David Mitchell: Back Story (19 page)

I drank a lot of wine. For the first time in my life, it was really going down a treat. That horrid sour drink had become delicious. I wanted to guzzle it – now a sensation I’m all too familiar with. I suppose we must all have got a bit tipsy but I’m pretty sure I was further gone than the others. I only became aware of the situation on the way to the loo: I noticed that the corridor had become slightly difficult to negotiate. I was swaying, like someone drunk in a film. It was weird, unsettling, basically unpleasant – but, at the same time, I was thrilled that it had finally happened to me. I was experiencing in real life something I’d previously only known from fiction – it was like seeing a white Christmas or someone ripping off the end of a cigar with their teeth.

I also felt embarrassed. I hadn’t behaved as responsibly or maturely as people might have expected. In a tiny way, I’d been stereotypically teenage and, in a stereotypically teenage way, I was ashamed of myself. So after an awkward swaying piss and a careful journey back to the living room, I tried to act as sober as possible. Yet somehow, while doing a gesture to illustrate some remark, I managed to break a plate. I was unmasked. I sat with a guilty expression, quietly burping. My friends observed the state to which I’d reduced myself with sage, judgemental looks that ill concealed their glee.

The next day, I had my first sensation of wondering how much of a fool I’d made of myself. That’s so often the strongest feeling after you’ve got pissed – worse than the hangover. You’re seldom convinced that you were a tit, you’re just not convinced you weren’t. You feel the urge to make phone calls to test the water. You hope that you can determine whether you should be embarrassed and apologetic by the tone of voice with which your call is answered. You think they’re unlikely to sound offended – but it’s a warning sign if they sound amused.

Of course I also had my first hangover, which I didn’t realise was a hangover as my expectations of what one would be like were solely informed by Alka Seltzer adverts. What I know now but didn’t then is that you often don’t get the bad headache they illustrated, just an overall feeling of unease, clumsiness and delicacy.

The stomach is usually more upset than the head, which Alka Seltzer failed to mention – largely because, if your stomach’s feeling peaky, the last thing you want is Alka Seltzer, a horrible salty fizzy drink. Its pain-killing powers are dwarfed by the massive downside of taking on a gallon of stomach-troubling slosh. So, at the time, I was relieved to escape the dreaded hangover but puzzled to coincidentally have no appetite and crave water. It’s not much to be proud of, managing to get drunk for the first time. But, like mumps, I was glad to get it out of the way.

I’m just leaving Regent’s Park now. On a bench near the gate, there’s a tramp swigging from a can of Special Brew. Now there’s someone whose first experience of alcohol probably wasn’t swiftly followed by the offer of work at Oxford University Press. I wonder if he got into booze under pressure from his parents to stop watching
Blackadder
and develop a social life? I wonder if they were half glad, the first couple of times he threw up in public, that he was beginning to live a little?

I wonder if they nagged him into taking an interrailing trip round Europe so that his gap year wouldn’t be entirely frittered away doing clerical work for £4.50 an hour? I wonder if he sat nervously in beautiful squares in Florence, eating supermarket sandwiches and worrying about wasps, utterly oblivious to all the opportunities of high- and low-brow fun that lay around him? I wonder if he dutifully got up from youth hostel beds at eight in the morning to trudge round museums and galleries, bored out of his mind but feeling ashamed of that boredom? I wonder if his terror of running out of money while away from home prevented him from buying more than tiny amounts of horrible cheap food, while salivating as he passed restaurants? I wonder if he worried about how much more life frightened him than excited him, about how he longed to take refuge in things he knew? Did he feel inadequate at the thought of contemporaries who’d travelled to the Third World to build schools and get off with one another, thus rubbing his nose in his own encumbrance with shyness and fear? Did he return home from this holiday in Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna and Prague just hugely relieved that it was over and looking forward to eating beans on toast and watching
Telly Addicts
?

Probably not, that would be a bit too much of a coincidence. I walk out of the park and continue heading south.

- 18 -

Enthusiasm in Basements

I hope I don’t bump into Michael Palin. I don’t know why I would, but it’s always possible. He might be standing at a bus stop. Or browsing in a shop window. I hope he isn’t.

I feel bad about saying that. And thinking it. I was once having a conversation about who was the worst person to bump into on holiday, to find staying at your hotel, and I concluded that, for me, it would be Michael Palin. Not Hitler. Not my worst enemy. Lovely Michael Palin.

This was my reasoning: first of all, on holiday, you don’t really want to bump into anyone unexpected at all. You want to spend time with the person or people you’re holidaying with – so bumping into anyone is bad news. I appreciate that this is a misanthropic attitude and I’m sorry about that but it’s how I feel. I actually like people, in lots of cases, and want to spend time with them. In a
planned
way – I’m not up for chance encounters.

There are various sorts of chance encounter I dismissed before deciding Palin would be worst. For example, there’s that category of acquaintance you’re tempted to ignore when you pass them in the street. Not because you don’t like them or hardly know them but because you know them to just the wrong and annoying extent. You’re not really friends, but you know them well enough for acknowledging them to necessitate a ‘catch-up’. You have to go through the whole ‘My God, how are
you
!?’ pantomime, as if the fact that you’re not often in touch has been a tremendous and regrettable lapse rather than a tacit agreement.

Don’t get me wrong: I know the world is basically a better place for these pleasantries and I wouldn’t want to live without such lubricating hypocrisy, but it’s just sometimes easier, when you spot someone whose level of acquaintanceship with you is in this category, to pretend not to see them. They may well be doing the same and I don’t think that makes either person evil – just not particularly warm. And there are genuinely warm people – my mother, for example – who like to have such passing catch-ups with people they would never otherwise think about. They enjoy those little purposeless chats, the moment of human interaction and contact. Such people, I freely admit, are better than I am. But I won’t become one by pretending.

Now, on holiday, almost anyone unexpected falls into this category. If you met a real bosom buddy, which is unlikely because you’d probably know the holiday plans of anyone that close, it might be okay. You could have a meal together one evening and otherwise continue with your plans. But everyone else is trouble. The oddness of the circumstances would be so unavoidably worthy of remark that you’d have to chat fully with people you’d barely speak to in the context that you know them from: ‘Oh my God, you work in that shop round the corner from me, I see you there a lot, we’ve never exchanged more than a nod and now you’re in exactly the same Portuguese hotel and it’s so weird we have to say hi and chat for a bit – and because we’re beside a swimming pool we’ve now seen much more of each other’s naked flesh than either of us is comfortable with. Hooray!’ The ‘My God, how are
you
!?’ hypocrisy levels are sky high.

So it would be worse to bump into someone you’re neutral about than someone you hate. In the latter case, you’d have to assume the hatred went both ways and you’d naturally avoid each other on the beach, in the restaurant and going round the interesting local church. If you hate them and they
don’t
hate you, just behave like an arsehole when they say hello and you’ve killed two birds with one stone.

Back to Michael Palin. For me, he’s the nightmare scenario: someone I massively admire and would feel incredibly self-conscious in front of. It would ruin the holiday. A different sort of person would love it: they’d think, ‘What a great opportunity to become friends with my hero Michael Palin!’ and merrily set about ruining Palin’s trip. I’m no such optimist. Why should Michael Palin want to be friends with me? I’m sure he has enough friends. And so do I, actually. How would Palin–Mitchell socialising work? He’s much older than me. He’s a big star. What would we do? Would I go round to his house and play board games? Would we go to the cinema? Would I hold dinner parties for all my university friends and Michael Palin as well, sitting in the corner being exactly, uncannily, off-puttingly like Michael Palin and making everyone worried about their table manners?

As things stand, I get to enjoy Michael Palin’s work while satisfying my friendship needs with people who aren’t part of the Monty Python team. Knowing him won’t make
The Life of Brian
any funnier – in fact, if familiarity breeds contempt, it might make it less so. What a disaster that would be! I’d lose the pleasure I derive from some of the most brilliant comedy ever made, and get saddled with a friend my parents’ age who makes me feel self-conscious. Perhaps you begin to understand why the Michael Palin encounter would be my holiday hell – and I’d get no help from the British consul.

Or you might be wondering why I can’t just ignore Michael Palin on this theoretical Portuguese beach. Not an option.

Perhaps I should explain that I have met Michael Palin before. I was in the pub in Kilburn with my friend Toby, on an ordinary Saturday night about four years ago. I was unshaven and greasy-haired – I was getting pissed at my local, which felt like an extension of my living room. I didn’t feel like I was ‘out in public’ – I was probably comfortable enough to scratch my balls without thinking about it – when suddenly Michael Palin walked into the pub, came up to me and introduced himself.

Can you imagine how weird that was? There was no seeing him across the room and hoarsely whispering:

‘Is that Michael Palin or just someone who looks like him?’

‘I think it’s him – maybe you should say hello? You’re on TV.’

‘No! That would be really annoying of me – he won’t want to be pestered by fans. Besides I’m not presentable and I keep scratching my balls!’

Toby and I had no such opportunity. Instead we got an instant ‘Hello, I’m Michael Palin – I’ve seen you in
Jam and Jerusalem
, which I really enjoyed.’ Or something like that – something nice. He definitely said ‘Michael Palin’. I heard Michael Palin say ‘Michael Palin’, live in the Black Lion in Kilburn.

And of course being a weird, shy and socially maladroit fan, I don’t think I was very nice to Michael Palin. I wasn’t rude – I was just quiet. I said hello, I introduced Toby, and Michael Palin went away to sit with his friends while I interrogated the part of my brain that seemed to think Michael Palin would have minded if I’d said, ‘I’m a huge admirer of your work.’ Exactly how had I come to the conclusion that this remark could wait for the next time Michael Palin came up to me in the pub? Obviously I was thrilled and amazed – one of my biggest comedy heroes had recognised me and said hello. Yet the thrill and amazement was dwarfed by shame at having dealt with the situation so poorly. So I was left with the strong net feeling that I’d rather the whole thing hadn’t happened. But at least I wasn’t wearing trunks and trying to drink out of a coconut.

I’ve met Michael Palin again since, in the building I’m just passing now: BBC Broadcasting House, at the bottom of Portland Place. That’s probably why I’m jumpy about bumping into him again. We were both on an episode of
Loose Ends
. This encounter went much better, I’m relieved to say. But then I was ready for him. Broadcasting House is the sort of place where you expect to meet people, where you don’t go without having your shit together. So, having managed to give a reasonable account of myself with Michael Palin at last, why on earth would I want to bump into him under a palm tree and cock it up again?

In a tweedy way, there’s something momentous and sacred about BBC Radio Comedy. It’s a world in which new performers and writers, aspirant and broke, desperate to turn promising Edinburgh Fringes into ways to pay the rent, are thrust together with some of the grand old men of comedy. Never is this more apparent than at the BBC Radio Comedy Christmas party. The tatty clothes of the skint and keen are punctuated by the occasional gleaming blazer of the likes of Nicholas Parsons or Barry Cryer.

There’s a sense of amazing continuity – that an unbroken tradition from the days of
It’s That Man Again
, through
The Goon Show
and
Round the Horne
, into the era of the three great and surviving radio panel shows,
Just a Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
and
The News Quiz
and taking in brilliant shows like
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and
On the Hour
, is still alive here. There’s a bookishness alongside a sense of possibility. This is a place where pipe-smoking and ale-drinking sit alongside surrealism and satire – a perfect environment for a conservative who thinks the world needs to change. I love working in radio: it’s quick, you don’t have to learn your lines, they always give you sandwiches and you’re encouraged to go to the pub afterwards. I feel I belong there, and I’m proud of that feeling.

But that’s not how I felt when I first entered Broadcasting House as a keen undergraduate on a day trip to London. James Bachman, who had already graduated, took Matthew Holness and me to a
Week Ending
non-commissioned writers’ meeting. This was in a basement ‘Writers’ Room’ which, in 1996, was still equipped with typewriters. The three of us sat quietly in a corner as a harassed and tubby script editor or producer, wearing round glasses and a bright waistcoat, went through the news stories they were looking for sketches about, while a handful of braying smart alecks chipped in and announced their writing intentions.