Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life

by David Mitchell

  The prospect of a Disneyfied Star Wars would have appalled me 15 years ago. The thought of that corporate giant getting its weird three-fingered hands on the beloved space stories of my childhood would have seemed like sacrilege. Since then, of course, Jesus has desecrated his own altar and then set up as a money-changer in his own temple. And if you think that’s a hyperbolic way of describing the fact that George Lucas made three disappointing sci-fi films, you need to get online more.

  As a feckless writer and comedian, I spend a lot of pub time railing against all the occasions when creative control is wrested from the people who have the ideas by the people who keep the accounts. So I find the story of the Star Wars franchise unsettling. Lucas had the successful idea and maintained rigid creative control over it, doubtless fending off the advances of avaricious predators who wanted to exploit or develop it differently. And yet that idea was more comprehensively ruined than if it had been left exposed to the worst and most idiotic corporate abuse imaginable.

  So what’s to fear from Disney? They might make an entertaining film about a duck in space. It would be a lot edgier than Jar Jar Binks.

  Disney didn’t hang about, as we now know, and episode seven is currently in production, with JJ Abrams directing and most of the stars of the first film reprising their roles. Which means, sadly, that it’ll be episode eight, at the earliest, before we see Russell Crowe attempt to wrestle Chewbacca, Bill Nighy get exasperated with R2-D2 or a duck feel the Force.

  *

  Laura Carmichael deserves to be congratulated. Few actors have achieved her kind of success. Her portrayal of Lady Edith in Downton Abbey is so effective, and so affecting, that the character has started to become real. Not just to seem real to people watching television, but actually to be. The fact that this became clear on the occasion of her West End debut playing another role in no way diminishes the achievement.

  You may not be familiar with Lady Edith, or with Downton Abbey at all. Even if you are, you may pretend not to be. It’s not a particularly respectable show to admit to watching.

  Or is that nonsense? In some ways, it’s unassailably respectable: a Sunday night costume drama, oozing the cream of the British acting profession. But it’s not particularly worthy or worthwhile, and yet neither is it trashy or amoral enough to be watched with irony. It falls equidistantly between the two vastly separated stools of Our Friends in the North and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Watching it is nothing to be proud of, but neither is it sufficiently shaming to be conversationally interesting.

  I’ve seen every single episode. I think it might be my favourite programme. I enjoy it enormously. I also think it’s shit. Not badly acted or filmed, but appallingly scripted and structured. Utterly inept with regard to these elements of television production which I previously considered vital to a drama’s success – or certainly its enjoyability. Yet I undoubtedly do enjoy Downton Abbey, and not “because it’s so terrible”. I unironically enjoy it despite how bad it is. Is that what they call cognitive dissonance? Or is it just really liking footage of a stately home?

  So Laura Carmichael deserves much credit for turning the implausible words and actions in the script into a believable character. Lady Edith is the second daughter of the Earl of Grantham, who owns Downton Abbey (which is where Downton Abbey is set – it is not a real abbey, so he is not an abbot), and she has a very rough time. The plainer middle sibling, she lives her life like an emotional Frank Spencer, her heart always metaphorically being dragged along on roller skates behind a bus. The men she loves either die or get engaged to her sister or both; or are too old or jilt her at the altar or both. Everything Edith turns her hand to – driving, farming, journalism – is greeted with hostility and scorn. She’s definitely the unluckiest of the three Crawley sisters, and one of the others has died.

  So, when the press night of a new production of Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville theatre, in which Carmichael plays Sonya, was interrupted in a weird and unlucky way, I thought: “Of course, that would happen to Lady Edith.” And then I realised: Lady Edith has come to life.

  This is what happened: in the closing moments of the play, Lady Edith (Sonya) was delivering a soft and moving final speech to Ken Stott (Vanya) in which she exhorts him to keep his pecker up, when Sir Peter Hall, who was in the third row of the stalls, started shouting, or at least talking. Accounts vary, but he definitely wasn’t whispering. Accounts also vary as to exactly what he definitely wasn’t whispering, but he definitely wasn’t not-whispering “Bravo!” The Telegraph reckons he said: “Stop, stop, stop. It doesn’t work and you don’t work. It is not good enough. I could be at home watching television,” while the Guardian thought “It’s not working, it’s just not working. It’s just like something on television” was nearer the mark.

  Theatre being what it is, the sentiments conveyed by Hall are less surprising than the fact that he chose to express them during an actual performance. Wishing productions to stop and that you could be transported back home to the TV are familiar sentiments to all regular theatregoers, but it seemed rude of Hall to shout those desires so audibly, and it clashed with his subsequent verdict on the show as “a fine production with a superb company of actors”.

  A couple of days later, Sir Peter provided the explanation: “I dropped off for a moment and on being woken by my wife I was briefly disorientated.” Well, we’ve all been there. Theatres are warm, dark and quiet. The drama being played out on a slightly illuminated platform some yards away is often no more energising than a whispered midnight conversation at the nurses’ station of a restful hospital ward. If I had a penny for every time I’d fallen asleep while watching a play, I’d nearly have enough for an interval drink. Genuinely.

  As apologies for heckles go, “Sorry, I was asleep!” isn’t ideal. It doesn’t necessarily mean the production is bad or boring – and the critical consensus seems to be that this one is neither – but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement. “This show sent me so soundly to sleep that, when I was shaken awake by my wife, I’d completely forgotten where I was or what was going on” is unlikely to be put up in lights outside the theatre.

  But Sir Peter had to own up to being asleep or he’d seem boorish and brutal. His priority was to clarify that, as he said, “Remarks made in the resulting confusion were not in any way related to Uncle Vanya.” I believe him because I think they were in every way related to Downton Abbey – and Lady Edith. Sir Peter’s unconscious mutterings make it very clear that he is a regular viewer and has been utterly captivated by Carmichael’s performance.

  He walked into that theatre with his head full of Lady Edith’s misfortunes: he was nervous for her, wishing her well, yet fearful that something would go wrong for her, as it always does. Consequently, when surprised in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, his fears Touretted out: he found himself saying the worst things his unconscious could imagine – precisely the remarks that Edith/Carmichael least wanted to hear.

  Even while playing a lead role on the press night of a starry and classy West End show, which coincided with the broadcast of her massive TV hit, Laura Carmichael didn’t seem successful or fortunate to Hall. She didn’t seem like a rising talent, a celebrity, a household name, a winner, the centre of a maelstrom of opportunity. She remained every ounce the luckless Edith. Now that’s acting.

  *

  I was recently infuriated by a study. I’m not talking about the type of room – I wasn’t maddened by a den or seething at the sight of a home office. I was annoyed by a “survey”, a “report”, some “research”. It was given all sorts of titles in the press, none of which was “pile of sanctimonious crap”, which is a shame because that’s what it was.

  Some people at Netmums, which I’m guessing is the Pepsi to Mumsnet’s Coke (irresponsible though it is of me to mention either high-sugar drink when children might be reading), had decided the world might be a better place if they found some way of slagging off The Simpsons. And, while they were at it, The Flintstones and Peppa Pig an
d The Gruffalo and My Family and Outnumbered. All of those enjoyable entertainments, and My Family, were criticised for their negative depictions of fathers. It was like the RSPCA moaning that Tom and Jerry is an unrepresentative depiction of the behaviour of the domestic cat or the Institute of Hospitality complaining that Fawlty Towers puts people off going to hotels.

  It wasn’t just a diatribe written by the website’s staff members: 2,000 parents had been asked their opinions, although I’m not sure in what context and I refuse to find out. But they must’ve been caught in a whingeing mood because they seemed determined to take popular culture personally. Ninety-three per cent thought that the typical comedically bungling TV dad doesn’t accurately reflect what fathers contribute to families in real life. They were not then asked whether or not that’s a problem – whether it is the job of a show such as The Simpsons to accurately reflect family life, whether such shows have ever implied they’re an accurate reflection of anything at all and whether Homer Simpson accurately reflects the number of fingers most fathers have.

  Had they been asked those things, I hope they would have responded along the lines of “No, of course that’s not a problem – it’s just that you asked whether various characters in popular culture, which are clearly the product of comic exaggeration and in some cases surreal invention, were accurate reflections of reality, and they’re obviously not, so I said they weren’t.” But I doubt that’s how it would have gone because 46% of those surveyed thought that these characters could make children believe that all dads are “useless” and 28% felt that these depictions amounted to a “very subtle form of discrimination”. So they do seem quite het up about it, which I think is stupid and depressing.

  My state of mind was not improved by the remarks of Netmums’ founder, Siobhan Freegard, which accompanied the report. “It’s never been harder to be a father – but good dads have never been more needed by their families,” she said, which seems reasonable enough until you think about it for a second and realise that she’s wrong on both counts. There have been many times in human history when it’s been harder to be a father – during the Black Death, for example – and also many times when families have needed fathers more – the tens of thousands of years when they were expected to hunt and kill all the family’s food springs to mind. Sorry if you think I’m being petty but, if she’s going to claim that loads of comedies that people enjoy are corroding our society, she oughtn’t to kick off with a historically inept statement.

  She wasn’t finished: “So it seems perverse we are telling men to step up and be involved, while running them down in the media.” Who is this “we”? Whoever wrote The Flintstones? The Peppa Pig production team? She presumably counts herself among the people who tell men to “step up and be involved” – fair enough – but is she annoyed that she can’t also vet all scripts for comedies and children’s programmes for deviations from that message? Does she expect the culture to speak in unison? Does she believe that Fred Flintstone saying “Yabba-dabba-doo!” amounts to an advocacy of shouting gibberish? Maybe she thinks Miranda Hart’s pratfalls undermine the good work of the Health and Safety Executive.

  “Some people claim ‘it’s just a joke’,” she continued, “but there’s nothing amusing about taking away good role models for young boys.” Yes, there is. Once again, she’s strayed into untruth. For example, when Homer Simpson says “Mmm … floor pie” on seeing a slice of pie on the floor, that is amusing, and yet he is not being a positive role model. The negative role models Siobhan Freegard has commissioned a report to complain about do amusing things all the time.

  What there is, for practical comedy-writing purposes, “nothing amusing about” is good role models: a caring, conscientious father who doesn’t get into scrapes – that’s the stuff of government information films, not funny programmes. And the “useless dad” may not be a fair reflection of society but, if it was complete invention, the characters wouldn’t resonate. Accident-prone Daddy Pig, or Hugh Dennis’s hapless character in Outnumbered, may not be representative examples of modern fatherhood but they obviously strike a chord or those shows wouldn’t be watched by millions.

  This report is at once joyless and opportunistic. It seeks to say something headline-grabbing and preachy in order to garner positive coverage for a website, and is content to make a victim of some of the finest products of the noble human urge to amuse and entertain. There are many things wrong with humanity but I’m fairly sure that funny sitcoms and cartoons about family life aren’t among them.

  But when Freegard says, “The type of jokes aimed at dads would be banned if they were aimed at women, ethnic minorities or religious groups,” she has got a point – just not the one she thinks she’s got. Men and fathers are so favoured in our society, the world is weighted so much to their advantage, that comedy writers can safely make them the perpetual butt of jokes. The fact that Homer Simpson is the funniest, most prominent and most popular character in that show says far more about the continued male dominance of money and power in the west than his fecklessness or misfortunes say about the undervaluing of paternal effort.

  Comedy is a misère bid – to be the biggest loser is to win. If a time comes when incompetent or hapless women are humorously depicted as often as their male equivalents, then the distorting fairground mirror of comedy might at last be reflecting a just world.

  *

  On the occasion of the first anniversary of the 2013 horsemeat scandal …

  One year ago today the horsemeat scandal broke, when the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported that horse DNA had been found in some beef burgers – or, depending on your point of view, that some horse burgers had been mislabelled. This wasn’t to be an isolated incident. In the weeks that followed, a bewildering array of ground cow products tested positive for ground horse. It seemed that there was hardly a manufacturer or retailer in the British Isles that hadn’t been cutting its sirloin with fetlock.

  Horses had thoroughly contaminated the food chain. “What an oddly large animal to have infested so many factories,” we thought. It’s easy to envisage how mice, cockroaches or flies can sneak into dirty or badly maintained facilities to feed and breed – but horses? Surely they must have left traces, hoofprints in the butter? Why had no one smelt a rat? Perhaps because of the overpowering stench of horse.

  The scandal climaxed with the news that some Findus lasagnes were found to contain 100% horsemeat. They were absolutely all horse. Not a scrap of beef had made it in. In a sense, this made Findus the worst offender. But, looked at from a different angle, it was cause for hope: restricting products to one type of meat was achievable, it seemed. If Findus could only repeat with beef this remarkable success with horse, then all would be well.

  As a comedian, I am extremely glad that this all happened. To my mind, there is little to be regretted about this widespread equine malpractice and a great deal to be celebrated. This was extremely funny news and I am convinced it will have brought immeasurably more pleasure to many more people than all of the grotty ready meals that were recalled could ever have done had they solely contained ground-up cartilage and ligament of the advertised species rather than the macerated fragments of other, more glamorous, quadrupeds.

  You may disagree with my definition of funny news. What’s funny about incompetence, malpractice and dishonesty in the preparation of our food, you might ask. You might think this is simply a grim example of something going seriously wrong. Funny news, you might say, is when Boris Johnson gets his balls caught in a harness or Kanye West sues the online currency “Coinye West” for exploiting his image.

  In my experience, news like that is too obviously amusing to be lastingly funny. You can’t make a joke about it because the story is already a joke. You can laugh once, because it’s daft, then it’s over. But the horsemeat scandal kept on giving. It was proper news that deserved coverage – but no one had died and several large and unappealing corporations were left with egg on their faces. Well, they said it w
as egg.

  Audiences love jokes about this sort of thing. It’s not just a YouTube clip of a gibbon sneezing and it’s not Syria. It’s serious enough for the act of joking to seem slightly irreverent, but not serious enough for anyone (other than those with no intention of ever being amused by anything) actually to be offended. It’s part of a nation’s shared experience and laughing about it brings us together, like a family swapping anecdotes about a tipsy uncle.

  I’ve noticed a few subjects like this over the years. Liberal-leaning Radio 4-type studio audiences absolutely never tire of derogatory references to the Daily Mail, for example. There need be nothing incisive or new in the joke, but you can guarantee a supportive laugh by questioning that newspaper’s honesty, accuracy or goodwill, or mentioning once again its former warm regard for Hitler.

  The excessive distances between the small airports sometimes used by budget airlines and the cities those airlines have advertised as their destination are also a reliable source of collective amusement. You have only to imply that Ryanair won’t necessarily drop you off right in the centre of Paris and people will guffaw and crow as if a great and brand-new injustice has just been spotted for the very first time and simultaneously comprehensively dealt with.

  In my view, the horsemeat thing is one of the greatest. It has obvious advantages. “Horse” is a funny word – only one syllable, and it’s a corker. The idea of people having eaten something without realising it is inherently comic. The deep solemnity of some of those who rightly pointed out how worrying it is that we’ve so lost touch with where our food comes from that we can’t even be sure of what noise it once made is apt to make people giggly. And the palpable desperation of the likes of Tesco, Iceland, Lidl and Findus that this whole thing should be forgotten makes hearing it repeatedly brought up intensely pleasurable. It will be decades before the words “Tesco” and “horse” stop getting a laugh just for being spoken in the same sentence – and that fact, and how infuriating the PR people at Tesco must find it, is itself hilarious.