that makes you want to be sick – it does me). And this try-out wasn’t a proper invitation – it was just an audition for another new Channel 4 show with, if anything, an even less promising title than Does Doug Know? (which isn’t very good but would, as discussed in the previous chapter, have been fine if people had liked, or indeed noticed, the programme – and in support of that, let me introduce They Think It’s All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, for fuck’s sake, into evidence).

  Yes, my Does Doug Know? performance must have been terrible. Panel shows are hungry beasts and always looking for fresh meat, more panellists – I know that now. But whatever I did on that show led the entire industry to conclude that such programmes were not for me, a conclusion that thankfully it subsequently r
evoked. Not mentioning any names, but just think of the most annoying person who keeps popping up endlessly on panel shows (apart from me). Think of the one you find most grating and annoying (which, actually, is unlikely to be me in your case unless you have a masochistic taste in books). The most awful witless twat whose continued employment you cannot understand. Done it? (I wonder if we’re thinking of the same person?) Anyway, I must have been worse than him (and it is a him, let’s be honest. Hardly any women are allowed on panel shows so the ones that break through tend to be pretty good).

  I’d had the occasional invitation from clip shows, usually with Rob – to appear on the I Love 1987 style of programme and affect nostalgia for Sodastreams – and I’d jumped at them until Rob said he hated doing them so we largely stopped. And he was quite right; they’re a shit form of television and contributors seldom come across well. The context is too unflattering: you simultaneously look like a cheap rentaquote and someone sufficiently arrogant to think their opinions are fascinating. Oddly, a panel show doesn’t carry the same implications, probably because there’s usually a nominal game being played to conceal the fact that it’s really some people behind a desk pontificating. Give Loose Women some sort of quiz structure and I reckon it would only be about half as annoying – although that is still very annoying.

  So the FAQ U try-out sounded enough like it might be a reprieve for that foundering side of my career for me to forgo seven pints of beer. At 7 o’clock I stumped miserably away from the pub towards another pub, the Bricklayers Arms, in the upstairs room of which the audition was taking place. I got the job.