Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. This decision about the show name was made a full year after ‘POV’ was commissioned. We’d made the whole series, not knowing what it was going to be called. So let’s go back to the summer of 2002.

  I was on holiday in France when my mobile rang.

  I’m going to leave that sentence on its own because I found it all so impressive at the time. I was on holiday – a deliberate, organised period of sophisticated relaxation. In France: a foreign country which I had travelled to using my own money with no help from my parents and showing a valid passport which I’d managed to sort out for myself – I’d been to the post office and filled out the forms like a functional human. My mobile: yeah, sure, I had a mobile phone, I needed it for work, it was quite a small snazzy one if I remember rightly; I could pay the bills and stuff, that was never a problem. Rang: MY MOBILE WORKED IN FRANCE!

  I answered and it was Phil Clarke – A TELEVISION PRODUCER CALLED MY MOBILE WHEN I WAS ON HOLIDAY IN FRANCE!!! I wasn’t actually by the pool. It would have been better if I’d been actually by the pool. Phil said he’d been invited to have a chat with a bloke called Andrew O’Connor, who it seemed was some sort of magician-impressionist, to talk about a commission he’d got for a show where comedians wore cameras on their heads and he’d heard that I was involved. Would this be a good thing for him to produce or was it a nightmare being organised by a chancer?

  I thought it probably was a nightmare being organised by a chancer but it was also a nightmare I’d already signed up to live through, with hilarious scripts, and the only opportunity on my horizon of actually getting on TV other than applying for Big Brother. Maybe, if it was a success, I’d have to field calls from more producers at even more exotic holiday locations. And Phil understood comedy as well as anyone I knew. I strongly encouraged him to go for the chat. After doing that, he took the job.

  There were certainly times when I felt a little bit guilty. Phil had been working at Talkback, a production company with a great track record in comedy, while Objective was a company lacking a track record in anything other than filing accounts at Companies House (and I wouldn’t be amazed to hear that it had dropped the ball once or twice where that was concerned).

  And the ‘POV’ shoot was very tough indeed. We were shooting something in a style that hadn’t been tried before – where every shot was looking through the eyes of one of the characters – and our first discovery was that it took much longer than normal filming. We hadn’t realised this when making the taster tape because we hadn’t really bothered with things like consistent lighting. But this was going on TV and had to look reasonably professional. And it turns out, when a camera is aping a person’s movements, it has to keep turning round to look at another part of the room. This soon leaves you with hardly any parts of the room in which to put the lights, which are the main thing that stops TV from looking like someone’s home movie.

  If you haven’t seen Peep Show, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Few have. Televisually few; it would be a hell of a turnout on the Edinburgh Fringe. But it’s never been a ratings hit. It’s been well reviewed and won a few awards, including a BAFTA, a couple of British Comedy Awards and a Golden Rose, and I feel enormously proud to be in it and lucky that Sam and Jesse have chosen to lavish such amazing writing on my weird voice. Still, if you feel the need to read the following description, I’ll be neither surprised nor disappointed. Come to think of it, I won’t even know.

  It’s about two young men (well, they were when we started) who share a flat, one of whom looks uncannily like me. They’re called Mark and Jeremy and, looking through their eyes and hearing their voices, we’re plunged into an intricate and comically heightened version of urban tedium. They’re friends from university living disappointing lives, Mark as a pedantic, lonesome loans manager and Jeremy as a libidinous failed musician. Each feeds off the certainty, in the midst of all that baffles him about the world, that no one could be more wrong than his flatmate. Here’s a typical exchange between the two of them from series 6. Jeremy has just fallen in love again and Mark has discovered that his computer is broken and he’s lost everything on it despite being, as we hear his interior monologue say, ‘exactly the kind of person who backs up’:

  JEREMY: Hey.

  MARK: Bloody computer’s dead.

  JEREMY: Oh I’m so sorry! Oh that’s really dreadful for you – oh, come here.

  Jeremy hugs Mark.

  MARK: (Interior monologue) Ugh, hugging?

  JEREMY: Poor you!

  MARK: Are you okay? Is this … Ecstasy? You’re not getting into Ecstasy again, are you?

  JEREMY: I’m in love, Mark. With amazing Elena. I don’t want to tempt fate but I think everything’s going to be totally great forever.

  MARK: I’m pleased for you.

  JEREMY: You don’t understand, Mark. I’ve realised that everything’s just a substitute for being in love. Reading, running in the Olympics, getting a job, being a doctor. And I don’t need those substitutes any more. Elena is my one true soulmate.

  MARK: It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that out of the three billion adult women in the world, your one true soulmate happens conveniently to live in the same block of flats as you. Rather than, say, in a village in Mozambique.

  JEREMY: Who knows how these things happen? There are powers at work beyond our understanding.

  MARK: No there aren’t.

  JEREMY: What was it that Shakespeare said?

  MARK: He said a lot of things, Jeremy.

  In the first series, we filmed everything with mini-cameras strapped to our heads. Unfortunately, the footage was so poor that a lot of it wasn’t usable so we also filmed everything on a normal camera but with the actor whose POV the camera was aping reaching round the lens so that things could be picked up or put down or other characters’ hands shaken. This was incredibly fiddly and took a lot of time. For series 2, we came to the conclusion that a lot of things didn’t really need to be filmed on ‘headcam’ as well as by a normal camera. For series 3, the headcam was used, I think, once. We haven’t used it since.

  We filmed in a real flat, halfway up a tower block in Croydon, possibly the least convenient part of Greater London to get to from Kilburn. Croydon was chosen because the director of the first series liked the idea of setting a scene on a tram and Croydon is the only part of London with trams. Then Channel 4 told us not to set a scene on a tram as that would be weird because there are hardly any trams anywhere nowadays – mainly it’s Croydon and Vienna. So the tram plan was dropped but somehow the Croydon plan wasn’t, which was annoying. Sam and Jesse would have been just as happy setting it in Kilburn, which would have cumulatively saved me weeks in a car. Still, it wouldn’t have helped in my struggle to differentiate myself from Mark Corrigan.

  The flat was a fairly unpleasant working environment as, at any given moment, the whole crew had to be concealed in whichever room definitely wouldn’t be visible in the scene we were shooting – which was often the smallest. Watching the show play out in a bland empty flat unfilled by Mark and Jeremy’s bland empty lives, it’s weird to contemplate that there are perpetually about twenty people just out of shot.

  The scene in which Mark, very uncharacteristically, has sex with a seventeen-year-old he’s picked up at a bowling alley is precisely such a moment. In that apparently intimate bedroom, there were six or seven burly men hiding just out of sight, behind the camera and under the bed as I did my valiant sex faces, and yet more people – make-up, costume, director, writers, producer, props and art department – lurking right outside the door. In fact, that made it less embarrassing, as the ambiance was vastly different from the one we were trying to portray.

  I’d been dreading the sex scene. How much of my naked body would be on display? What if I got an erection? What if when I tried to look like I was having sex, everyone thought it was weird? How was I supposed to behave to this actress I hardly knew? Some of the crew discussed the scene as if I was suppo
sed to be looking forward to it, as if pretending to have sex was a bit like actually having sex, and this made me more uncomfortable still. I wouldn’t want to be rude to the actress by not looking keen, or rude to the actress by looking keen. It was a minefield.

  Fortunately, the point-of-view filming style came to my rescue. It turned out that, through the eyes of the characters, viewers would only really see heads and shoulders – that, in this world at least, the characters did look at the mantelpiece while stoking the fire. So it involved very little nudity and very little rolling around in bed with a stranger in front of colleagues. Largely, I looked into a camera lens and pulled funny faces. I was helped here by my character who, in seven series, has hardly ever had good sex. So I was supposed to look uncomfortable and worried, which I can do. It would be mortifying to have to pull a confident, aroused face.

  In that first series, I also had a love scene with Collie, who played Sophie, the object of Mark’s desire. They don’t have sex, they just roll around in bed for a bit before having to take Jeremy to hospital when he fakes an overdose. That was slightly less embarrassing as Collie and I knew each other well enough to frankly discuss how much we were both dreading the scene. We didn’t have to behave professionally about it. We were singing from the same hymn sheet. And the hymn was: Oh Lord, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.

  When the shoot ended, for Phil Clarke the greatest challenge began: making sense of the weird footage. In the edit, he discovered that parts of the show wouldn’t cut together. The grammar of this new way of filming hadn’t yet been fully worked out and Phil found himself desperately trying to make sentences without enough conjunctions or prepositions. The first editor was also a problem. I think he was a bit too arty and, according to Phil, the first cut of episode 1 was basically an indecipherable blur. He refused to show it to me or Rob as he thought we’d be too depressed.

  So a new editor had to be found, reshoots organised, and the money to pay for them extracted from Channel 4; and in general Channel 4 had to be mollified and stopped from panicking. This was made easier by the fact that our commissioning editor was Iain Morris (who has since co-written the brilliant sitcom The Inbetweeners). He understood the show, he loved the scripts and was determined, in the face of all our difficulties, not to lose heart. This in turn heartened the rest of us as, in the nine-month gap between the end of the shoot and the first broadcast of the show, we had ample time to wonder whether anyone would like or get this weird thing we were bringing to the screen.

  A lot of the time I wished that we could have done something more normal. I’d wanted to make an old-fashioned sitcom with a studio audience. I liked the ‘POV’ scripts very much but felt that the shooting style was a gimmick. Still, I reasoned, Rob and I were virtually unheard-of and so some sort of gimmick was needed as an excuse for giving us our own show.

  And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m now pleased that Peep Show has a distinctive filming style. I think it’s interesting, often helps the jokes and seldom hampers them. Basically though, I think the show succeeds in the same way as a conventional British sitcom. It’s about two people, with whom the audience can identify, trapped in a situation with which the audience can also identify. Like all of us, they want love, money, success, security. But they probably end up pepper-spraying more acquaintances, urinating in more churches and burning more dogs than most of us:

  JEREMY: There’s a hell of a lot of steam.

  MARK: Yeah. As it turns out, dogs do seem to be mostly water.

  JEREMY: (poking with a stick) It’s going a bit, just … not the legs.

  MARK: Put the legs back on in the middle – maybe it’ll burn better.

  JEREMY: Oh right! I have to put the legs back on? If you hadn’t refused to pay for firelighters it would have gone by now.

  MARK: You shouldn’t need firelighters to burn a dog, Jeremy!

  JEREMY: How would you know? Shit – it’s going out.

  Jeremy bends down, starts blowing at it.

  MARK: Look I’ve got to get my pitch sorted before I see Malcolm.

  JEREMY: We’ll have to bury it. Get the spade.

  MARK: What spade?

  JEREMY: You didn’t bring a spade?

  MARK: Do you think I’m some kind of freelance dog-murdering mafia man?

  JEREMY: Oh, great. So we’ve got no fire, no spade … we’ll just have to dig with our hands.

  Jeremy tries pathetically to dig a hole in the earth with his fingers and a stick.

  MARK: Jeremy. There are many things I would do to help you. But digging a hole in the wintry earth with my bare hands so that you can bury the corpse of a dog you killed is not one of them.

  Mark and Jeremy are caught between jeopardy and opportunity in the same way as Steptoe and Son, Tony Hancock, the various incarnations of Blackadder, Gary and Tony from Men Behaving Badly and David Brent. In many ways it’s a classic comedy masquerading as a ground-breaking one and, as a small ‘c’ conservative, I mean that as a compliment to the scripts, not a criticism.

  The extended interior monologues, when you can hear the characters’ thoughts, were a proper innovation in TV comedy and one that massively adds comic potential. Here are the thoughts that we hear going through Mark’s mind as he attempts his first-ever jog:

  MARK: (interior monologue) Hey, wow … I’m actually good at this. Maybe I’m a natural? Yeah, I’m a jogger! Of course, there had to be a sport for me! I just never realised – I’m a natural jogger! Feel the legs, like two great steam locomotives, pumping away. I’m Cram, I’m Ovett, I’m unstoppable, I’m – … Jesus, is that a stitch? I … fuck. I think I’m going to be sick. I’ve got to slow … I need to walk … Urgh. I think I’m going to puke. I am literally going to die. What an idiotic boob I was, back ten or eleven seconds ago.

  If you only saw what Mark did and heard what he said out loud, he wouldn’t be nearly so funny. He’s such a model of conventionality that you’d have comparatively little (just the occasional desk-pissing or stationery-cupboard-ejaculating incident) from which to infer his inner turmoil. As it is, his thoughts can be funny even when his behaviour is meekly shy or just normal. Mark partly came out of the character I’d been chalked down to play in All Day Breakfast (the show that Sam, Jesse, Rob and I wrote together, which never got made) who was called Phil. We’d found him harder to make funny than Conrad, Rob’s character on whom Jeremy was partly based, because he was so buttoned-up and controlled. But when you can hear the thoughts of such brittle pillars of the community as they begin to crumble inside, there’s a lot more potential for comedy.

  A world away from the concerns of two twenty-something men sharing a flat in Croydon was my home life: sharing a flat in Kilburn with another twenty-something man. In fact, one of the things that struck me when I first walked into Mark and Jeremy’s flat for filming was that it was slightly nicer than mine. Certainly anyone stumbling into my Kilburn residence could have been forgiven for thinking that I was a method actor who’d taken things a bit far (if that’s not a tautology).

  But Robbie Hudson and I get along a lot better than Mark and Jeremy. I own the flat and am an inept landlord who doesn’t know how to repair anything and finds even the process of contacting those who do very stressful. Things just go wrong in flats, it seems. All the time. It isn’t just the doorbell. Things that used to work – washing machines, boilers, lavatories, lights – just stop doing so, for no reason. It’s like a Microsoft application – except you can’t just turn a blocked sink off and on again. And apparently, if you own the flat, it becomes your fault and you have to sort it out. Well, I’m not very good with that but, in compensation, I don’t notice if the rent’s a bit late. I’m not saying Robbie ever pays his rent late – just that, if he had, I wouldn’t have noticed.

  Of course we have our differences. He likes the place to be clean but doesn’t mind a bit of clutter – whereas I’m not very fussy about cleanliness but do like things to be tidy. So we’ve compromised on neither o
f us getting his way.

  But mainly we have lots of things in common: we drink a lot of tea; we work from home most of the time; we take any opportunity to be distracted from work by something stupid on the internet; we enjoy mocking daytime TV while avidly consuming it. And, most of all, we both believe that, if you’re going to share a flat with someone for any significant length of time, you should never express annoyance. This principle, while it would hobble a sitcom, is vital to a calm life. It is so much easier to live with being annoyed by someone than to live with someone being annoyed by you: the first state is one of irritation, the second is a tyranny. So it’s much better to suck it up and never get cross while, in return, all the maddening things about you are reciprocally overlooked.

  We’ve had the occasional point of conflict, however. Robbie likes football, which I do not. During one international football tournament, he took to putting up England memorabilia around the flat. This was only to annoy me – he’s not a moron. There were flags on the fridge, lions on the windows, bunting along the bookshelves, etc. He was clearly trying to wind me up, but I rose above it. And, as I rose, so did the tide of memorabilia. More and more household items were decorated with England-liveried plastic, including a large poster of one of the players on my bedroom door. The flat looked like we were celebrating a sort of nationalistic version of Christmas. But the more there was, the more determined I became never to mention it. I knew he was trying to provoke me and reasoned that the most annoying thing I could say was nothing. In a conflict, you should always do what your opponent wants least. One day, all of the memorabilia was suddenly gone. We have never spoken of it. In fact, only if he reads this book will he know for sure that I noticed.

  And then there was the partial rent strike. It was over my failure to put in a shower. When we moved in, I promised I’d get a shower fitted and then did nothing about it as I had no idea where to begin. (Anyway, baths are fine.) Robbie would occasionally mention this. Then he would often mention this. I felt guilty. Then he said he was going to dock the rent he was paying until a shower materialised. I was very relieved by this strategy as it meant I no longer felt guilty. He wasn’t paying for the shower any more, so I wasn’t being unfair by not providing it. I was able to massively scale back my shower-procuring efforts.