Back Story

by David Mitchell

  This flew in the face of everything my parents had ever said about how you run restaurants and hotels. When people complain, you have at the very least to say sorry and accept that the complaint is sincere. So I sprang into action and gave this unpleasant woman what I remember as a devastating tongue-lashing. That is also how the others remember it, although it must be said that we were all a bit drunk.

  I do know that I never raised my voice or swore. I merely contradicted the woman back and, when she tried to interrupt me, told her to be quiet and to listen to what I had to say – which was that she was running the worst restaurant I’d ever been in. To the last, she rejected all our complaints and refused to say sorry. Meanwhile, behind us, one of her staff started glumly hoovering.

  We left feeling better for having had our say. But, ridiculously, we paid. In full. The manageress’s technique of accusing us of trying to get a free meal tricked us out of the only action that could have hurt her. She didn’t care about the argument or that we were unhappy, she had no hopes of repeat custom – that wasn’t the business model. She needed only to get our money once. The next day, there’d be another bunch of dupes to fleece. Well, at least we didn’t leave a tip. Still, we contributed to that miserable chain’s survival. For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to go to the Angus Steakhouse once.

  Writing on Armstrong and Miller led to other work. Ben and Xander asked us to help write their radio sitcom, Children’s Hour with Armstrong and Miller, and Phil suggested us to the production team of The Jack Docherty Show, a Channel 5 chat show also made by Absolutely, as regular writers.

  Meanwhile Nick Jones, the director we’d met in Edinburgh, had some excellent news. He’d finally got his name printed on his business cards. Also, he’d put together a BBC Two sketch show pilot called Bruiser with a producer and writer called David Tomlinson. Rob and I had written a fair bit of the material and Rob was cast as one of the performers. The BBC had sat on this tape for a few months before giving the green light to a full series. In February 1999, at the end of a writing day on Jack Docherty, David and Nick took us to the Hand and Racquet pub near Leicester Square to tell us about the commission, and to say that the only cast members they were planning to retain for the series were Rob and Mackenzie Crook (who subsequently dropped out to make the first series of The 11 O’Clock Show instead). They also said that they wanted me to join the cast and for Rob and me to head up the writing team. Suddenly, out of the blue, we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. Rob and I were so excited we immediately went to Pizza Express.

  And we had yet another iron in the fire. Nick Symons, a producer at Carlton who’d seen our 1998 Edinburgh show, asked us to develop a sitcom with him. The idea was to pitch this to Channel 4 rather than ITV in the hope that it would initially be staged at the Channel 4 Sitcom Festival, where several promising sitcom scripts were staged as plays in front of an industry audience.

  After years of indolence, suddenly we were extremely busy, writing sketches for Bruiser, Armstrong and Miller and Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, the sitcom pilot for Nick S (which we called Daydream Believers and featured Colin and Ray, characters who had been central to several of our Edinburgh shows) and a script for a new Edinburgh show which, in an act of brand simplification, we decided to call The Mitchell and Webb Story. No ‘That’ yet.

  Then we had to perform all of those things, starting with the five-week Bruiser shoot which was my first experience of a concentrated period of filming. The Bruiser cast were almost all people we knew from Cambridge whom we’d introduced to Nick and David: Collie, Matthew Holness and Charlotte Hudson (who’d done a lot of acting at university but was best known professionally as a co-presenter of Watchdog). The only stranger in the cast was Martin Freeman, of whom we were consequently suspicious and whose naturalistic and charismatic performance style was immediately annoyingly entertaining.

  Filming usually involves an early start in anyone’s temporal currency. Even a farmer couldn’t call you a slugabed during a location shoot. As an actor you have to be ready to film by 8am, which means, for a sketch show where you have to keep being made to look like different people, you start costume and make-up preparations at about 7am, by which time you need to have got to the unit base on the other side of London and eaten breakfast, so you’re usually leaving the house at about 6. This prospect genuinely frightened me. As someone still accustomed to getting up at lunchtime, unless I had a pressing reason not to, setting an alarm for 5.30 seemed like a sick joke. Surely I just wouldn’t hear it or would be unable to function? I was aware that other people got up early every day of their lives, but I was convinced that there was a significant metabolic difference between me and them. Clearly, tiredness didn’t affect them as keenly. Maybe I had some mild form of ME.

  One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow. ‘Don’t lawyers only have to be in court at 10?’ I thought. How had I made such a massive misjudgement?

  What came as a surprise and a huge relief to me is that I loved location filming. The mornings were painful, vast amounts of the day were spent inexplicably waiting around because of unfathomable technical hitches, and the work itself was incredibly repetitive, involving performing the same shard of material again and again and again from different angles while everyone worried about light and sound and costume and make-up and practically ignored the performances. So most of the minutes and hours spent filming are stultifying. But the days are brilliant. The feeling of achievement at the end of each day is very satisfying. The camaraderie of a crew all working together to achieve the same unlikely and frivolous aim – the making of a funny show – is warm and inspiring. The breaks for lunch and tea, the relishing of comfort food, the ridiculous chats about nothing while waiting around with a cup of tea somewhere incongruous, are all great fun. When that five-week shoot ended I was deeply sad and desperately hoped that it wouldn’t be the last such period of work I’d experience.

  We then went straight into rehearsing Daydream Believers for the Channel 4 Sitcom Festival. The director was Gordon Anderson, who has since gone on to direct The Catherine Tate Show and The Inbetweeners but who, at the time, had mainly worked in theatre. He was great with our script. When he made an editing suggestion, it was concrete and achievable. His first was simple: swap the first and third scenes. It was an excellent note and meant the show started in the living room of Ray’s disgusting house, with Colin recording an answerphone message:

  COLIN: (into answerphone) Hello, you’ve reached Colin and Ray’s house – well, Ray’s house. Well you’ve reached Colin and Ray, or have you, because actually we can’t make it to the phone at the moment, so if you want to leave a message, and we hope you do, then by all means do so. Excellent. So, we’ll speak to you soon. Right. Cheerio. Bye bye. Hope that’s okay. And – ooh it’s after the tone. Oh erm … (to Ray) Shall I ask them to leave the date and the time? (into answerphone) Could you leave the date and the time and a number we can contact you on, unless we’ve got it, in which case don’t bother. But, if in doubt – oh it’s run out of tape, I think that was too long.

  RAY: Colin, you should thank them for calling. It’s rude otherwise. You should thank them and say sorry we’re not in. It’s just thanks, sorry, goodbye – it’s like the end of the British Empire.

  COLIN: No, I know, let’s do a funny one – one, with music. No, no, just a funny one. Like I say, ‘Leave a message or Ray gets it,’ and you go (muffled) ‘Mmm. Don’t hurt me!’ in the background.

  RAY: We could do that, Colin. My only reservation is that we might then be mistaken for a couple of twats.r />
  COLIN: Yeah, that’s true. Okay, let’s do a really cool one, really brief. Yeah I know. (He presses the button and talks into the machine) You know what to do. (He lets go of the button with an air of cool finality) That’s it! I’ve done it! Although I’d better say who we are, in case it’s a wrong number. (into machine, very casual) Hi, it’s Colin and Ray, you know what to do – oh, I let go of the button. (again, dismissive) Hi, it’s Colin and Ray, you know what to do. Oh, is that a bit arsey? You know, a bit ‘you know where to stick it’.

  RAY: What if they don’t know what to do?

  COLIN: (again) Hi, it’s Colin and Ray. We assume you know what to do. If you don’t, what it is is that we’re out or we can’t make it to the phone so do leave a bleh bleh bleh, oh this really is all just bollocks. I’ll do it later. Ray, I’m doing it later. All right? I mean, if it’s not all right then say. I just can’t be fagged at the moment.

  It’s a very efficient, and hopefully amusing, introduction to the characters: what they’re like and their circumstances. The show went down well and was, I think, the only one from that year’s festival to be developed further: we were asked to write another couple of scripts with a view to making a pilot.

  We went straight from the sitcom festival into rehearsing The Mitchell and Webb Story for Edinburgh, with James Bachman directing. As a publicity gimmick, our show that year was supposedly sponsored by a company called Künty Matches from Bremen, Germany. I expect you can see the joke. We even had thousands of little books of Künty Matches manufactured for distribution round Edinburgh (it’s surprisingly cheap to have things printed on books of matches) and, with James, wrote an advertising jingle for them:

  Künty Match, Künty Match,

  Made one at a time and not in a batch.

  From schoolboy to parson, for smoking and arson,

  You’re never alone with a Künty Maa-aaaaa-aaaa-aaaaa.

  Maaaaaaatch!

  Künty Match!

  (-es).

  In the show, Rob and I played the supposed representatives of this sponsor, unimaginatively named Gunther and Klaus. The opening scene included a joke by James Bachman, which may be my favourite of all the jokes I’ve ever performed on stage. Gunther and Klaus are performing sections of Strike a Light – My Künty Career, the autobiography of the matches’ inventor Dr Hermann Künty, who was a well-connected German industrialist in the 1930s.

  They take up a position.

  KLAUS: Hello, Dr Künty.

  GUNTHER: Hello, Herr Hitler. I have heard so much about you.

  KLAUS: All good, I hope.

  It was our most successful Edinburgh show ever, which isn’t actually saying much, but it was well reviewed and sold out the whole run and, back in London, even more people wanted to give us cups of tea and talk about our ideas.

  Among those who meant business were David Tyler and Geoff Posner. Geoff’s first directing job had been Not the Nine O’Clock News and he’d worked with most British TV comedy stars who’d come to prominence since. David had cut his teeth on Spitting Image and Absolutely. The pair’s own company had recently made Coogan’s Run and Dinnerladies and they wanted their next project to be with us. They quickly obtained a BBC commission for a TV script in the style of our Edinburgh shows – a silly story full of characters all of which were to be played by us. The idea was that, in a series, each episode would have a different context – the Middle Ages, Outer Space, Snooker in the 1970s, the Wild West – but the characters would recur, a bit like The Goon Show. The working title was Extraordinary Tales of Exceptional Goodness.

  This was a very exciting prospect. It was only a script commission but David and Geoff weren’t time-wasters. They were funny and successful, and the show, if we could get it made, might be relatively original. Original in TV terms – in that it would be a rip-off of a show that happened forty years before, rather than six months ago. It would also be the natural continuation of the stage shows Rob and I had been writing for years. If we could make this show for the BBC and Daydream Believers for Channel 4, maybe after a second series of Bruiser, we’d be well set-up men indeed.

  And still more people wanted to have meetings with us, although they seemed less exciting now that we had so much proper work. As I surveyed the enviable position I found myself in at the start of the new millennium, as I looked proudly at my new BBC diary for the year 2000, I remembered that Rob and I had agreed to meet a couple of jobbing writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, to talk about an idea they’d had. We’d met them on an ill-fated team-writing project organised by David Tomlinson, which attempted to make eight men committee-write a sitcom about squatters. Nothing came of it but we’d got on well with Sam and Jesse. We liked what they’d written and vice versa.

  We’ve got a bit too much on, we thought. We’re getting proper commissions now. But it would be rude to refuse to see them for a chat – we didn’t want to seem grand. Still, we were experienced enough to know that nothing ever came of that sort of meeting.

  - 28 -

  The Magician

  ‘Well, they’ve got a brand new cooker now, so we’re having to shoot it all the other way.’

  ‘How’s that going to work?’ I said. ‘It’s POV – the camera has to keep swinging round. How can two people have a conversation in a tiny kitchen without either of them catching a glimpse of the cooker?’

  ‘It’s going to be tricky.’

  ‘Anyway, how come they’re messing about, changing their kitchen? You’ve paid them a location fee.’

  ‘That’s how they bought the cooker.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘We’re also a bit worried about Rob’s tan.’

  ‘What about it?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Well, you haven’t got it any more.’

  ‘Yes, well it’s February now –’

  ‘It’s March.’

  ‘Shut up, David. So what do you want me to do – go to the solarium?’

  ‘We haven’t really got the budget for that.’

  This is how I remember the conversation Rob and I had with the producer, Andrew O’Connor, in early 2002 as we returned to the tiny flat where, eight months earlier, we’d made a ten-minute ‘taster tape’ for Channel 4 of a programme called ‘POV’. The channel had apparently enjoyed the taste – the way it was filmed from the two main characters’ point of view was deemed to have worked and they’d liked the interior monologues – but not quite enough for a whole meal (or series – I’m going to abandon this metaphor with the parting image of EastEnders being a seemingly endless supply of gallon after gallon of gruel). Instead they’d asked us to show them the other half of the episode – the end of the story which had started in the taster tape. The only trouble was that we hadn’t shot the other half so we were doing that now.

  ‘This,’ I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘is not the way television should be commissioned and made. We make a thing on the cheap, hoping against hope that its potential will show through the low production values. It takes us two days to shoot the ten minutes but, it seems, over half a year for the execs to watch it – and then they ask for the impossible.’

  I wanted us to say: ‘That’s not the deal – you don’t get to see the second half because you didn’t pay us to make it. Make the call, commission a series – or even a proper pilot where we’re not slipping a couple of flatmates a cooker’s worth of cash on the quiet to make themselves scarce over a weekend. This is not how things should be organised!’

  I have this feeling so often when making TV. With huge amounts of money at stake, stupid costs are cut and compromises made, causing crews on the ground, who are actually trying to make the programmes, huge logistical problems. I always angrily want the suits in offices who make arbitrary budgetary or policy decisions to come and answer for it at seven in the morning in a freezing field. Why was Comedy Nation made in a disused office while proper TV studios lay idle two floors below? Why do money constraints mean that sunny picnic scenes have to be shot in the pouring rain; th
at hundreds of man hours are wasted, when shooting at a cheap location near Heathrow, waiting for the tiny quieter intervals between planes passing overhead; that cutting back on vehicles means props and costumes get left at the previous location by tired, over-worked people, causing more hours to be wasted and costs to be incurred which are much higher than having an extra car on stand-by? These costs, which look cuttable on a balance sheet in an office, are slashed through with the pen of someone who doesn’t have to live with the consequences of their actions. Meanwhile vast sums are thoughtlessly spent on public relations, rebranding, expensive advertisements, management consultants, etc. I’m not just talking about the BBC or Channel 4 but all of them, by the way – all broadcasters, all production companies, probably all large organisations. The consequences of bad decisions made by essentially unaccountable managers make me want to scream.

  And yet, what do the TV crews do? They work round the problems. They wait for the missing prop and agree to work late. They listen uncomplainingly for the gap between planes. They make the show happen. This is a far nobler response than mine – and it keeps in mind the most important truth: that it’s fun and a privilege to get to make TV shows, particularly comedy shows, and we should be grateful for any opportunity, however compromised by managerial incompetence, to do so.

  This was very much the approach of the producer of ‘POV’. Andrew O’Connor, whose fledgling company Objective Productions had made the taster tape, was of the opinion that we could work with all difficulties. We’d film round the cooker, we’d put a bit of fake tan on Rob, we’d make the second half of the taster tape like good boys and girls. Keep them sweet and we might just get a series.

  Andrew O’Connor is one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met. A child actor, former Young Magician of the Year, impressionist and quiz show host, he was one of the last old-school non-alternative comedians. He became famous by the old route, having been a Pontin’s Blue Coat. One of his best stories is of the time that Bruce Forsyth explained to him the technique for changing your trousers in the gents of a club without trailing any part of them on the inevitably piss-drizzled floor. The first stage, as I remember it, is to grip the end of one or both of the trouser legs between your teeth.