David Mitchell: Back Story (34 page)

But readings were the vogue in the early 2000s and, with
Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness
, it was felt that extra effort would be needed to get commissioners to see its potential. So David and Geoff decided to stage it. They hired a fringe theatre, the Latchmere in Battersea, for a couple of nights and put on a version of it, with Rob and me playing all the characters, and lots of the frenetic cross-dressing that had been the hallmark of our Edinburgh shows.

This was all planned considerably in advance and the BBC’s comedy commissioner was due to come on the second night. Sadly, a few weeks before the show, she resigned and took a job at Channel 4, and her deputy was promoted to the job. This was bad news. When a commissioner leaves, all the projects they were developing are tainted in the eyes of their successor. ‘I won’t get any credit if that idea is a success – I need to be developing my own projects,’ they usually think. So, if the commissioner who is your advocate, or even the person who’s been giving you a sceptical hearing, changes jobs, there’s a big chance your idea will be shelved. But we decided to go ahead as, if the deputy was enthused by the show, there was still a chance he’d feel ‘ownership’ of it and would push it forwards himself.

The show was well received on both nights. Afterwards, David, Geoff, Rob and I sat in the pub under the theatre to chat to the new commissioner. The first words said about the show were from his deputy: ‘How on earth do you learn all those lines?’

Terrific, I thought. That’s damning with faint praise if ever I heard it – and now I have to think of an answer more polite than: ‘Because it’s my job – how on earth do you remember to go to all those meetings?’ They treated the show as an amusing entertainment they were coincidentally going to and had enjoyed – not a pitch that had been put on at their express request. They also said, and this made my already boiling blood create a weird ‘haemo-vapour’ which came out of my mouth in scarlet burps, that it seemed a bit too theatrical. Having just spent the past week converting a TV script for suitability to the stage, this was bitterly annoying. Two weeks after that show, the new commissioner left the BBC to join his former chief at Channel 4.
His
former deputy, the one who’d been impressed with the line learning, took the job and
Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness
was never heard of again.

The only show we were able to get off the ground in the first couple of years of what was becoming a frustrating millennium was for a cable channel, UK Play, which then rebranded to Play UK (for which change – and it is always important to remember this – someone was paid money) before closing down. One of the decisions it made on its journey towards unviability was to commission a six-part sketch show from Rob and me. This was almost as low budget as
Comedy Nation
but, as there were only two writers and performers involved, with occasional support from Olivia Colman, Gus Brown and Mark Evans, the money went a bit further.
The Mitchell and Webb Situation
(still no ‘That’) was a decent show, considering all the constraints on us, among which I include our limitations of time, experience and talent, but I think more people watched it round our various flats on video than saw it broadcast on Play UK. Still, it was a nice, if slightly tantalising, reminder of the fun we could have doing the job we aspired to do.

Meanwhile, Matthew Holness, together with his writing and performing partner Richard Ayoade, had won the fucking Perrier Award! Matt is a very good friend of mine – the kindest and most honourable of men – and his prodigious talent and hard work had created a brilliant show which was a rightful winner of the award. And how much better, I kept telling myself, that a good friend should win the award than a stranger? It’s nice for your friend and even in cold, hard, mercenary, networking terms, better that the career leg-up should go to someone who you know than someone who you don’t.

But no amount of that reasoning could soften the blow. As Gore Vidal apparently said: ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ I didn’t want to be like that and I worked hard to conceal it, but I couldn’t help feeling horribly envious. Matt and I had gone into comedy at the same time, I’d got the earlier breaks, but Matt had stuck to his guns, developed a character for the stage and created a show that was both brilliant and entirely ‘him’. Meanwhile, I’d been messing around pitching compromise ideas to TV companies – and now he had an award and I’d just guzzled a lot of free tea. He was the toast of that year’s Fringe, while Rob’s and my show
The Mitchell and Webb Clones
(a ‘That’ wouldn’t have really worked in this case) was languishing unnoticed.

So, as you can probably tell, the sheen had been rubbed off my early, excited experiences of television by the time we were shooting the second half of ‘POV’. Everything seemed difficult and stressful and obstructed. My back kept playing up. I felt unhealthy, as if I was missing opportunities. And my private life was a mystery to me.

The reason I say that is, in autumn 2001, I’d briefly had a girlfriend. Within days of the relationship ending Ellis was already characterising my whole attitude to relationships as ‘tried it, didn’t like it, so I stopped’. I suppose that was a reasonable summary.

A very nice girl, a friend of friends, had come to see
The Mitchell and Webb Clones
. I don’t know whether to tell you her name. It probably won’t mean anything to most readers, which isn’t to say she’s not very successful at her job because she is, but it isn’t one of the jobs that brings your name to prominence like pop star, chef or disgraced former chief constable. But obviously, for her and her friends, there it would suddenly be in a book, with me delicately implying I’ve had sex with her – which certainly isn’t something she asked for (being in the book, that is – the sex was totally consensual; I’m an absolute stickler about that).

So I’m not going to tell you her name – I’m going to make up a name. So you can just imagine a girl, rather than anyone specific. Let’s call her Meryl Streep.

I hope that doesn’t make it difficult for you to not think of someone specific. My logic is that, if I call her Meryl Streep, anyone flicking through this in a bookshop might randomly open it around here and assume it’s full of salacious Hollywood anecdotes. With me in them. Sleeping with film stars. A bit like
The Moon’s a Balloon
but with Peter Sallis instead of David Niven.

So Meryl Streep was a bit flirty after the show and I liked it. I thought she was attractive and bright and entertaining. It didn’t occur to me to do anything about it but I noticed. A few weeks later, I bumped into her at a play which a mutual friend was in. We chatted some more and the next day she sent me an e-mail asking me on a date.

Interesting, I thought. A date, eh? So they do happen! What should I do? Well, the first thing I noticed is that I was not in love or infatuated with her. I hadn’t suddenly developed a crush – I was not preparing for her a pedestal in my heart. But I definitely liked her a lot and fancied her. And I was 27 and all my love life had consisted of was the occasional guilt-ridden one-night stand while I pined passively for someone else. At the time of meeting Meryl Streep, I was in one of the widening gaps between obsessive crushes. ‘Isn’t this exactly the sort of person I should be going out with?’ I thought. ‘People go out with people they’re not in love with all the time – they like each other, fancy each other, enjoy each other’s company and have a good time. Sometimes their feelings grow stronger, sometimes not. But either way, relationships like that are worth having when you’re in your twenties, aren’t they? Surely it’s ridiculous of me to bloody-mindedly wait for the woman of my dreams to ask me out? Meryl Streep is lovely and seems to like me. I should give this a go,’ I reasoned.

I know this is a fairly unromantic train of thought – but also probably a common one, although I suspect that earlier developers than me go through it in their teens rather than their late twenties.

So we went out for a while, Meryl Streep and I. But, while there were many aspects of the experience that I liked (I am now definitely sounding like a robot), I basically didn’t take to it. We had fun, we had lots to talk about, it was brilliant having regular sex but, ultimately, being in a couple with someone I didn’t have overwhelming feelings of love for felt wrong. Like a lie, even though I hadn’t lied. I hadn’t implied I was in love and neither had Meryl. But I wasn’t comfortable with the physical closeness to someone I didn’t feel sufficiently emotionally close to. I suppose that’s a bit weird and repressed, and I felt terribly guilty when I had to say to her, apparently out of the blue, that the relationship wasn’t working for me. And I had no satisfactory explanation of the situation other than Ellis’s summary, which I felt wouldn’t go down too well. But there it was.

So, in early 2002, my private life was a mystery to me. I was single and it was definitely my fault. I’d had the chance of a nice relationship and all I’d used it for was to hurt someone lovely. I really didn’t know what I wanted.

- 29 -

Are You Sitting Down?

The landline rang in my living room. This wasn’t as unusual in 2002 as it is now. Nowadays I’d assume it was a survey or someone trying to sell me something. If I answered it, I’d expect that suspicious pause after I said hello which tells you that it’s from some poor sod in a call centre – a cold-call centre, in fact. Possibly a cold cold-call centre if it’s in the North-East, or a humid cold-call centre if it’s the subcontinent. The pause, I reckon, is because they’ve dialled a dozen, or a hundred, or maybe a thousand numbers at once, and it takes a beat for them to notice which ones have been answered. And of course it’s an infuriating pause because, not only is someone about to waste your time, you’re also expected to wait a few seconds until it’s convenient for them to start wasting it. They require you to waste a bit of your own time for them first.

And then the battle begins. The battle, in my case, is to get off the phone politely and without having hung up on anyone. I feel that an element of my humanity will have been lost if I actually hang up while they’re still speaking. I try, by adopting a firm and patronising voice, to put an end to the call in good order. Of course it never works. The techniques drilled into the staff of a cold-call centre presumably include never stopping talking and never saying, ‘Okay, thanks, goodbye.’ I’m a slightly obsessive ‘goodbye’ sayer – I come away from parties with an unsettled feeling because I haven’t formally taken my leave of all the people I chatted to. I know that’s fine and people don’t expect it, but it feels like I’ve left lots of loose ends hanging.

All of which makes me easy prey for the cold-caller. My I’m-so-sorry-I’m-not-interesteds and thank-you-I-already-have-a-mobile-phones have no power over them and they can get through their full script. So they’ve won. Assuming that’s their aim rather than selling anything. Because I certainly never buy anything and I can’t imagine anyone would. If you’re reading this and, when someone cold calls you, you actually consider buying what they’re offering then please stop for all of our sakes. It’s only the one in a million like you who actually pays attention to the unsolicited telephone bullshit that fuels this industry of time-wasting that’s the scourge of us all – and would have led millions to abandon landlines altogether if the likes of Sky didn’t perversely insist you have to have one. That’s how far we’ve come in the last ten years: televisions used to work without telephone lines and now they don’t. Well done everyone.

The other thing that was different ten years ago is that a lot of people still used landlines as their first way of getting hold of someone. Mobiles were a luxury for use in emergencies, like a mink life-ring or a fire extinguisher full of champagne. It was like my father’s approach to the immersion heater at home.

Nowadays, of course, we’ve become too impatient not to use them all the time. The idea of calling a place not a person is insufficiently immediate for our increasingly self-important techno-civilisation. And you tell yourself that you’ve got lots of free calls to and from mobiles so it’s all fine. No need to cross the room to either pick up or answer the phone – just use the one in your pocket that’s slowly microwaving your upper femur.

Every month I pay about £60 to Orange. I think, if I managed my tariff choice as conscientiously as those with no real sense of the brevity of our time on earth say I should, I could probably get it down to about £30. That would still be £360 a year I’d pay – and for what? Being able to get hold of people and talk on the phone? No, that happened fine before mobiles. Being able to arrange to meet people? No, that happened fine before mobiles. To allow myself to be bombarded by text messages that require painstaking, thumb-arthritis-inducing answering and to indulge myself in sloppy meeting plans that have to be finessed at the last minute by phone? Yes, I get that. For hundreds of pounds a year. Well done everyone.

Anyway, back in 2002, I sometimes answered the landline.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s Andrew. Are you sitting down?’

‘What, er … why? Do I sound sleepy? I haven’t just woken up – I’m actually in my living room.’

‘Are you sitting down?’

‘No, well, sort of. I’ve got one knee on the arm of a sofa and I’m sort of leaning against a wall but I’m not really … what?’

‘Um, right. Yes, well, Channel 4 have commissioned a series of POV!’

‘Oh that’s brilliant news! Excellent!’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

‘Oh! Now, I see what you meant about sitting down – you were saying that it’s, that it would be …’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry, I should’ve … I didn’t respond appropriately.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Anyway, all the details still have to be sorted out but I wanted to be the one to tell you first.’

‘Thanks. Sam and Jesse mentioned it last week actually.’

‘Did they?’

‘They said it wasn’t definite but that it was …’