Back Story

by David Mitchell

  FAQ U was to be a nightly comedy discussion show, on at about 11 or 12, even later than Peep Show. I think Channel 4 was trying to recapture the success that they’d misremembered The 11 O’Clock Show as being – but with a simpler format. Some young comedians talk about vaguely topical stuff while sitting on sofas in front of an audience. The show had a three-week pilot run and they wanted to try out a new host for each of the weeks. I was given the job for week 2.

  This show was not a success and did not get a series after this trial run. But not only did I hugely enjoy doing it, somehow it put me on the panel show map. Within a week of its first transmission in May 2005, Objective was developing a late-night show for me to host on More 4, and I’d been invited on Have I Got News for You and QI. Just like that, I was on the list. I didn’t have to work my way up via 8 Out of 10 Cats and Mock the Week – I went straight in at the level of the two premier panel shows. I don’t know what it was I’d said on FAQ U – I mean, I felt it had gone well but not amazingly – but before it I’d only ever been asked on Does Doug Know? and after it I was asked on everything. Not getting pissed at the radio party had been the right call.

  It’s difficult to describe the combination of feelings that my first appearance on Have I Got News for You evoked in me. That programme started in 1990 when I was 16 and at the height of my comedy fandom. I think most people are at the height of whatever fandom they tend towards at about that age and I wasn’t into music or even films particularly. I was into clever, wordy comedy. And HIGNFY was a new, clever, wordy comedy show that was suddenly part of the national conversation, leading the satirical assault at a time when Thatcher was falling from power. I watched it avidly every week with my version of the fanaticism that led some women to throw their underwear at the Beatles.

  Doing TV comedy in general has always been all the more exciting for me because it’s informed by nostalgia for those feelings of teenage enthusiasm. But with HIGNFY it was on another level because this was exactly the same show as I’d watched when I was at school. The set was the same, the team captains were the same – the only major difference was the presence of Des Lynam in the host’s chair rather than Angus Deayton – but apart from that, it was literally a teenage dream come true. My unformed brain, only six years after it stopped aspiring to a career as a Time Lord or wizard, had looked at that show and said to itself: ‘I want to be there.’ So, as I sat in that studio and the lights darkened and the signature tune played, and those boards at the back of the set turned round like I’d seen on hundreds of occasions for the last fourteen years, it felt like I was flying the TARDIS: amazing and impossible and terrifying. Ancient childhood synapses were re-firing and I just wanted to soak it all up – but I simultaneously realised that this was no time to enjoy the atmosphere. I had somehow to give a decent account of myself. I was the newbie and I could sense the audience’s fear.

  That’s the main battle with an audience – to help them deal with their nerves. They’re seldom hostile to a new performer (and I have always carefully avoided performing in places where they might be) but they’re often fearful for you: nervous that you’re nervous and consequently won’t be funny. In that mood, they can’t properly laugh because they’re on their guard. You need to put them at their ease quickly – say something confident and funny which gives them the impression, however dishonestly, that you’re not nervous. Making reference to the unnerving nature of the situation can be a good way of doing this. In a TV panel show, if you say something that dies – totally fails to get a laugh even though it was clearly meant to – the consequent audience tension can often be defused with something as simple as: ‘Blimey, I fucked that up!’ You’ve got to be careful, though. If nerves creep into your voice at that point, you’ll only make matters worse.

  The bravest and most successful example of this approach that I ever saw was when I went to watch Ken Dodd’s show in Oxford aged 15. He’d packed out the Apollo Theatre and the show was going fine, if mutedly, in front of the rather staid Oxford audience. Clearly this wasn’t good enough for Doddy, who was used to more appreciative northern crowds. So, after a few minutes of respectable but not massive laughs, he put his old, knobbly hands together on either side of the microphone as if in prayer and looked upwards to the heavens.

  ‘Please God, make me funny!’ he said.

  It got a massive laugh – the biggest of the night. All tension immediately dissipated as we all realised we were in the presence of a performer who was so supremely confident, he felt able to refer to the ultimate elephant in the room: the fact that he was supposed to be making us laugh more than he was. It was amazing, and I often think of it when I see comedians say outrageous, edgy things that ‘other people are thinking but won’t say’. But would they have said that? Ken Dodd was willing to go to a more frightening place than any Frankie Boyle or Jerry Sadowitz routine when making reference, as a technique for warming an audience up, to the fact that he wasn’t being funny enough.

  I wasn’t quite up to that level of confidence on my first HIGNFY but I managed to give the false impression that I was expecting to be funny, which meant that I was able to get some laughs. And, to my surprise, I hugely enjoyed the experience. The honour, the excitement and then the terror all fell away quickly and soon I was quite straightforwardly having a good time.

  This probably makes me a pervert. Having to appear and/or speak in public always comes high up people’s list of worst nightmares – the sort of list which tells you that farmers always kill themselves and moving house is more upsetting than divorce. And to do so on TV while having to get laughs would presumably make the prospect even worse for most people.

  I’m not completely unfamiliar with the feeling. When I first went on QI, a couple of weeks after HIGNFY, I found it much harder. It was a terribly pleasant, civilised environment. The producer John Lloyd, a brilliant and kind man, told me just to chat as if it was an interesting dinner party, and Stephen Fry and the panellists (who, as well as Alan Davies, were Phill Jupitus and Bill Bailey) were welcoming and inclusive. But I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to say. Without the focus of ‘trying to be funny about the news’ I got a bit lost and went quiet.

  It’s like vertigo. You sit there, listening to other panellists chatting easily and getting laughs, thinking, ‘I haven’t said anything for ages! Why aren’t I saying anything?!’ Then you think, ‘Whatever I say next had better get a big laugh!’ That’s not much of an incentive to open your mouth. I snapped out of it, and did okay, but it was a nasty few moments. I’ve never felt like that on QI again. I’m comfortable enough to babble on about anything nowadays, reasoning that enough usable stuff will tumble out of my mouth in a 90-minute recording.

  I don’t worry about that vertigo moment recurring because I know it will if I do. I’ve enjoyed every panel show I’ve done since then. As a physical coward, I’m heartened by the fact that I regularly do something that would make some mountain climbers, bear wrestlers or fire-breathing snowboarders quake in their appropriate footwear. I don’t really think that makes me brave, though – they’re just getting things out of proportion.

  A recurrent interview question for me is: ‘Why do you do so many panel shows?’ It implies, probably fairly, that I do too many – that I’ve become over-exposed, that I’ve become a serial invader of people’s living rooms with my nasal whining on subjects that don’t really concern me. The answer to the question is that it’s because I love doing them. The money is nice and the exposure has helped my career, but I’ve also done them when the money’s shit and I don’t need it, and when my level of exposure is too high – when the canny career choice would have been to try and create some scarcity in the market for my services. Recently I’ve started saying no a bit more often. But, ultimately, when I’m asked on a panel show my first reaction is that I want to do it because it’s fun.

  There’s no doubt that this was all a bit of a career breakthrough for me. At the time of FAQ U and my first panel shows, I wa
sn’t that busy. Peep Show kept coming around again, although it was always a marginal recommission because audience numbers remained stubbornly unimpressive, and we had our radio show but, other than that, I just did the occasional incongruous acting job: the BBC Shakespeare reworking of The Taming of the Shrew; a pilot sketch show for Channel 4 called Blunder; an ITV comedy drama called All About George; and, most surprisingly of all, a straight-to-video Michelle Pfeiffer film for which I briefly had to go to LA. But Rob was busier, in particular because he played the lead in another TV sitcom, The Smoking Room.

  So when the panel shows started calling, and then other people started wanting to develop new panel shows with me as a regular team captain or even host, I had time to get really stuck in and Dave viewers have been bearing the brunt ever since. As well as cropping up regularly on HIGNFY, QI and Mock the Week, I made a series called Best of the Worst for Channel 4 and a pilot called Pants on Fire for the BBC, which title was thankfully commuted to Would I Lie to You? by the time a series was commissioned.

  Perhaps more excitingly, in early 2006 I received a letter, dated 14 February, from Jon Naismith, the long-serving producer of Radio 4’s ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. It wasn’t a love letter, although it was the nearest I got to such things at the time. Jon and Graeme Garden, one of the wittiest men alive, had devised a new format for a radio panel show which, like Would I Lie to You?, involved lying, albeit in a very different way. Panellists would come on and read out lectures full of humorous nonsense from which their competitors would have to spot the occasional nugget of unlikely truth. They wanted me to chair it.

  Jon’s pitch to me, basically, was that while radio panel shows don’t have the same impact as their TV equivalents or pay anything like as well, when they succeed they can run for decades. This could be your retirement plan, he was saying. And you don’t even have to shave before you turn up. Well, five years after the pilot was broadcast, The Unbelievable Truth is now on its tenth series, so the plan seems to be working so far. With luck, I’ll still be doing that show long after I’ve stopped being able to hear the buzzers.

  Panel shows changed the public perception of me enormously because before I did them there wasn’t really any public perception of me. People who were into comedy might have known the name of the guy who played Mark in Peep Show but wouldn’t have had any sense of what he was like. When I started doing panel shows, people began to know a bit about me – obviously only the side of my personality that I projected when appearing in public, but that’s still very different from playing a character, or it is in my case. People now seem to be slightly interested in me and want to know what I think about things. They want me to rant on subjects that annoy or concern me. They think my presence will make a programme potentially more entertaining. This is something for which I am tremendously grateful and which, to be honest, massively appeals to my vanity.

  So, even though I set out with Rob to make character comedy, to be a writer-performer, to avoid stand-up at all costs, my career has taken a very different turn and, like a stand-up, I spend a lot of my time trying to be amusing as myself. I write a weekly column in the Observer, I do a series of online comedy-opinion pieces called David Mitchell’s Soapbox, I’ve hosted shows which comment on the news, initially More4’s The Last Word then The Bubble and 10 O’Clock Live. No one would have thought of me for that kind of work as I stood outside the Crown and Sceptre ranting about the pointlessness of TV try-outs and how I’d been duped into starting my own Christmas late. I wouldn’t even have deemed it possible myself.

  I sometimes worry that I’ve strayed too far from comic acting and from writing sketches or sitcom scripts for TV. I don’t want to lose that side of my career and I certainly don’t want to stop working with Rob. But I now value my ‘panel show persona’, and all the opportunities for showing off on screen, in print and online that come with it, equally highly.

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  Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam

  It stops being Holland Park Avenue very suddenly. It’s like the credit crunch – there’s no real warning. In hindsight, there were signs. There was something slightly low rent about that Hilton hotel on the left and just a suggestion of flaky paint on Royal Crescent to the right, but nothing to prepare the casual pedestrian for what happens next. The tree-lined avenue of stucco houses ends abruptly and a bleak and vast plain of tarmac is revealed: a huge and alienating roundabout that forms a barrier between leafy Holland Park and affordable Shepherd’s Bush.

  I stop and wait at a pelican crossing and, unable to endure a moment’s inactivity somewhere so unpleasant, get my phone out to check for messages. No texts and no voicemails but, because this is an iPhone, I can check for e-mails as well and I establish the slightly stressful fact that I’ve got two new ones before the lights change and I have to start moving.

  Marvellous. Now I’m wondering what those e-mails can be. All the little issues of background stress – the people I haven’t got back to, the decisions that broadcasters have yet to make that affect me, even potential family crises, crowd into my head in a way they wouldn’t if I didn’t know I had messages. That’s the trap – I check them in the hope of the reassuring feeling that no one’s tried to be in touch – but that doesn’t work if someone has. For years I resisted a smartphone because e-mail, I felt, was something that should always be able to keep until I got home. If it’s urgent, let people ring or text. An e-mail is like a letter – people shouldn’t expect a response in less than a day or two. But, if they get wind of the fact that you can receive e-mails 24/7, the timescale on which they expect a response suddenly shortens. A 24-hour delay becomes discourteous. Great, another massive boon from the monthly bill.

  I’m not in fact a Luddite. They actually destroyed machines rather than just moaning about them. But I’m not even a Luddite in the modern sense of someone who rails against technological advance. A lot of people assume that I am, but I’ve basically got all the stuff – a big desktop computer and a tiny laptop, a digital camera, an iPhone and a Kindle. I love my Kindle, in particular. I genuinely think it’s nearly as good as reading a book and it fits neatly in a jacket pocket. Paperbacks used to fit neatly into a jacket pocket before publishers collectively decided this was a design advantage of their product that was unfair on the rest of the market and decided to make books annoyingly slightly bigger to give TV and video games a look-in. Very sporting. But the makers of Kindles have cleverly borrowed that feature from the old sort of paperback and combined it with the ability to contain a whole library of reading. They’ve even solved the problem of making the screen visible in bright light. It’s a terrific machine.

  Of course I hate myself for liking it. I want to prefer books in the same way that, as a child, I wanted to like porridge. It seems to fit my image better – the slightly tweedy person with strong views. Liking a Kindle is neither tweedy nor a strong view. You can’t get strident about it. I suppose I could get strident about all the people who idiotically hate Kindles – except I don’t think that’s idiotic. I think it’s born out of fear that reading and books, cornerstones of our civilisation, are under threat. I totally get that – I just happen to think the Kindle’s a neat little device.

  The other way to go, and there’s a lot of pressure on men to be like this, would be to become a gadget fanatic. That’s another thing that some people assume I am: if not a Luddite then a geek who would love technology to a slightly weird degree. It seems I don’t come across as someone with much of a sense of proportion.

  Or maybe that’s just the culture. We’re not interested in moderation. You get that with TV all the time – every new show is on a knife-edge. If it falls one way, it’s a massive hit; if it goes the other, it’s a humiliating flop. The whole industry and its critical scrutineers seem blind to all the things that are kind of fine. But I’d say that was the feeling you get from most of what’s on television: ‘This is okay – I might keep watching for a bit but I’ll happily watch so
mething else if it comes along or indeed turn away when the microwave pings.’ TV assaults us with wave after wave of acceptable, mildly diverting mediocrity. Yet, to see it reviewed or hear it discussed by those that make it, you’d think it was a weird alternating barrage of unprecedented brilliance and inexcusable garbage. That’s just not how it seems to me – maybe I need to adjust my set.

  So I feel slightly ashamed to neither despise nor adore all these new machines that are changing the world. My plodding, not particularly adept, reluctant but not resistant attempts to vaguely and half-heartedly sort of get to grips with some of these things is disappointing for people. I get it with cricket as well. I quite like watching cricket, as a result of which people assume that I’m a huge cricket fan. ‘I know you’re obsessed with cricket,’ people say, as if to be able to stand cricket at all must mean that I can’t get enough of it. But I just quite like it. I don’t want to be painted a fanatic, or real fanatics will think I’m a fraud. Or a moron who, despite apparently being obsessed with the sport, can’t remember who last year’s county champions were. By saying I like to go to the cricket, it feels like I’ve misrepresented myself as someone who can think of nothing else. ‘Not everything is like Marmite!’ I want to scream. ‘Including, I suspect, Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.

  Maybe men are supposed to have fanatical hobbies – that seems to be a thing. ‘Men are from Mars, they like to go in their cave and make model ships or play fantasy war games or tinker with vintage cars.’ That’s the current off-the-shelf analysis. My lack of a real hobby or obsession on which to lavish all my spare time is probably a sign of a want of masculinity, a lack of testosterone.