Back Story

by David Mitchell

  The reality is that meeting new people and aimlessly chatting about ideas basically is the TV industry. Hundreds make their living in perpetually salaried ‘development’, seldom troubling a cameraman. Only under exceptional circumstances is a show actually made, at which point the key idea-developers, the ones who have meetings, often delegate that task to others. Our little chats with TV companies had only been about making contact, acknowledging each other’s existence, as part of the vast, inefficient, meandering dance which the comparatively small amount of actual TV production manages to support.

  I’m glad I didn’t really understand any of that in our early days of getting meetings – because if I had they would have been less exciting and fun. As it was, the process seemed to show such promise, such cause for hope, that it was a long time before the absence of anything much coming from it made me concerned.

  None of this constituted a full-time job, but I suppose it was a full-time obsession. I didn’t think about much else. I was in my early twenties, living in London, so you might imagine I was always going to parties and hanging out in trendy bars. But no such thing.

  I certainly didn’t go on dates. In fact, until fairly recently, I didn’t really believe that going on dates was something people did, except in stories and America. I thought it was like proms or spherical Christmas puddings. The fact that some people – probably most people – approach the absence of a romantic relationship from their life in such an ordered, almost clinical, way is something I’ve only cottoned on to in the last five or six years. In my twenties, I didn’t have a clue. Sex was surely something that happened unexpectedly, occasionally and almost by accident, and ‘going out with someone’ was just a further happy accident that would follow if you didn’t feel shit about yourself in the morning. The thought that you might actively try and meet women – at parties or bars, maybe by going along with male friends also looking for dates – and then get talking, exchange phone numbers and then, horror of horrors, ring up and ask them to join you for some sort of social event was ridiculous. That would be like just saying you fancied someone, to their face! Honestly!

  And none of my friends seemed to go on dates – or, if they did, they didn’t tell me. All of my friends were from Cambridge and some of them were going out with each other. In the absence of anyone in that group who I wanted to go out with and who wanted to go out with me, I was single. That just seemed to be one of the things about me, like brown eyes and a preference for tea over coffee. I tried not to think about it. I imagined that, one day, a supermodel with a rapier wit and a heart of gold would throw herself at me. And my friends didn’t discuss it much either. Studenty conversations about crushes waned. In the real world, the crushes were fewer and further between – but the whole subject was somehow more serious. So I avoided it. I knew this sort of thing was important in the long run but, like eating enough fruit, it didn’t feel like a pressing concern. I was perfectly happy single.

  Besides, I seldom met anyone new, other than over a tea in a production company, discussing the difficulties of pitching a sitcom. Which, to be frank, worried me a lot more than the prospect of dying alone.

  - 27 -

  Causes of Celebration

  A pink limo pulls over to the kerb a few yards in front of me. I doubt that it’s local. It’s not that sort of area. I’m back on the Bayswater Road now, having run out of park. The posh houses of Kensington Palace Gardens stretch down to my left. I’m not saying their owners are immune to vulgarity when it comes to choosing cars – they could probably be tempted to one of those slightly chavvy new two-door Bentleys – but this vehicle is full-on Vegas kitsch.

  Various participants in a hen do, still fairly sober at this hour of the afternoon, get out to stretch their legs and finalise plans for their assault on the West End. They’re all wearing devil horns and short skirts except for their two male friends who, for some reason, are dressed as pirates. I pity those men. The girls’ devil outfits look perfectly sexy, while the two blokes are encumbered with cutlasses and parrots. When the paparazzi hope to glimpse a twat getting out of a limo, this isn’t what they mean. What are these two doing there?

  Maybe they’re gay. A gay friend of mine was once invited on a hen do. He went along but couldn’t quite get the rationale clear in his head. Surely, he thought, stag and hen nights have to be demarcated along the lines of the gender of the participants, not that of whom they aspire to fuck? Would a lesbian be made to join the stags?

  Take that to its logical conclusion and loos, the gender division of which is presumably to preserve decency and avoid funny business, should actually not be for ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ but for ‘Gent-Fuckers’ and ‘Lady-fuckers’. So straight men and lesbians can happily pee in the same area, safe in the knowledge that mutual sexual attraction cannot occur – while the gay men are in with the straight women, happily talking about [insert sexist/homophobic generalisation of your choice here].

  I really must stop thinking about loos. I stop briefly in Starbucks on Pembridge Road to relieve the problem. To clarify: I use the Starbucks loo. It’s not an anti-capitalist demonstration.

  Those poor pirates! I have awkward and mixed feelings about fancy dress. I’m very happy to dress in whatever stupid costume I’m given when appearing on TV. I won’t be nude but any sort of ridiculous outfit, in a context where it’s supposed to look funny, I’m fine with. That’s probably because I can say I didn’t choose to wear it, it’s just my job (although that’s a pretty flimsy excuse when it’s a costume for a sketch I’ve written). But when a party invitation says ‘fancy dress’, it’s different. I don’t think it’s right to turn up dressed normally, although people do and God knows that avoids hassle and embarrassment. I just think it’s a bit rude and churlish. It’s both failing to observe a clearly stated dress code and refusing to join in with the fun of a social event. Rather than that, I think one should probably just not go.

  At the same time, though, a perfect, gleaming, hired costume would feel a bit OTT – a bit ‘Look at me!’ A friend of mine regularly has a Hallowe’en party for which some form of horror-inspiring outfit is required. Perhaps, to reflect what inspires horror in me, I should go as a party invitation requiring fancy dress. Instead, I make a lame nod towards compliance. The first year, I went to a ‘party shop’ and quickly bought a plastic vampire cloak and a wizard’s hat and went wearing both. I felt this would do the job. It would be saying: ‘Look, I’m joining in – clearly this is not how I’m normally attired.’ The problem was that the first question everyone asks you at a do like that is, ‘What have you come as?’ and those two items don’t really provide an answer. A vampiric wizard? A magic vampire? A wizard going to the opera?

  The next year, I eschewed the hat but slicked my hair and said I was a vampire. A vampire with normal teeth. The year after that I thought I’d have to do better and so I cut up a furry hot water bottle and sewed bits of it to the backs of fingerless gloves and other bits to a T-shirt. No one got that I was a werewolf, even though I’d put fake blood round my mouth.

  ‘You just look like a normal bloke who’s trailing fluff everywhere,’ someone said.

  Why are the British so comfortable with this extroverted form of social event? What happens to our trademark repression when an accountant and his wife cheerfully get into a cab dressed as Sylvester and Tweetie Pie? What is it that makes an otherwise inoffensive man happy to go to a social event wearing round glasses, a false beard and sporting a stethoscope so that he can spend all night saying ‘Yes, Shipman’ in answer to appalled gazes?

  And when did it start? To my eyes, before about 1950 most people were wearing fancy dress anyway. What on earth was a Restoration-era costume party like? Could a gentleman be persuaded to remove his ridiculous three-foot wig before donning the comparatively conservative horned Viking helmet? (I know, before you balk, that the Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets, but I can’t help feeling that’s their mistake, not ours.)

  W
hat does the Queen go as, when she’s asked to a fancy dress party? That must happen all the time – aristocrats love masked balls and other eccentric events that show breeding and conceal inbreeding. But she’s got a problem. She’s basically in fancy dress her whole life. She has to go to everything as the Queen. On a normal day, she’ll be head to toe in canary yellow, salmon pink or frog green and, if she’s opening Parliament, she’ll be wearing a sparkly dress and a crown. Like me, she seems perfectly comfortable wearing weird outfits for work. But, if the footage of her from Millennium night, awkwardly holding hands with Tony Blair while singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, is anything to go by, she finds it difficult to let her hair down at parties, which is also like me.

  Where we differ, and where our Millennium nights differ, is that I didn’t light a beacon, then cruise down the Thames to the sound of a 21-gun salute en route to a party at the Dome. I didn’t watch 400 carnival performers do whatever carnival performers do (which is whinge about hamstring injuries and touch their parents for cash, I imagine; we may be a country that can cope with fancy dress, but the concept of ‘carnival’ is beyond us and I suspect that British carnival acts are the preserve of those intellectually sloppy but counter-culturally inclined children of the middle classes too lazy to train as homeopaths and too prudish for burlesque).

  Me, I just had a few drinks in Swiss Cottage. We didn’t even have a proper party because we thought any potential guests would have something better to do. So a handful of us got pissed and then walked up Primrose Hill to watch the fireworks on the Thames, which at that distance looked tiny. I somehow mistimed my drinking and got a headache that I couldn’t shift.

  It may have been a dull night but it was a fairly uplifting time for me professionally. For the last three years, everything had consistently got better. In 1998 Rob and I had met Phil Clarke, a BBC producer who had been given the thankless task of making a late-night sketch show for £29,000 an episode. That was the budget of the show, I hasten to clarify, not his fee. If it had been his fee, that would have been thanks enough. (You may think that £29,000 sounds quite a lot for half an hour’s TV but, trust me, for a sketch show, with lots of cast, crew, locations and editing needed, it really isn’t. A prime-time sketch show would have a budget ten times that.)

  Phil cast us in it and so we got our first TV job. The show was called Comedy Nation and, if you look it up, maybe on IMDB, you’ll see that it had a stellar cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Ronni Ancona, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Peter Serafinowicz, Sally Phillips and Phill Jupitus. Stephen Merchant was the runner.

  Unfortunately Rob and I didn’t meet any of those people, as all the different bits of the show were filmed separately. Also, it wasn’t a very good programme. It consisted of sketches, written by the performers and then little more than camcordered by a tiny crew. For the first series, we had to provide our own costumes and props, and our sketches were filmed in an office at the BBC while its usual occupants were out at lunch.

  But its artistic failings certainly weren’t Phil Clarke’s fault. For that budget it is basically a miracle there was a show at all. What felt equally miraculous to us was that, for our contribution (the writing and performing of half a dozen sketches) we were each paid literally hundreds of pounds.

  Phil Clarke is another of those magic producers like Gareth Edwards who, having been comedians themselves, can come up with jokes without the help of writers or performers and who, consequently, get their best work. He is mildly spoken, calm in a crisis, accommodating to other people’s views but very firm when he’s convinced that he’s in the right. But he picks his moments to speak out and is, in general, a civilising and humour-injecting influence in a stressful environment. I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with the strain of dealing with commissioning editors, but he’s also a black-belt kick boxer.

  Comedy Nation was a resistible viewing pleasure but, for Rob and me, it led to other work. Ash Atalla, who was later to produce The Office, had been Comedy Nation’s script editor and, when he was commissioned to produce a Radio 4 sketch show about disability issues, he asked us to contribute some material. So it was that Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, a show predicated on the flawed premise of being for the disabled what Goodness Gracious Me had been for Asians, became Rob’s and my first Radio 4 writing credit.

  Phil also put more work our way when he left the BBC and moved to Absolutely, the production company founded by the team of writer-performers behind the terrific late ’80s/early ’90s Channel 4 sketch show of the same name. They were making the second series of Armstrong and Miller and Phil asked us to join the writing team. This was a brilliant experience. Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong were not only very funny, they were welcoming and enthusiastic to us and had an appealing, analytical approach to comedy. All of the writers would turn up with half-thought-through notions of what might make a sketch and then the group – Ben, Xander, Phil, George Jeffries and Bert Tyler-Moore were the other regulars – would discuss it, find the comic kernel and knock it into shape. It was like a more professional version of the Footlights system. Half-arsed ideas would be fitted with their second buttocks and everyone would leave the meeting with a list of coherent pieces of material to write up.

  Armstrong and Miller was a massive turning point for me because that’s when I started to make a living from comedy. For the first time, I didn’t need to do anything else to supplement my income and I never have since. Fingers crossed, touch wood, turn around and touch the ground, etc., etc., etc. I was 24 years old and it was an enormous relief. I get asked a lot in interviews about ‘breakthrough’ moments in my career, presumably to elicit a glittering anecdote set in a revolving restaurant where a cigar-smoking producer screams, ‘This kid’s got something!’ Instead I tell them about when the jobbing writing work started to cover the bills. That’s when I properly became a professional comedian.

  And I suddenly felt rich. Hundreds of pounds were entering my bank account every week and I hardly had any overheads. I seemed to have instantly gone from never having enough money to having more than I could imagine what to do with. This is not because I was very highly paid but because my spending imagination had atrophied through underuse. It felt beyond the dreams of avarice that, rent and bills taken care of, I was able to get my round in at the pub and occasionally go to Pizza Express. I couldn’t think of much else to spend it on. In the same way that starting to get regular work was a bigger moment for me than the showier career successes that came later, those first regular arrivals of a few hundred quid felt like more money to me than any of the fatter fees I’ve earned since. It turns out money is like a drug – to start with, it doesn’t take much of it to get you high.

  I was looking for ways to spend. And one night, I came up with the idea of going to one of those Angus Steakhouses (or possibly Aberdeen Steakhouses – they look identical) that were still dotted around central London. I’d long wondered about those places. The combination of their prominent (and therefore presumably expensive and sought-after) locations, their shabby ’70s decor and the fact that they always seemed to be at least three-quarters empty had long baffled me. How did they survive? Outside, they gave a partial clue: a blackboard listing the unremarkable beef products they proposed to serve, alongside the prices. Those weren’t ’70s at all. In fact, they were positively futuristic. In the years of being broke, I would certainly never have set foot in such a place (if I was going to splash out on a restaurant, I’d go somewhere cheap where I knew what I was getting, i.e. a curry house) but now I had the chance to indulge my curiosity.

  So one night, after a few pints in the pub, Rob, James Bachman, who was also finding solvency in comedy writing around this time, Tom Hilton and I decided to soak up the booze in an Angus/Aberdeen Steakhouse on Leicester Square. We wandered in and were favoured with a table in the window.

  Our expectations were not high. We were basically going there because we thought it was funny. But I think we reckoned that we’d get competent steak and ch
ips, for which we’d then be overcharged. Maybe slightly poor steak and chips but, as steak and chips is fundamentally nice, that would be okay – more than worth enduring for the adventure of going to one of those inexplicable restaurants. We were pretty determined to enjoy the experience: James ordered a side dish of Brussels sprouts purely because he was amused that they offered such a thing.

  All seemed well when the food arrived: it looked funny. It reminded me of our very occasional trips to the Berni Inn when I was little. There were tomatoes in the garnish that had been sort of crinkle cut and all the food was served on enormous heaps of cress. I hadn’t seen cress for years – which didn’t bother me, it’s a pointless food – but the reason for its disappearance was apparently that the Angus and Aberdeen Steakhouses had bought up the entire world’s supply.

  Then we tucked in, at which point the joke was on us. All of the food was terrible. Inedible. Burnt and unchewable. Apart from James’s sprouts, which seemed to have undergone 40 per cent of the process of turning them into soup. The wine was expensive and like vinegar. We were sad. We’d wanted dinner.

  ‘We should complain,’ said James.

  He was met with a cressy splutter from the rest of us.

  ‘Typical American!’ (James is half American) was our response. ‘Why add the nightmare of embarrassment to the horrors of the meal itself?’

  But he insisted. And, very gently and politely, he asked to see the manageress.

  Well, she wasn’t taking any shit. I think she was Russian. She was certainly cold and warlike. She wouldn’t accept anything James said and, from the off, implied that we were only trying to avoid paying. At some point, I saw red. I hate complaining, I hate conflict – I’d rather nod and smile and then bitch behind people’s backs. Or nod and smile and then ring my agent to get her to complain. But at one point James said something perfectly reasonable, and she interrupted and directly contradicted him.