Back Story

by David Mitchell

  The first time was when I was seventeen, the age you’re supposed to learn. You’re used to learning things at that time of life – you’ve been doing it since before you can remember. Seventeen solid years, from sitting up, through talking and toilet training, reading and writing, autumn, basic maths, autumn, capital cities, autumn, all the way up to calculus, historiography and autumn. The prospect of those driving lessons and tests is a lot less intimidating in the context of so many other lessons and tests.

  I had a nice instructor – he seemed kind and responsible. He was an ex-policeman. He told me I was doing quite well. I believed him. Then he said something quite strange: ‘Left here. So, the weirdest thing happened to me last night – watch your speed. I woke up at about 3am and there were these lights outside. Down to second, it’s a hill. Flashing lights – don’t flash your lights. Yeah, flashing lights. So I went to the window and looked out and – have you seen the cyclist? Aliens! There was this alien ship hovering over next door’s garden. Careful, it’s a mini-roundabout …’

  I didn’t have any more lessons after that. Not for fifteen years, at which point I went on an intensive driving course in Norwich with Mark Evans. Mark had promised his girlfriend that he’d learn and suggested he and I get back on that metaphorical horse together. Norwich was chosen on the basis that when Mark googled ‘intensive driving course’, or possibly even ‘crash course’, a Norwich driving school came up first.

  My new instructor showed no signs of having recently undergone an alien epiphany. He was a slight young chap called Eddie who smoked roll-ups and coughed a lot. He was a bit like a Dickensian waif – but more of a stickler for checking your mirrors.

  On day one, ten minutes into my first lesson, I was tentatively driving around some suburban streets with Eddie when I stopped at a junction. Slightly abruptly. I hadn’t yet got the feel of the brakes and, I suppose, I was erring on the side of caution. Eddie screamed.

  ‘Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! What did you do that for?’

  ‘Sorry, I was just stopping.’

  ‘Christ that hurts! Jesus, careful!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I dislocated my shoulder last night.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s right where the seatbelt digs in.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why did you stop so suddenly?’

  I wanted to say: ‘Because I can’t drive a car, you moron! What the hell did you expect!? When has anyone ever got in this car with you and known how to drive!?’

  It was a weird week. Every day, Mark and I would go out with our instructors, meeting up every couple of hours at a lorry drivers’ caff on the ring road. On the first morning, Eddie ordered teacakes. A large plate duly arrived. Eddie smiled:

  ‘Massive plate of teacakes. And that’s only three quid. Pretty good, eh?’

  To be fair, it was exactly what I was thinking.

  In the evenings, Mark and I would go to the pub and discuss both Eddie and Mark’s instructor, whose name escapes me but who had a shiny nut-brown head, which was entirely hairless but for a magnificent moustache. He ran the company and Eddie looked up to him like a god. During the day, I would undergo hours of stressful tuition which would make me sweat profusely. It was January but, unless we kept the car windows wound down, they’d steam up within minutes. At the end of the course Mark passed and I failed. I blame Eddie.

  So, when Rob and I were touring around the country in 2006, I still couldn’t drive. But that didn’t matter because the producers had hired a massive gold tour bus for us to travel around in. This was quite the ego boost, even if thoughts of rock bands on the road made us nervous about inspecting the upholstery.

  Even more of an ego boost was the warmth of crowds that had specifically paid to see us. These weren’t Edinburgh audiences wandering in because they’d read a review or merely failed to get into the more successful show in the venue next door. These were ‘Mitchell and Webb fans’ – a new type of human whom the power of television had called into being. Consequently the show always went down well and was a huge pleasure to perform. Except in St Albans – that was a shit night. I don’t know what those guys were expecting but they sat there in baffled silence throughout. Maybe they’d seen a dog get run over on their way in or something.

  I worried most in advance about our visit to Liverpool. You hear a lot, usually from Liverpudlians, about what a warm and lovely and naturally witty and comedic place Liverpool is. It’s as though you can’t fully understand humour if you’re not from there. To those of us with no real connection to the city but who still aspire to amuse, it’s an irritating claim. Being all kind and sentimental and northern doesn’t give you the monopoly on jokes, we want to say. I’m all southern and buttoned up and I don’t cry at weddings or give a single solitary shit about football but I still think I can make a reasonable stab at raising a laugh. I don’t want to accept that there’s this place, where I’m a stranger, in possession of the warm beating heart of mirth. I considered mentioning that my father’s from Liverpool in the opening sketch, but that would be cheating because I’d never been there before myself. The audience would only see a repressed public schoolboy and might be sceptical about his comic powers. Rob isn’t a repressed public schoolboy – he’s from a working-class family, he’s from Lincolnshire, and he went to a state school – but, damn him, nobody can tell. Thanks, Rob – way to suppress your fashionable underprivileged regional roots!

  So we were a bit apprehensive about the night we were to play Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre and weren’t much enthused when we arrived. It is a beautiful theatre but, in 2006 at least, it was in a terrible state of repair. Everywhere, doors were blocked and signs warned of asbestos. The seats had been ripped out of the stalls and replaced with cabaret tables and there was a bar at the back – actually in the same room as the stage. This gave the place a discomfiting, cabaret, chair-throwing feel.

  Nevertheless, the show had sold out and, half an hour before it was due to start, a long, chatty queue had developed round the block. It was a cold night and the theatre had no bar other than the one in the stalls, so the audience would have to remain shivering outdoors until the house opened. And there was a problem. Our technicians had discovered that the main lighting bar over the stalls – the large piece of metal from which other large, sharp, hot and electric pieces of metal were suspended – was only held up by a few flakes of paint and plaster. It was terribly unsafe and we couldn’t open the house with it in that state.

  It was one of those problems that kept developing. Initially, it looked like the bar needed screwing in some more; then it transpired that the thing it was being screwed into needed screwing in; then some bits of ceiling came away in someone’s hand. This all made things much worse where the audience was concerned because the theatre management wouldn’t just say: ‘The show will be delayed an hour,’ at the outset. That would have allowed people to go off to the pub or ask for their money back, not just be left there shivering. Instead, the hour’s delay came in increments of ten minutes each. I know what that would have done to my mood if I were part of that queue round the block.

  Soon Rob and I were desperately hoping that the lighting bar couldn’t be fixed and we’d have to cancel the performance. It would be a big blow to ticket sales but at least we wouldn’t get bottled off stage. So, when all was fixed and the audience came shivering in an hour late, we were extremely nervous. At the start of the show we went on and explained the situation and apologised. We were met with such an atmosphere of warmth from those freezing people that we were immediately ashamed for having expected them to be angry. It was a wonderful audience. Noisy, enthusiastic and determined to have a good time – every joke was relished. I’d been determined to leave Liverpool with something negative to say about that city’s attitude to comedy, but not only was I denied that, this audience gave such a positive demonstration of everything Liverpudlians claim for their city and its comic heart that I’m absolutely duty bound
to mention it here. Grrr. Still, that building was in a shocking state.

  Throughout this tour Rob and I were powerfully sick of the sight of one another. We’d been working closely together for years – and that year, more closely than ever. Also, we were no longer desperate or poor so the fear that drew us together, that need for mutual reassurance, had lessened. We remained good friends – we knew that objectively – we just didn’t want to be in the same room for a second more than was necessary. I suppose we’d been thrown together into a situation as intense and stressful as marriage – but we didn’t fancy each other and we weren’t in love.

  I wouldn’t want you to think, though, that we ever argued. Rob and I have virtually never exchanged a cross word. Neither of us likes confrontation or believes that it’s healthy to ‘have it all out’ (Rob learned that filming Confetti) and we’re both quite self-indulgent when it comes to rhetoric. I think we instinctively know that if we had a row, and particularly if we’d had one during that frantic and stress-charged year, we’d both have said TERRIBLE things. Unforgettable, dark truths about each other would have been slung around in a way that neither of us would ever be able to forget even if we managed to forgive. So, for months, we interacted with thin-lipped smiles – all icy politeness, passive aggression and significant pauses. It’s a feeling I’m determined to remember in case we ever play a gay couple in a film.

  I certainly obsessed about all the things I was doing in the show, and for our act in general, that I felt Rob didn’t contribute equally to, and I’m sure he must have done the same. I would tell myself I didn’t need him and that, if he suggested we should stop working together, I’d agree in a flash. But I never seriously considered suggesting that myself. Other, wiser and nicer parts of my brain were counselling caution, reminding me of how far we’d come together and how foolish it would be to imperil this double act, the cornerstone of both of our dream careers, in a fit of pique. So I restricted myself to bitching to James Bachman.

  On the tour, it got to the point when, in any sketch, we’d each be trying to upstage the other. Literally. I’m not talking about hamming things up or changing the performance at all, but just trying to be standing further upstage so that more of your face is visible to the audience and more of the back of the other performer’s head. (It may sound counter-intuitive to move away from an audience to get more attention but, unless you’re enough of a performance-whore to entirely dispense with the notion of looking at the other person on stage who you’re supposedly talking to, and neither Rob nor I is that bad, the best way for your performance to be more visible and better communicated to people watching is to stand further away so, while talking to the other person on stage, you’re the one facing the crowd.) I didn’t mean to do this unfairly, and I’m sure neither did Rob. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t upstaged and was erring on the side of caution. But, as a result, in the many sketches where we were both talking to each other on stage, a small, almost imperceptible, dance away from the audience would commence.

  I could no longer imagine Rob just as a friend. For all his good qualities, the thought of him was inseparable from the burden and stress of work and, I suppose, from this entity ‘Mitchell and Webb’ which had started to feel like a denial of my own individuality – whereas panel shows were an expression of it. On his side, I was pretty sure he’d started to hate me.

  Just before Christmas that year, only a few days after the tour ended and a few days before the fourth series of Peep Show started filming, Rob and Abbie got married. Rob asked me to be his best man.

  Oh God, I thought, I’m such a cunt. This is, basically, my best friend. And I’m so lucky to have been working with him for ten years. I haven’t ‘lost my individuality’, I’m just a bit knackered.

  Obviously I was honoured by the best man thing. Obviously I was touched. Obviously I was annoyed. Those are always the chief feelings at such times: you’ve been asked to be part of a close friend’s special day – that’s in the plus column – and the terrifying prospect of making a speech will ruin it for you as a result – that’s in the minus. But I was just going to have to pretend, for one day, that I wasn’t a total cunt.

  And in the end, it was easy. At the wedding, a wonderful Christmassy occasion on an ice-cold foggy London day, I actually went a bit ‘method’ and forgot I was a cunt at all. I thought about how much Rob had made me laugh at that first audition in Cambridge, despite his scandalous haircut and his ear jewellery, and how much he’d made me laugh since. I thought about the frantic first night of Innocent Millions, and all the other shows we’d done together when there was no money in it, only fun and possibility. Once again, I could feel our friendship rather than just remember it. And I felt properly happy for him, not just that I ought to feel happy for him. Having got to know Abbie better by then, as a result of the tour, certainly helped. She usually understands what I find annoying about Rob – she can see what I’ve spotted and will often commiserate. But she always sees beyond that in a way that I sometimes failed to, and certainly had done for most of 2006.

  It’s always weird to see someone you’ve known for ages, a contemporary, get married – or at least I always find it so. Throughout the time that I’d worked with Rob there’d been something else going on in his head, something more important than performing or his career, or even his friendships, for all that he valued those things very highly. I realised, as I listened to his tearful speech about Abbie, and her tearful one about him, that he’d remembered and prioritised the attitudes and feelings that all loved children experience before anything else. Through all his ambition, failure and success, he’d kept a sense of perspective, while I had not.

  As Abbie sat down, in floods of tears and to rapturous applause, I stood up to make some jokes.

  - 34 -

  The End of the Beginning

  I’d met Victoria before, I was certain of that – briefly, at some after-show drinks years earlier. I could tell she hadn’t remembered. This meeting was different, though. Last time, I hadn’t fallen in love with her.

  This was a very posh party. It was a film premiere party – the reward for having been to a film premiere (which, I’d just discovered, is quite a distracting way to watch a film). It was 2007 and I was starting to get invited to this sort of thing but usually I was filming or doing a panel show or my back hurt too much. But my back was on the mend, thanks to all the walking, and I’d been personally invited to this, rather than just getting an e-mail through my agent, so here I was. I was immensely glad.

  There were lots of famous people there, some of whom had introduced themselves to me and said nice things. They thought I was famous too, it seemed, so there was a sort of implied acquaintanceship between us. I liked this, but it also made me queasy.

  Then she’d been introduced to me – and I’d said we’d once met, just out of pedantry really, and she had neither denied nor remembered it. She was all chatty and sparky and gossipy and interesting and it seems ridiculous that I can’t remember a single thing she said, though I can still see her face looking up at me when I close my eyes.

  After a while, the little chatting group developed and widened. She was a couple of yards away from me now and I was talking to a middle-aged woman who had some theory about comedy. I wasn’t interested but I still considered parties like this to be basically hostile environments so I was also grateful to the middle-aged woman for paying me the attention. But then she was back, in my eyeline again, interrupting the woman.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ She was gesturing towards the door.

  I’m a moron. ‘No,’ I said. I was just answering the question. I hadn’t had a cigarette for about six months so I felt like I didn’t really smoke. I only ever have a bit. I didn’t want to lie to her. Amused irritation flashed noticeably across her face. Irritation, though, not disappointment. I suspect she already knew.

  She went off for a cigarette – she kind of had to now – but was back quite soon, if not quite soon enough. She wasn’t t
rying to mingle. I was pretty sure she was flirting but was unwilling to believe my instincts as that seemed too good to be true.

  We talked for a long time. I think the main topic of conversation was how awkward parties like this were and how some people seemed so adult and adept about working their way round them, but how we found that difficult and didn’t know how you were supposed to break into other conversations. We. I hoped she didn’t really want to break into another conversation because I certainly didn’t. I wanted to stay in this one forever. The pessimist in me said that she was just what she said she was – a bad mingler, someone shy at parties who didn’t know how to break away from someone else shy at parties.

  Eventually she did: ‘I really should go and say hello to …’ I can’t remember who she said, I was suddenly too depressed to care. ‘Maybe see you in a bit?’ She walked away and I got the first wave of a sensation that would become familiar to me: missing her.

  I date the current phase of my life from that party. I changed then. Everything that happened to me after that moment, even incidental things, are in a different context, a new world where different things matter.

  We went on a few dates – I clumsily managed to organise that, self-consciously booking a restaurant for a time and a place and then feeling amazed, touched and flattered when she actually turned up – this beautiful, exciting woman, just to see me, wearing clothes that she’d picked out while thinking of me.

  But it didn’t work out. She e-mailed me and explained, carefully, lovingly really, why it wasn’t a good time for her and how she felt something, in fact had strong feelings for me, but didn’t think it could work at the moment. But can’t one always get over that? Timing can’t be crucial – not outside the context of a joke? And she said she’d met someone else as well. Ah. She didn’t know what would come of that and who knows, maybe in six months or so …? But it was a bad time. A very bad time. Her father had just died. Everything was wrong.