David Mitchell: Back Story (20 page)

It was not a happy atmosphere, probably because we all knew that we were the bottom of the heap – most of the material would come from the commissioned writers who had already been briefed and had taken the juiciest stories. They were on the princely retainer of £50 a week and were gods to us. In the non-commissioned writers’ room, it was intimidating to be a newbie, shouted down by older hands, conscious of how hard it was to get noticed even by one tiny satirical radio show. But it was worse to be an old hand, because there was really no excuse for not having become a commissioned writer by now. Anyone who’d been going to those meetings for more than a couple of years was officially deemed to have failed. And I have to say, from what I heard of the ideas they loudly chipped in with, rightly so.

But it’s no good getting lost in reveries about Broadcasting House. I have to plan what I’ll say if I bump into Michael Palin. Be prepared, as I didn’t learn in the cubs. I managed to say that I admired his work when I saw him at
Loose Ends
, but I probably shouldn’t just say that every time I see him. I need something else, possibly urgently. As I turn down Regent Street, I’m amazed by the number of people who, from a distance, could be Michael Palin. It’s crowded; he could come at me from nowhere. By the time he was close enough for me to be sure, it would be too late to plan. That’s one of the many ways in which Michael Palin differs from Mr Blobby.

Maybe I’d tell Michael Palin about having to play a dancing girl at Mr Fezziwig’s party. He, of all people, might be sympathetic. Michael Palin’s first stage role was Martha Cratchit, daughter of Scrooge’s hapless clerk. He played her at primary school in Sheffield, I’ve read.

But he was only five and I was ten. Maybe at five it wouldn’t have been so embarrassing to cross-dress and look exactly like a girl? Or maybe Palin’s masculinity shone through? I’d hate to try and swap stories about our shared misery only to find that he loved it, and thus my attempt to bond over common ground with Michael Palin would actually result in the exact opposite. He’d walk away thinking I was weird and incomprehensible.

Also, I reckon Martha Cratchit’s a better part than Dancing Girl. I bet he had lines. At five! He was a prodigy – he was six years younger than I was when I was finally trusted with ‘Vespasian, centurion’, which I reckon Palin would have made more of and was also, when I think about it, slightly embarrassingly
Life of Brian
-ey. Thanks, Mr Roberts! Way to make me look like a dick in front of Michael Palin! Yes, it would definitely be better not to bump into him.

Michael Palin’s first comedy experience at university was, I’ve also read, performing sketches at a Christmas party. That means he waited weeks, months before trying to break into the performing scene at college. Not me; I went to fifteen auditions in my first weekend.

Yes: following some successful A-level results and an interview, I discovered halfway through my gap year that I’d got into Cambridge. I’d decided to apply there instead of Oxford because, having left school, it struck me as a good idea to spread my wings a little and get away from the place where I grew up – albeit only to somewhere unbelievably similar.

Getting in felt like more of a relief than a triumph. By then, I’d managed to persuade myself that, after all the years of obsessing about exams, not to get to Oxbridge would be a disastrous failure. Ridiculous though this view is, I felt it sufficiently strongly that, psychologically, I’d probably made it true and, had I not got to Cambridge, I would have slunk to whatever other perfectly good university had admitted me with an irreversible sense of defeat. Or perhaps I would have been stung by the rejection into intense hard work and made billions out of a dotcom. Nevertheless, my overwhelming emotion was of having averted a disaster – which, if anything, feels better than a triumph.

When I arrived at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in October 1993 it was time for Phase 2 of my plan: reject academe and get stuck into drama immediately. (If my admissions tutor is reading this, I’m sorry. It’s Oxford I was angry with. But I couldn’t take it out on them, because they hadn’t let me in.)

The two largest drama societies in Cambridge, the Amateur Dramatic Club and Footlights, both held Freshers’ week ‘squashes’ – the Cambridge name for drinks dos aimed at attracting new members. (Cambridge University has lots of its own words for things that there are perfectly good words for in wider circulation. This is one of the ways in which Cambridge University is like sailors.) The Footlights squash was held in its clubroom – a dark, damp, spider-infested room in the Union Society cellars, which had been expensively decorated to the height of fashion in 1978.

As soon as I arrived, I was offered a drink: ‘There’s red or white wine – I’m afraid the lager’s just run out.’ The significance of that remark was lost on me at the time – more of that later. I joined Footlights; it seemed you didn’t have to audition to be a member, just pay a fiver. However, you did have to audition to be in any of the shows or ‘smokers’ (late-night cabaret evenings). The next show was the Christmas pantomime – I made a note of when and where to audition and then attempted, in a shy 18-year-old way, to ‘work the room’. This involved walking round the room without talking to anyone in it. Finally I managed to introduce myself to Dan Mazer, later producer of
Ali G Indahouse
, at that point Footlights vice-president and in his third year at Peterhouse, the same college as me. We had an awkward chat and then I left.

At the Amateur Dramatic Club squash, people were more helpful and welcoming, in a way that immediately made me think less of the institution. I’m not proud of that but there’s no doubt Footlights’ shabby standoffishness, coupled with its fame, projected greater cachet than the ADC’s inclusive efficiency. The ADC welcomed those keen on any and every element of theatre production: not just acting and writing but all the boring ones as well. In fact, those seemed to be the priority, possibly because the ADC had its own theatre and so was very focused on everything you could do with and in it: lighting, set-building, publicity, front of house, costume, make-up, etc. I was slightly put off by all that. But what I was much more put off by was the fact that, scandalisingly, one of the committee members, a student only two years older than me, had a baby – her own baby – which she was sort of wielding like it was the most natural thing in the world. I reckoned that meant she’d definitely had sex.

Keeping on the opposite side of the room from the girl with the baby, I finally managed to ask someone wearing an authoritative T-shirt about acting and how to get involved.

‘The standard,’ I was told, ‘is incredibly high.’ (This was a lie.) ‘You probably won’t get a part in anything in your first year – certainly not in your first term – but you should audition for everything to give yourself a chance.’

Everything. Right.

‘Alternatively, if you’d like to learn lighting design, we’ve got people who can teach you.’

I did not want to learn lighting design. Undaunted by this evidence of widespread electricity, drill, hammer and penis use in Cambridge drama, I decided to audition for everything.

Play auditions at Cambridge, in my day at least, were all advertised in
Varsity
, the student newspaper, and always happened at the weekend so that even students who had lectures all day every day of the week (scientists, basically) could still audition. (Obviously, they’d hardly be able to make any of the rehearsals but that issue was glossed over. Throughout my time at Cambridge, the acting and writing scene was dominated by people reading for arts and humanities degrees because our workload was so much lighter than the scientists’. Those who read Natural Sciences or Medicine practically had full-time jobs, while all I had to attend was one weekly supervision for which, strictly speaking, I had to write one weekly essay although I usually didn’t. All lectures were voluntary and I didn’t go to a single one after week four of my first term. So there was lots of time for messing around in plays.)

The first weekend of the Michaelmas (autumn) term was the busiest of the year for auditions. In any given week, there are several student shows on at Cambridge University, not just at the ADC Theatre but in many of the colleges: Trinity, Queens’, Robinson, Peterhouse, Christ’s, Corpus Christi and St John’s all had serviceable performance spaces. In the first weekend, when they cast many of the plays for the whole term, there were more auditions than one person could physically go to. I managed to get to 15 and learned a fair bit about Cambridge geography in the process.

Walking around that beautiful city on a sunny autumn weekend, I was properly excited. I loved where I was, I was relieved to be allowed to be there and, for the first time, I seemed to be in possession of some of the energy and enthusiasm I’d previously associated with people who went bungee jumping in Thailand. The mist of puberty was lifting and things were beginning to seem possible.

The auditions were held in a wide range of venues – some were in newer college buildings and felt municipal and drab. But many were in old college rooms with dusty medieval staircases, up which you would queue for your chance to be in some pseud’s production of
The Changeling
while looking at shabby old posters for previous productions.

These were first-round auditions. Outside the room would be photocopied sheets of speeches to prepare (not necessarily anything from the play you were auditioning for – this stage was a general trawl for acting talent). You’d practise the speech in the queue outside – there seemed to be loads of people auditioning for all of these productions, although I noticed some recurring faces, from which I inferred that I wasn’t the only one doing the rounds. When your time came, you’d go in, give your name and college, read the piece out, get told to do it differently, read it out again with that in mind and leave. It was all done with the seriousness and self-conscious professionalism that only enthusiastic amateurs ever possess. A couple of days later, a list would be posted on the noticeboard of the ADC Clubroom of those invited to a ‘recall’ audition. Of those, less than half would be cast.

Everyone involved in this process was a student. There were no grown-ups. You can’t read drama at Cambridge, so it’s only ever something people do alongside their degrees, as a hobby. This is a brilliant system as it prevents anyone in a teaching capacity from interfering – from saying there’s a right way and a wrong way of putting on a play. You get to learn by experience, from your mistakes, from each other and from each other’s mistakes. And the main thing you learn from this whole process is how much entertaining people, telling them a story, moving them, making them laugh, is about instinct and luck. Those who succeed are, in general, those who don’t let the failures or the successes turn their heads too much, and who keep at it.

The audition I was most excited about, and felt I had the least chance of succeeding in, was for the Footlights pantomime,
Cinderella
. As a comedy-obsessed teenager, I’d obviously heard of Footlights. It was the club of which so many of the comedians I admired seemed to have been members: Peter Cook, John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry – these were the brightest stars in the firmament but, like a night sky in the countryside, the more you looked, the more stars you saw: writers like Michael Frayn and Clive James; producers like David Hatch, John Lloyd and Jonathan James Moore; directors like Jonathan Miller and Trevor Nunn; actors like Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes and Simon Jones; Cecil Beaton, Germaine Greer, Bill Oddie, Julian Slade. The more you found out, the more Footlights seemed to be behind about half of the stuff worth paying attention to.

And there was something intriguing about that clubroom. I mean, it was horrible. It stank of stale beer. It was unpleasantly dark, but it would have been worse if you could see into the corners. Getting in involved a long walk through the union cellars, down a corridor so narrow it felt like it had been hewn out of the earth by Morlocks and as weirdly, frighteningly and garishly painted as a punk’s squat. But I’d noticed there were posters on the wall of shows that looked old and significant, and photographs of famous people sporting haircuts from the era preceding that of their breakthrough.

The director of the pantomime wasn’t present at the first-round audition – it was left to Footlights committee members to separate the wheat from the chaff. I auditioned in front of the two vice-presidents, Dan Mazer and James Bachman. I read out an Alan Bennett monologue in which a man is speaking on the phone, trying to arrange for a saucy telegram to be sent to his girlfriend. What James told me later is that, just before I came in, Dan had groaned, ‘Oh no, here comes that keen one.’

That interests me. First because it gives an insight into my own uncool naïvety – that in one conversation with Dan at the squash, in which I was just attempting to be appropriately enthusiastic and upbeat as minor public schoolboys are trained to do, I’d transmitted a desperate and unattractive keenness. They were looking for people who were keen, presumably. But I had obviously seemed keen in a way that, in Dan’s view, almost precluded my also being funny.

And it also interests me that such a category of people exists at all – that we go beyond the insight that enthusiasm is no guarantee of talent to the conclusion that it actually makes talent less likely, and indeed that a snooty take-it-or-leave-it standoffishness suggests you’re likely to be hot stuff. It’s a sort of Groucho Marx perversity: like the club who’ll accept him as a member, my enthusiasm was somehow repellent. If Dan had felt he had to court my enthusiasm for Footlights, he’d probably have found it easier to believe I might show promise.

I don’t mean to criticise the 21-year-old Mazer here. I’m just using him as an example of how pervasive is our culture’s attraction to cool and sangfroid. I was guilty of it myself when I found the unfriendly Footlights squash more attractive than the more open ADC one – I was almost
directly
conforming to the Groucho quote there. But, for all that I’m susceptible to it, it’s a phenomenon I hate. I hate cool. I’m impatient with disingenuous affectations of having better things to do, being untroubled, being an unflappable presence disdainfully moving through the world. What’s particularly daft is that people who affect such an attitude are often incredibly fashionably dressed, giving the lie to their claims of immunity to a desire to be included. I prefer less hypocritical expressions of human frailty, where saying things like ‘Yes I’d be really keen to get involved in your comedy club’ doesn’t immediately get you marked down as a cunt.