Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Christian Hodell made one final attempt to help me. Later that year, after he’d let me down gently, I did send a photo and CV round to agents, including him. I got some serious-looking photographs taken by a friend and chose one to be blown up to 10x8 format and reproduced dozens of times. But the shop blew up the wrong photo. I didn’t notice until I’d got it home. It was quite a bad photo with my mouth sort of half open, looking weird. It was more appropriate to a charity’s website than the CV of an aspiring TV star. But the photos had cost me £70 and I didn’t have another £70 spare. I suppose I could have gone back to the shop and complained but this was not a good patch for me, competence-wise. So I sent them round anyway and heard nothing back except standard rejections. Except from Christian. He sent a note, which read something like this:

  ‘I hope you won’t think it’s not my place to say this but that is a TERRIBLE photo. Seriously. Don’t send any more out. Burn all copies.’

  He was right. It was good and kind advice. But it was too late. ‘Well, looks like I’ve pretty much fucked up my whole life,’ I thought. I went next door: ‘Pub, anyone?’

  Throughout that difficult time, what sustained me and distracted me, what helped me stick to my guns but also, for hours on end, leave my guns unattended, was the community of people I lived with in Swiss Cottage. Don’t be put off by the word ‘community’ – this wasn’t anything hippyish or communistic. It was three flats above the shops on Winchester Road (with entrances on Fellows Road), in a building that’s since been demolished, full of friends from Cambridge.

  The first flat, 169 Fellows Road, had initially been rented by Katie Breathwick and passed on to Rob, Jon and Ellis a year later. Jon then noticed, in the summer of 1996, that two more flats were up for rent and suggested that some of his friends who were graduating that summer might want to take them as they were quite cheap and spacious. We jumped at the chance and so 161 and 163 Fellows Road were added to the roster.

  I lived in 163 with Leila Hackett, Rob’s then girlfriend and a fellow Footlighter, and Sally Watson, Tom Hilton’s partner these days. Back then, Tom and Sally were entering the second year of an incredibly slow-moving Beatrice and Benedick mutual spikiness scenario. They’d gone out for about 25 minutes in 1994, then fallen out, then become friends who were ‘completely over each other’, then fallen out in a way that friends who are ‘completely over each other’ never do, then become friends again – and by friends I mean two people who constantly bickered. This remained the situation for about another eight years before they finally got together, a few months after the last person who always said to them ‘You two should get back together’ had stopped bothering to do so.

  Tom lived in 161 with Charles Dean, who’d handled the technical side of Footlights for many years, and an ever-changing third occupant. Matthew Holness was there for a while, as were Robert Thorogood, James Bachman, Mark Evans and my friend Ed Paleit from school.

  Because there were so many of us, we became a sort of centre of gravity for people who’d recently left Cambridge and wanted to act, write or tell jokes. We had quite a few parties, since all that involved was announcing the intention and buying a bottle each. Even such niceties as crisps and dips we considered to be the preserve of a royal garden party. In a way that was basically awful, friends started to refer to us as ‘Swiss College, Cambridge’.

  It was like a sitcom. It really was. We were a bunch of fairly charismatic losers with lots of time on our hands. And funny things happened. Ellis came back from a long IT contract in France with case after case of cheap wine which turned out to be undrinkable, but we were so desperate to mobilise that alcohol resource that we spent more than the wine was worth on gallons of orange juice to mix it with, calling the resultant concoction Sangria. We invented a game called hand tennis, played on the roofs of the shop storerooms below, which had special rules for when the ball went into the fetid piles of bin bags or the area of discarded pot plants outside the doors of 161 and 163. One night, Rob and Jon, after several bottles of wine, decided to put some posters in frames up on the walls of 169. They literally smashed 60 per cent of them. That all sounds funny, doesn’t it? It felt it at the time. Maybe you had to be there.

  I think we were a bit obsessed with its being like a sitcom, particularly those of us who aspired to write and/or be in a sitcom. The dream was to live glamorous and successful lives by being in funny shows about lovable failures. Instead we were broke, stuck in our flats watching This Life, a programme about glamorous, successful people our age. Everything seemed to be the wrong way round.

  - 25 -

  Real Comic Talent

  I’m at the top of the Long Water, which is not a good place to be. I’ve dipped into Hyde Park to get away from the traffic noise, and of course this is a more attractive place to walk. It’s the kind of place where people without bad backs might stroll anyway, for non-medicinal reasons. For the sheer hell of it. Laughing about their healthy spines as they go. Lovely. There are fountains here and everything. Unfortunately, my bladder seems to be able to hear them. Somehow it’s been distracted by other thoughts since I swerved the public conveniences in Regent’s Park, but now it’s put its metaphorical hand to its metaphorical forehead and metaphorically said: ‘I knew there was something!’

  That reminds me of a night on stage – or rather an afternoon. The production of The Miser on the London fringe that I mentioned may sound like an unusual gig for me. You probably think that a play by Molière is a bit arty for a low comedian. The whole Oedipus the Pantomime thing sounds a bit poncy too, I dare say, though only in the clever-clever undergraduate way that you’d expect. But a straightforward production of a classic play? You may doubt my long-term passion for French literature.

  Well, rat correctly smelt. The main reason Rob and I took part in a production of The Miser was that it could be paid for by a tour of independent schools, in a way an original comedy show featuring the word ‘fuck’ could not. You pick a play that’s on the A-level syllabus, ring up a series of private schools, and say that you’re touring a production of it, suitable for teenagers, and would they like to book you in for a performance? You also offer to throw in some ‘theatre workshops’. Each school agrees to put us up for the night and pay a few hundred quid, which, if you get enough schools, covers production and transport costs, a bit of spending money for the cast and crew, and enough left over to hire the Etcetera Theatre, Camden, for a few weeks – so that we can invite agents along in the hope of using the production to kick-start our careers.

  The Etcetera Theatre, Camden, I should add, is not a theatre. It’s a room above the Oxford Arms pub from which you can hear the football match being watched by the regulars downstairs. Nevertheless it is, for some reason, on the London theatre map. Agents, casting directors and the like have heard of it and, in a quiet week, can be prevailed upon to go there.

  This seemed like a workable scheme (and less financially flawed than Oedipus the Pantomime, which I had largely bankrolled using dead relations’ bequests that had been in a Post Office savings account for my entire childhood, and for which hardly anyone had bought a ticket). Robert Thorogood was directing and he decided on a cast of four: Rob, who played Harpagon, the miser of the title; Thorogood himself, who played Cléante and Valère; Olivia Colman, who played Élise and Mariane; and me, who played everyone else. Let me tell you, this is not enough people to mount a production of The Miser.

  Actually, though, I think we made a decent job of it. There was an ingenious set, built by Tom and Charles, which was easily transportable in a small van and looked like an old-fashioned pound note, but with lots of doors and flaps opening from it. All the doubling and costume changing added to the frenetic pace that Robert felt was crucial to the production. It wasn’t an atmospheric Miser, it wasn’t an insightful Miser, but it was quick and entertaining. It consciously borrowed the chaotic feeling which Rob’s and my two-man shows tended to have in their closing stages.

  It was certainly good en
ough for schools and its flippancy alone ensured it went down well with sixth-formers. We were a bit worried about the ‘theatre workshops’ we’d promised as we had no idea what such things involved. But we reckoned none of the kids coming to them would either. I suggested we could paint their faces like clowns and show them how to balance a hockey stick on one finger, but nobody could believe a school would stand for that kind of crap.

  What became clear on the tour was that, at a lot of schools, we weren’t the ones pulling a scam. That was the teachers who booked us; they could take the afternoon off while we minded the kids and then, in the evening, had a bunch of new people to talk to in the pub. At a lot of isolated boarding schools, the presence of a few unfamiliar and articulate graduates was warmly welcomed by staff and we were often under intense pressure to get pissed with them. Pressure to which we yielded.

  But we had to do a lot of these shows and, being as unprofessional as we were unpaid, the production slid swiftly from slick and entertaining to lazy and gabbled-through and bored. At some schools, if we were warmly welcomed and there was a nice theatre, we kept our shit together. But when we found ourselves in a drab, unwelcoming institution, it became harder to concentrate, especially if we were in front of pupils who were following the play in their textbooks as it went along – or at a place where, when a bell went for the end of the lesson, the half of the audience for whom this didn’t form part of a ‘double period’ would leave in the middle. Within a couple of minutes, they would be replaced with different kids, fresh from Maths or Geography, who were expected to watch the end of the play despite having no idea what was going on.

  On days like that, our minds wandered and whole sections of the show would stall as some or all of us collapsed in fits of silent giggles. I remember the City of London School in particular because it had a pillar in the middle of the stage. The audience were just silent whatever we did. It was as if they were dead or getting on with other work. Once we started laughing there, in that eerie silence, it was really hard to stop. The tears came too – weird tears that were a mixture of crying with laughter and just crying. I remember a moment when Robert Thorogood was supposed to respond to some diatribe from Harpagon but couldn’t and just stood there for minutes on end, wheezing and shaking and watering from the eyes, before muttering nonsensically, ‘I’m as happy as Larry,’ and exiting.

  But the biggest nightly crisis for the show was just before the end. I had to come on in the last scene as a character who hadn’t yet appeared in the play, Signior Anselme. He’s the deus ex machina who miraculously solves everything at the end. This involved a complete costume change for me. Most of the parts I played were servants, but Signior Anselme is an authority figure so my costume was a rather nice cream suit and a silk bow-tie. Not a made-up bow-tie but one you had to tie.

  I’m okay at doing that. It takes me a couple of minutes but I can fairly reliably make it into something bow-tie shaped. At the age of 22 I was still proud of my bow-tying skill and so, even when I realised that there wouldn’t be a mirror in the wings where I’d be doing my quick change, I didn’t suggest getting a clip-on as backup. ‘I can do it by feel,’ I thought.

  The problem was that I never knew the extent to which I was right about that, because I couldn’t see the state of the object that was under my chin when I walked on stage. This was a very unfair position to put my already giggly fellow performers in, night after night. ‘What will it be tonight?’ they must have been wondering just before they turned to face me. ‘What insane, lop-sided, unravelling knot, what weird lump or clod of cloth, will be lodged under David’s chin unbeknownst to him as he comes on with the placid face of the character who’s about to resolve the plot?’

  Soon it didn’t matter what the tie looked like – they’d still laugh. If it was a disaster, as misshapen as a Generation Game contestant’s first attempt at a pretzel, that would be hilarious. If it was basically okay but a bit wrong on one side, that would be hilarious. If it was totally fine then that would be even more hilarious because it would make a mockery of all their giggling speculation about something disastrous: it would be a hilarious anticlimax. There was actually nothing funnier, they discovered, than me appearing placidly from the wings in a normal-looking tie. The moment had gone toxic.

  The afternoon which my bladder has just reminded me about was at a very posh girls’ school where we were performing in a brightly lit hall rather than a theatre. It was an uninspiring institution – clearly very focused on academe and discipline, to the extent that the spirit seemed to have been driven out of pupils and teachers alike. It was a joyless environment and so we were gigglier than ever.

  I don’t know what my bow-tie looked like when I walked on stage that day but Collie laughed so much she pissed herself. There and then. On the stage. Some muscle relaxed and wee was suddenly pouring down her legs into her shoes, which soon overflowed as her feet were already in them. The piss progressed speedily down the, we now realised, slightly raked stage. It’s amazing how much piss there is when someone pisses themselves – in the same way, I suppose, that it’s amazing how much water there is when you knock over a glass of water. Liquids really do cover a very large area when freed from restraining glasses or bladders. And, as she pissed, she continued laughing. We all continued laughing, in our bodies, mouths and face – but no longer our eyes, which had gone wide and desperate. All four of us were in a massed spasm of public humiliation from which we couldn’t escape.

  Collie was the first to recover herself – possibly as a result of finishing her wee. She promptly said her exit line and left to tidy herself up at just the moment that the puddle reached the lip of the stage and started dripping down in front of Row A’s studious faces. Those pupils were so brainwashed, I don’t even remember them reacting. We might as well have been touring North Korea.

  I’m a comedian but that’s the only time, to my knowledge, that I’ve ever made anyone piss themselves laughing. And it was not deliberate. After the show, we hastily left – aware that, as a company, we were now both taking and leaving the piss.

  Our run at the Etcetera garnered a three-star review from Time Out from which we extracted the quotation: ‘real comic talent’. The night after it was published our audience numbers leapt up into the low twenties. But they were soon back to the high single figures that guaranteed a feeling of embarrassment, of having made a mistake, among the people who’d come, but didn’t justify cancelling the performance. For that, we felt, the audience had to be outnumbered.

  Rob got an agent out of it, though: Michele Milburn, then of Amanda Howard Associates. I tried to be pleased for him – I made all the right congratulatory noises. And I salved my feelings of inadequacy with the thought that he’d been out in the world a year longer than me and he’d had the main part in the play. But it was a very unsettling feeling. An agent on the lookout for the likes of me had pointedly asked Rob but not me to be a client. Once again, I was convinced that he was about to be swept off to BBC Two, leaving me alone in the wilderness.

  The news that a different agent had signed up both Robert Thorogood and Collie didn’t improve my self-esteem. Maybe I was just talentless, I thought in dark moments. But then I’d turn on the television, watch a few minutes of primetime and remind myself that talentlessness was no barrier to success. So, maybe it was worse than that – maybe I was unlucky. Still, if my career was going badly, I had my absorbing hobbies and fulfilling love life to fall back on.

  DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!? No, all I had to fall back or forwards on, all that I gleaned any self-esteem from, was my career/hobby. The supportive group of friends in Swiss Cottage were entirely derived from that, as was my key friendship with Rob. So it was either all going well or all going badly.

  My parents were very supportive, as ever, but they didn’t really know how to help and I didn’t want to explain to them the feelings of foolishness and doubt I was labouring under. I wanted them to think I had things under control. Whenever I was in a show
, they would come along and, knowing that we were desperate to sell tickets, they’d try and persuade their friends to come as well. For more than one London fringe show, they hired a minibus so that they could ferry over a dozen of their friends and colleagues from Oxford to the show and back again.

  My parents were used to the edgy material and flaky production values of shows involving Rob and me. What their friends, more used to a professionally produced Ayckbourn at the Oxford Playhouse, must have thought, I dread to think. But the friends were universally enthusiastic, supportive and complimentary and I’m very grateful to them for coming – and even more so to my parents for jeopardising so many of their friendships in order to help me. But of course, this help was also a sign of worry. I remember them saying in Edinburgh one year, probably after I’d been foul to them and then asked to borrow money, that they’d completely support me if I decided the whole comedy thing wasn’t working out and I wanted to ‘change course’.

  It made me laugh at the time because I knew they would. They’re the most wonderful, unquestioningly loving people I know. I think they’d support me if I said I wanted to set up as a drug dealer. (At times, they may have thought that’s what I was.) And the fact that they’d support me to try and do comedy meant that they’d definitely support me in a more prudent path. But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a very kind and gentle way of expressing concern, of intimating, in the face of my pride and brittleness, that they knew I had worries, wasn’t altogether happy and was afraid about how things might turn out.