Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Robert Webb – Rob to me – wasn’t the only friend and future collaborator I met on Cinderella. I got to know a whole new circle of exciting people, many of whom went into entertainment or broadcasting in one way or another: there were the writers of the show, Dan Mazer (who I met at the squash) and James Bachman, a comic actor and writer who I think I find more naturally, effortlessly amusing than anyone else I’ve met. There was Robert Thorogood, then president of Footlights, who played one of the ugly sisters and now writes the BBC One drama Death in Paradise, and his girlfriend Katie Breathwick, now a radio presenter. They got married after leaving Cambridge; it was at Katie’s behest that I wore a spy’s trilby to the National Gallery in order to pass Robert T a special birthday microfilm.

  And of course Olivia Colman – Sarah Colman then, but always known as Collie – a brilliant actress with whom I’ve been lucky enough to work almost as often as I have with Rob. She’s tremendously nice and kind, without being the sort of tremendously nice person who doesn’t like it when you make horrible jokes about other people. On Peep Show, I married her. I think I made a good choice. Shame we got divorced.

  I think it was Collie more than anyone else who made me realise that Footlights was a totally different environment from a school play. She was a first-year (at Homerton, the teacher training college – in fact, she never finished her degree but subsequently went to drama school) so I had her pegged as a beginner in the acting world, like me. She certainly seemed a bit ditzy – fun, funny, good company, but not what you’d call focused. She seemed talented in rehearsals, but slightly ‘all over the place’ and easily distracted.

  Then came the first night, when everything feels different. You’re not marking through your lines in a strip-lit room any more, you’re under theatre lights, alternately dazzled or in the dark. And lurking beyond these pools of light are people, an audience, strangers. It can easily put you off. I staggered through competently but certainly wasn’t as assured as I’d hoped. But Collie was transformed. Suddenly she was shining with talent – working the audience, timing her lines, drawing out new laughs but without ever seeming hammy. I was amazed. I was also flattered to be on the same stage as her and terribly worried that I was being visibly outclassed. This didn’t feel like amateur dramatics any more.

  ‘If this is what other first-years are like,’ I thought, ‘I’m going to have to run pretty quickly to keep up.’ Fortunately for me, while there were many talented actors at Cambridge when I was there, very few were as good as Collie – certainly no one better. Performing with Collie and Rob gave me an exaggerated impression of what I was up against in general.

  The other thing that was exciting me in my first term at Cambridge was that I had fallen in love again – with a lovely girl who was very happily going out with someone else. (I won’t tell you her name because I never said I was in love with her then so it would seem like a perverse thing to mention years later, now that I’m not.) I hadn’t felt this sensation since the wordless understanding of eternal passion that it turned out I wasn’t sharing with Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing four years earlier. I mean, I’d fancied girls since then, but I hadn’t had that feeling of overwhelming significance.

  I had that feeling constantly at Cambridge, for several different women, none of whom I ever either got off with or – and here’s the remarkable part – in any way propositioned. No lunges, no suggested trips to the cinema, no roses, no chocolates, no Valentine’s cards, no broaching of the subject in any way whatsoever with any of them. I did occasionally get off with someone, usually when I was too drunk to spoil my chances by thinking, but never with any of the ones I thought I was in love with.

  I know this seems like a terribly illogical approach, particularly coming from a heartless automaton like me. The hopeless crushes, the fallings in love – I don’t know which to call them because they definitely were the former but sincerely felt like the latter – didn’t make me happy. In general, I was very happy as a student, but the crushes got me down. And yet I did nothing about them apart from endless dissection with male friends over late-night drinks who told me, in thousands of different ways: ‘Look, you should just say something, tell her – probably nothing will come of it but you never know, and then at least you can move on.’

  But I was incapable of taking that advice. There are various possible reasons for that. Perhaps I just liked the sensation of unrequited love, even though I thought I didn’t, and felt it would be spoiled by doing anything about it – probably by rejection, but maybe too, at some unconscious level, I felt I would be put off the object of my desire if she became attainable. Maybe I liked the thrill of the not-bothering-to-chase.

  I would have denied that at the time. My explanation then would probably have been that rejection was more than I could bear the thought of living with. Also, as I stacked up a series of these crushes, even though I always claimed that the current one had eclipsed all previous ones, on some level I was aware that the same thing was happening over and over again – which means I knew they eventually wore off, without my having to go through the blow and embarrassment of rejection.

  Still, it was the wrong approach. I went through a lot of unnecessary heartache as a result of never addressing the problem, never ripping the plaster off and enduring one excruciating moment of kindly refusal. I’m sure my recoveries from these infatuations would have been much swifter if I’d found the nerve to do that. My course of non-action also eliminated the chance that I might have got somewhere with any of these women. Had I got lucky, I doubt I would have turned out to be as in love as I thought I was – but, still, to have had a bit of a relationship with someone you’ve got a massive crush on is something I would have enjoyed. To say the fucking least.

  I think the key reason for my perverse approach is that being practical about how I felt – trying to address the situation sensibly to optimise my happiness – would have seemed like a denial of the strength of my feelings. It would have been admitting that I was only in the grip of a crush, not a grand passion. It would have meant that the feelings of significance, importance, magic that unrequited love gives you were illusory, and those feelings were probably as much what drew me to the crush as the charms of its object.

  Ambition can feel like that. Dreams of your future career can be exciting just like a crush, and I suspect faith can. In a way, asking the object of a crush-that-feels-like-love on a date is like trying to prove the existence of God. It’s not a rational approach if you know that what you need to get up in the morning is hope.

  - 20 -

  The Cause of and Answer to All of Life’s Problems

  ‘Basically, I’m a three bottles of wine bisexual,’ said Ellis, taking a slurp from his pint of Kronenbourg. I secretly hoped he wouldn’t have another. He drew heavily on his cigarette and then did an elaborate French inhale which involved an almost musical popping sound followed by smoke pouring upwards like a liquid across his top lip and into his nose. I began to worry that I’d chosen the wrong person to teach me to smoke. I wanted it to look natural.

  We were rehearsing a production of Death of a Salesman. Ellis, who was only nineteen (like me) despite being a second-year, had been cast in the role of Willy Loman. It’s the sort of part that great actors wait a lifetime to play – they bring to it decades of experience, not just of acting, but of life. The weariness and defeat that only the triumph, disaster, boredom, excitement, worry and disappointment of years lived to the full can etch on your face and lend to your bearing is deployed, as they attempt to personify the American dream laid low. Ellis had a bash in his teens by putting on a gravelly voice and walking stiffly. It was basically fine.

  I needed the smoking lesson so that I could appear more cool and mature. That was what the director told me. I was playing Bernard, the snotty kid next door who grows up to be a lawyer – barely at university and already typecast. Will (the director) wanted something for the scene in later life where I’m a big shot professional, to differentia
te me from the kid in shorts with the whining voice. The shorts could be replaced but obviously we were stuck with the voice. Maybe if I was smoking, Will thought, I’d seem older, cooler and in control.

  I was incensed. As a fervent anti-smoker – someone who at this point genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone smoked (and what an admission of a lack of imagination that statement always is) – I didn’t want to have anything to do with portraying nicotine in a good light (in this case a Zippo), let alone an environment where that was the unthinking assumption. Also, I’d never smoked in my life and I was scared.

  After a lot of persuasion that it would really help the scene and that virtually everyone smoked in the 1940s (when the play was written and is set), I agreed to have a go. Will wasn’t much of a smoker but Ellis very much was and he gave me my first lesson with one of his Marlboro Reds. The only instruction I got, when handed the small papery burning object, was to ‘inhale’.

  ‘Go on, inhale!’

  ‘Why aren’t you inhaling!’

  ‘Are you scared of cancer – is that why you won’t inhale?’

  He thought I was an idiot, and I was perplexed because I was inhaling with all my might – I was positively hyper-ventilating, filling my lungs with oxygen but somehow unable to ingest any more than trace quantities of smoke.

  The verb that hadn’t been used – and this isn’t something I can say about every aspect of my theatrical career – was ‘suck’. To smoke a cigarette, you may or may not know, you have first to suck. Then inhale. I didn’t realise you sucked, just like on a straw. I thought you put it in your mouth and then sort of breathed through it. If you do that, it will not look as if you are smoking – in my case, it merely intensified the incongruity that having a cigarette in my mouth at the age of nineteen already projected. I was very young-looking. But for the fact that I’d already attained my full height, I could probably have passed for thirteen. With a cigarette in my mouth, oddly breathing round it, I didn’t project the image of sophisticated American maturity, more of slightly humorous, slightly sinister innocence inexpertly attempting to lose itself – like Iggle-Piggle trying to shoot up.

  I got the hang of it eventually and moved on to stage two of smoking technique: how to light a cigarette. The look of lawyerish savoir-faire wasn’t going to be improved by my holding the light a foot away from my face and tentatively moving it closer. Worse still, Will insisted I use a Zippo – much more appropriate to New York in the 1940s than the bright plastic lighters you get at the newsagents’, but much trickier to ignite and much more like a small, smelly can of petrol that you’re trying to set fire to in your hand. Drinking lager, I couldn’t help thinking, was much easier than this.

  Ellis was on both stimulants in the Pickerel pub on Magdalene Street, when he brought up the subject of how drunk he’d have to be to fuck me. A dangerous place to be when he’s in that frame of mind, you might think. Or a good place to be. I haven’t made it clear whether or not I wanted to fuck him, have I?

  I did not. He is a very good friend of mine but that is not something there is enough wine in the world to make me do. And to be fair on Ellis, he was talking in general terms about an alcohol-induced sexuality flip. It wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to make him stoop to me. Maybe three bottles of wine was for Brad Pitt.

  Ellis Wolfe Sareen is an unusual man with an unusual name, although the two things aren’t directly connected. The name’s a family thing – someone once every two generations gets called that, apparently, which I suppose saves on decision-making time. Now you’ll assume he’s American when, in fact, he’s from Manchester. He was a slightly controversial figure in the Cambridge drama scene when I arrived. He had a lot of friends but had also managed to annoy quite a few other thesps, possibly because of his enthusiasm for getting drunk and making passes at people (almost exclusively women, even when he’d drunk three bottles of wine, which was often); but more likely because of his disarming refusal to take himself or other people seriously.

  Ellis’s ruthless jollity was coupled with a deep, and largely justified, confidence in his own skills. He is blessed with great intellectual and practical abilities and there are few things that he absolutely can’t do – hit a tennis ball without weirdly opening his mouth as if he’s trying to swallow it is one. But that’s not to say his confidence doesn’t sometimes go too far, as you’ll know if you were unlucky enough to see his production of The Recruiting Officer in November 1994.

  I’m now walking west along Wigmore Street, passing the Cock and Lion pub on my right, which reminds me of the Pickerel in Cambridge. Both have low and dark ground floors where, like punters in a casino, the drinkers won’t be disturbed by natural light.

  The Pickerel enjoys the twin blessings of an authentic wooden-beamed building – medieval in places – and a riverside location. Unfortunately, they rather cancel each other out. Medieval builders are notoriously complacent about natural beauty – think of all those castles in lovely countryside where you can only see the view through an arrow slit. I suppose, in a world where there are hardly any buildings, and all of them olde-worlde, the sheer availability of rustic views inevitably suppresses people’s sense of their value. There’s no doubt that, had the architect of the older parts of the Pickerel been around today, he’d laugh at people’s obsession with the river but be transfixed by the fruit machine. So, you can’t see the river when you’re in the Pickerel, a picture window being beyond the builders’ ken, but it has the pleasing atmosphere of a place where people have been getting unglamorously pissed for centuries.

  That was an activity that Ellis encouraged and, in me, he found a keen student. Of drinking, that is. Less so of smoking. And I was very much not a keen student in the conventional sense because I was very enthusiastic about going to the pub all the time. I mean, we didn’t drink at breakfast, or particularly long into the night, Cambridge being a place where you couldn’t buy a drink after 11 o’clock except at the ADC Theatre bar; and having alcohol in our rooms took a level of organisation that was usually beyond us. But by the end of my first term, I’d slipped very easily into a lifestyle of getting up late, pottering along to the ADC via a sandwich shop for an afternoon rehearsal or a meeting about a show, going to another rehearsal in the evening and then settling into the Maypole pub or the ADC bar until it closed. On Saturday nights there was usually a party and I’d get properly pissed. It would not be fair to say that I was consequently sick more often than not on such occasions, but it wasn’t as less often than not as I’d have liked.

  When the ADC Theatre bar was shut, the Maypole was our regular haunt. The Maypole is not picturesque: in a city of beautiful buildings and views, it looks out on a multi-storey car park. It’s an unremarkable if inoffensive building with an insensitive 1970s flat-roofed extension at the front. It’s possibly my favourite pub in the world and, I’ve just realised, it’s virtually an FRP. But what it lacked in architectural merit, it made up for in the attitude of its management. It was, and still is, owned and run by an Italian family who brought to this unremarkable British pub the unfamiliar, alien notion that it should be a pleasant and hospitable place to spend time. They did all the normal pub things but also served food they’d be happy to eat themselves and had a menu of fancy cocktails. More than anything else, they were friendly and welcoming. They learned your name and made shy, spotty students feel like they were beloved old regulars with a tankard behind the bar. This strikes me as both canny and kind, and I’m very grateful to the Castigliones for making me feel so welcome and so grown-up. Their attitude made the Maypole the pub of choice for actors from the ADC, sportspeople from the nearby Hawks Club, and anyone in the university who fancied a pina colada.

  Getting quite drunk very often, and very drunk quite often, was a revelation to me. From being something that I’d only realised a couple of years earlier I had the ability to do, it quickly grew at Cambridge into a major hobby – not as major as acting or writing sketches, but one that seemed to complem
ent those activities perfectly. This was expensive and unhealthy but, as I had very few other costs, I was able to clear a substantial budget for it and I didn’t give my health a second thought. I was occasionally hungover, although not in the way I get hangovers now, but seldom ill. And the upsides were massive: it made you feel great, it made endless conversations endlessly interesting, it brought together nervous, shy, repressed, swotty teenagers by making them feel comfortable with each other. Boozing was an imprudence that I felt safe with – a recklessness that didn’t make me stressed.

  This isn’t heading towards a confession of alcoholism, by the way – not of the whisky on cornflakes type anyway. These days I drink more than doctors would recommend, but not that much more. I still get drunk occasionally, but not very often. I wouldn’t deny a certain sort of social dependence on it, but I think it’s a dependence I share with most of our culture. This society doesn’t work without booze – our parties aren’t good enough, our conversations aren’t sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It’s everywhere, lubricating everything. My mother has never drunk alcohol and consequently finds most parties or meetings of friends in pubs to be inexplicable and tedious encounters. ‘How can people stand for hours in rooms just chatting?’ she asks. ‘I can take it for half an hour but then my feet hurt, I’m bored of making chit-chat and I’m desperate to leave.’ The answer is that if you drink a bit, it becomes fun. Just as people say some dance music is only worth listening to if you take Ecstasy, so the vast majority of our socialising is only viable if you take the edge off your nerves/perceptions/inhibitions/foot-ache with booze.