David Mitchell: Back Story (29 page)

What became clear on the tour was that, at a lot of schools, we weren’t the ones pulling a scam. That was the teachers who booked us; they could take the afternoon off while we minded the kids and then, in the evening, had a bunch of new people to talk to in the pub. At a lot of isolated boarding schools, the presence of a few unfamiliar and articulate graduates was warmly welcomed by staff and we were often under intense pressure to get pissed with them. Pressure to which we yielded.

But we had to do a lot of these shows and, being as unprofessional as we were unpaid, the production slid swiftly from slick and entertaining to lazy and gabbled-through and bored. At some schools, if we were warmly welcomed and there was a nice theatre, we kept our shit together. But when we found ourselves in a drab, unwelcoming institution, it became harder to concentrate, especially if we were in front of pupils who were following the play in their textbooks as it went along – or at a place where, when a bell went for the end of the lesson, the half of the audience for whom this didn’t form part of a ‘double period’ would leave in the middle. Within a couple of minutes, they would be replaced with different kids, fresh from Maths or Geography, who were expected to watch the end of the play despite having no idea what was going on.

On days like that, our minds wandered and whole sections of the show would stall as some or all of us collapsed in fits of silent giggles. I remember the City of London School in particular because it had a pillar in the middle of the stage. The audience were just silent whatever we did. It was as if they were dead or getting on with other work. Once we started laughing there, in that eerie silence, it was really hard to stop. The tears came too – weird tears that were a mixture of crying with laughter and just crying. I remember a moment when Robert Thorogood was supposed to respond to some diatribe from Harpagon but couldn’t and just stood there for minutes on end, wheezing and shaking and watering from the eyes, before muttering nonsensically, ‘I’m as happy as Larry,’ and exiting.

But the biggest nightly crisis for the show was just before the end. I had to come on in the last scene as a character who hadn’t yet appeared in the play, Signior Anselme. He’s the
deus ex machina
who miraculously solves everything at the end. This involved a complete costume change for me. Most of the parts I played were servants, but Signior Anselme is an authority figure so my costume was a rather nice cream suit and a silk bow-tie. Not a made-up bow-tie but one you had to tie.

I’m okay at doing that. It takes me a couple of minutes but I can fairly reliably make it into something bow-tie shaped. At the age of 22 I was still proud of my bow-tying skill and so, even when I realised that there wouldn’t be a mirror in the wings where I’d be doing my quick change, I didn’t suggest getting a clip-on as backup. ‘I can do it by feel,’ I thought.

The problem was that I never knew the extent to which I was right about that, because I couldn’t see the state of the object that was under my chin when I walked on stage. This was a very unfair position to put my already giggly fellow performers in, night after night. ‘What will it be tonight?’ they must have been wondering just before they turned to face me. ‘What insane, lop-sided, unravelling knot, what weird lump or clod of cloth, will be lodged under David’s chin unbeknownst to him as he comes on with the placid face of the character who’s about to resolve the plot?’

Soon it didn’t matter what the tie looked like – they’d still laugh. If it was a disaster, as misshapen as a
Generation Game
contestant’s first attempt at a pretzel, that would be hilarious. If it was basically okay but a bit wrong on one side, that would be hilarious. If it was totally fine then that would be even more hilarious because it would make a mockery of all their giggling speculation about something disastrous: it would be a hilarious anticlimax. There was actually nothing funnier, they discovered, than me appearing placidly from the wings in a normal-looking tie. The moment had gone toxic.

The afternoon which my bladder has just reminded me about was at a very posh girls’ school where we were performing in a brightly lit hall rather than a theatre. It was an uninspiring institution – clearly very focused on academe and discipline, to the extent that the spirit seemed to have been driven out of pupils and teachers alike. It was a joyless environment and so we were gigglier than ever.

I don’t know what my bow-tie looked like when I walked on stage that day but Collie laughed so much she pissed herself. There and then. On the stage. Some muscle relaxed and wee was suddenly pouring down her legs into her shoes, which soon overflowed as her feet were already in them. The piss progressed speedily down the, we now realised, slightly raked stage. It’s amazing how much piss there is when someone pisses themselves – in the same way, I suppose, that it’s amazing how much water there is when you knock over a glass of water. Liquids really do cover a very large area when freed from restraining glasses or bladders. And, as she pissed, she continued laughing. We all continued laughing, in our bodies, mouths and face – but no longer our eyes, which had gone wide and desperate. All four of us were in a massed spasm of public humiliation from which we couldn’t escape.

Collie was the first to recover herself – possibly as a result of finishing her wee. She promptly said her exit line and left to tidy herself up at just the moment that the puddle reached the lip of the stage and started dripping down in front of Row A’s studious faces. Those pupils were so brainwashed, I don’t even remember them reacting. We might as well have been touring North Korea.

I’m a comedian but that’s the only time, to my knowledge, that I’ve ever made anyone piss themselves laughing. And it was not deliberate. After the show, we hastily left – aware that, as a company, we were now both taking and leaving the piss.

Our run at the Etcetera garnered a three-star review from
Time Out
from which we extracted the quotation: ‘real comic talent’. The night after it was published our audience numbers leapt up into the low twenties. But they were soon back to the high single figures that guaranteed a feeling of embarrassment, of having made a mistake, among the people who’d come, but didn’t justify cancelling the performance. For that, we felt, the audience had to be outnumbered.

Rob got an agent out of it, though: Michele Milburn, then of Amanda Howard Associates. I tried to be pleased for him – I made all the right congratulatory noises. And I salved my feelings of inadequacy with the thought that he’d been out in the world a year longer than me and he’d had the main part in the play. But it was a very unsettling feeling. An agent on the lookout for the likes of me had pointedly asked Rob but not me to be a client. Once again, I was convinced that he was about to be swept off to BBC Two, leaving me alone in the wilderness.

The news that a different agent had signed up both Robert Thorogood and Collie didn’t improve my self-esteem. Maybe I was just talentless, I thought in dark moments. But then I’d turn on the television, watch a few minutes of primetime and remind myself that talentlessness was no barrier to success. So, maybe it was worse than that – maybe I was unlucky. Still, if my career was going badly, I had my absorbing hobbies and fulfilling love life to fall back on.

DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE!? No, all I had to fall back or forwards on, all that I gleaned any self-esteem from, was my career/hobby. The supportive group of friends in Swiss Cottage were entirely derived from that, as was my key friendship with Rob. So it was either all going well or all going badly.

My parents were very supportive, as ever, but they didn’t really know how to help and I didn’t want to explain to them the feelings of foolishness and doubt I was labouring under. I wanted them to think I had things under control. Whenever I was in a show, they would come along and, knowing that we were desperate to sell tickets, they’d try and persuade their friends to come as well. For more than one London fringe show, they hired a minibus so that they could ferry over a dozen of their friends and colleagues from Oxford to the show and back again.

My parents were used to the edgy material and flaky production values of shows involving Rob and me. What their friends, more used to a professionally produced Ayckbourn at the Oxford Playhouse, must have thought, I dread to think. But the friends were universally enthusiastic, supportive and complimentary and I’m very grateful to them for coming – and even more so to my parents for jeopardising so many of their friendships in order to help me. But of course, this help was also a sign of worry. I remember them saying in Edinburgh one year, probably after I’d been foul to them and then asked to borrow money, that they’d completely support me if I decided the whole comedy thing wasn’t working out and I wanted to ‘change course’.

It made me laugh at the time because I knew they would. They’re the most wonderful, unquestioningly loving people I know. I think they’d support me if I said I wanted to set up as a drug dealer. (At times, they may have thought that’s what I was.) And the fact that they’d support me to try and do comedy meant that they’d
definitely
support me in a more prudent path. But it didn’t take me long to realise that it was a very kind and gentle way of expressing concern, of intimating, in the face of my pride and brittleness, that they knew I had worries, wasn’t altogether happy and was afraid about how things might turn out.

As I prepared for Edinburgh in 1997, failure felt both unthinkable and inevitable. There’s a lot of crossover between those two qualities – probably because there’s not much point in thinking about the inevitable. That’s my view, at least – I would never have made much of a philosopher or priest.

I tried to suppress the panic I felt whenever Rob had to go off for an audition or a meeting or to have photos taken. Those trappings of an actor’s career properly starting were terrifying, so best not contemplated. I just had to hope that something would come out of that year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where we were doing two shows: a rewritten version of
Innocent Millions
and, as I mentioned before, a production of the Stephen Fry play,
Latin!
To save money, we didn’t hire a flat of our own to stay in but slept on the floor of Rob’s girlfriend Leila’s brother’s friend’s living room.

Latin!
was a success. I think it was a good production and Rob and I played our parts well, but most of the credit should go to Stephen Fry for the very funny script he’d written nearly two decades earlier and for the draw of his name. But we enjoyed good reviews, packed houses and, most excitingly of all, an answerphone message of support left on Christopher Richardson’s voicemail by Fry himself. We were fucking thrilled. I know there is considerable televisual evidence that I have both met and worked with Stephen Fry lots of times, but that was all years ahead of me at this stage – so being in a show he knew about and was enthusiastic about was a crumb of affirmation on which I feasted.

The fact that
Latin!
was a hot ticket that year had surprisingly little knock-on effect on sales for
Innocent Millions
. But then the play-watching, Radio 4-listening Stephen Fry fans attracted by
Latin!
probably weren’t in the market for new comedy from the unheard-of, especially when they’d already seen them in one show and were in the perfect place to watch new comedy by the very-much-heard-of. Rob and I, as history attests, weren’t even soon-to-be-heard-of in 1997, unlike for example that year’s Perrier Award winners, The League of Gentlemen.

The other thing
Latin!
audiences, and Edinburgh punters in general, weren’t really in the market for was a show that started at 11 in the morning. Neither were we, of course, but it was the only slot the Pleasance offered us. And, we reckoned, peering for the bright side with the desperate super-luminosensitive eyes of deep-sea fish, we wouldn’t be up against any of the big shows.

Well, that was certainly true. All we were up against were children’s shows and the noise of cleaners hosing the previous night’s beer and sick off the cobbles of the Pleasance courtyard. At the Edinburgh Fringe, 11am is like dawn. The early birds might see it as they’re brushing their teeth but they’re not out doing anything yet. Our venue seated up to 100. On the night – sorry, force of habit, morning – when the all-important
Scotsman
reviewer came, the audience numbered only two. And he was one of them.

Well, just like a Hollywood film, from the jaws of misery, failure and disappointment, through hard work alone, we were able to snatch a small, muted success. You’ve seen Hollywood films like that, yeah? Imagine the strapline: ‘It could have been a disaster, but in fact it went okay.’ The
Scotsman
review was a warm three-starrer, Rob’s agent Michele Milburn liked my performance in the show and asked me to come in for a meeting in London after the Fringe, and two influential men came and saw the show.

Yes, it was Bernard Ingham and Gore Vidal! No. Perhaps ‘influential men’ is the wrong way of putting it. They were influential on our lives and they had a small measure of influence in the world that could help us. The first was Nick Jones, a TV director who ‘was putting together a sketch show for the BBC’. It’s a measure of how little we knew that we didn’t know how little that meant. But he had some business cards with ‘BBC’ written on them. Unfortunately they didn’t also have ‘Nick Jones’ written on them, which was disappointing. He was still waiting for his cards to be printed up, he explained, as he scribbled his name and number on one of the nameless ones.

Sounds like a confidence trickster, you’re probably thinking. Our reasoning at the time was that a confidence trickster would have got cards properly printed up. But we couldn’t deny the possibility that he was an inept confidence trickster. Still, since no one who had both the BBC’s name
and
their own on a piece of card was showing any interest in conversing with us, we decided to send him some material and hope something came of it.