David Mitchell: Back Story (35 page)

‘Oh.’

‘… likely, you know.’

‘Ah. Anyway – it’s good news.’

‘It certainly is.’

‘Bye then, talk soon.’

‘Bye.’

At the time I was convinced that Andrew O’Connor, with his theatrical approach to life, had tried to express it in a way that might get into someone’s memoir and that I’d ruined the moment. So, seeing as it was my fault, I feel duty bound to include it here.

And of course that was massive news for Rob and me. By the time of its commission, ‘POV’ was our last iron in the fire. Everything else that we’d been developing for years had ceased even to languish on television’s giant and growing ‘Maybe’ pile. We’d also tasted the life of the jobbing TV daily writer, which was both moreish and somehow unsatisfying, like a Happy Meal.

I’d come to feel that this would be my career. I wouldn’t have failed utterly – I’d be working in TV comedy, not as an on-screen writer-performer but a perfectly well-paid jobbing writer on other people’s shows who would maybe, very occasionally, get a small part guesting in something as an actor.

Being a jobbing writer isn’t like being a jobbing actor because it’s much easier to make a living. There are far more good actors than there is work to go round. Even if casting was completely meritocratic, a lot of talented performers would be out of work a lot of the time. In the system we actually have, where plenty of useless, jammy and well-connected turns work constantly, it’s even worse. But, while there are just as many injustices in the writing profession, the bottom line is that there’s more work in TV for those who can write funny things than there are people who can do it. If you’re funny and reliable and don’t smell too much – and, let’s be clear, you can smell a bit – you’ll find work.

Rob and I discovered this. For example, we worked two days a week on the last series of
The 11 O’Clock Show
which Phil Clarke had been brought in to produce. As a project, it had completely run out of energy and Channel 4 were looking for an opportunity to axe it. Rob and I were part of the team which ended up providing it. Despite our efforts, that series was a mirthless and merit-free gap between the era when
The 11 O’Clock Show
was bringing stars like Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais to national attention and the point at which the show was cancelled. We insulated the channel against criticism – we ensured that the programme slipped away unmourned. But we were paid hundreds of pounds a day just to be there, scribbling down jokes for others to reject. It was good, civilised work – but it didn’t feel like writing.

Daily jobbing writing on shows like that often involves no writing at all – no use of pen or keyboard. You sit in a room, supplied with too much caffeine and pastry and too little daylight and oxygen, and you pitch jokes and funny ideas, competitively, alongside other people. But you don’t decide what gets written down. Some senior writer or producer does that. In my view, only he or she (to be honest, in TV comedy it’s always been a he in my experience) could really be described as ‘the writer’. Other sorts of writing, even other sorts of TV writing, where you’re at home working on sketches or a sitcom script, don’t work like this. You get to decide what gets put down. People might refuse to print, read or get actors to perform it – they might quibble with sections or suggest changes – but the piece of writing is yours to create and change. Nobody tries to grab the pen.

I’m now walking through Notting Hill and I pass one of those horrible modern office buildings that were put there in the ’60s and ’70s to make the adjacent Victorian stucco look even more beautiful than it is. In there, I remember, Rob and I had one of our most dispiriting experiences of jobbing writing, in the offices of a successful independent production company.

We’d been hired for two days to help develop an idea for a pilot for Ben Miller. I think Ben had kindly suggested us for the gig but he wasn’t actually there and we were left to the tender mercies of some development producers. It was a panel show thing – I can’t remember the actual premise but it was aspiring to be part of that spate of
Room 101
knock-offs, all essentially TV versions of
Desert Island Discs
, which were popular at the time. Popular with commissioners, that is. I don’t think viewers ever expressed many feelings in their favour. So it was some sort of format in which Ben would talk to one guest for a whole half-hour show but the chat would be structured according to things they loved/hated, or movies, or bands, or historical characters, or types of cheese – that sort of thing. I can’t remember which.

Let’s say it’s the last. So Rob and I turned up first thing in the morning and had the premise for Ben Miller’s ‘You’ve Made It to the Board!’ explained to us by whichever hapless development monkey had been slaving away over it for the last few weeks, and were told that they wanted us to ‘punch up the pitch’ or ‘develop the format’ or something else meaningless. What I particularly remember about that job was the way the development people kept talking nervously about their bosses at the production company. They were referred to with trepidation throughout the day. This guy, Sebastian, kept being mentioned as if it should mean something to us.

‘So yes, we need more thoughts for intros to run past Sebastian when we meet him at 5.’

‘Okay, so Sebastian will be coming in at 5 and it would be great if we could pitch some more active rounds for the show to him then.’

‘We hear Sebastian might be keen to hear if we could work a sketch into the format, so that would be great if you could get some of those together by 5 – for the Sebastian meeting.’

‘Only forty minutes to go before Sebastian o’clock!’

They were terrified of Sebastian. After a few hours, I pretty much assumed it had to be Sebastian Coe. Either that or a massive Doberman. Sebastian, when he eventually arrived, was perfectly nice and reasonable and talked through the ideas like a sensible human for an hour. After he left, they were all: ‘I think the Sebastian meeting went well’ … ‘Yeah, I feel Sebastian thought we’ve made some improvements,’ etc. Maybe we were working with particularly anxious people, or maybe Sebastian was usually an ogre and we got him on valium day. Most likely, I think, it becomes psychologically necessary for some people to make elements of their life seem momentous – to inject a bit of ‘Hey guys, this is TV – how badly do we want this!?’ bullshit energy into a working environment to disguise the fact that, TV or not, the project under discussion is of no real interest to anyone involved, or indeed anyone else alive or dead.

All day, I wanted to say: ‘Listen, I don’t give a shit what Sebastian thinks as long as I get my £300 for the day.’

The real victim of work like that is the viewer. Good programmes are not made in the self-consciously cut-throat, ‘results-orientated’ environments which some production companies affect. It may be how you improve productivity in a factory but, in entertainment, it creates pap. There are too many programmes which nobody really cares about – as nobody really cared about this one (which never got made in the end). The format is developed by someone in format development who churns out a dozen such things a week; the star is attached because it looks like the right sort of show for them to be doing next; the company pitches it because it needs commissions to pay the rent; the channel commissions it because the idea ticks various boxes: it involves the right sort of name, or it’s a kind of show people watch, or it’s made in the regions, or a certain number of episodes can be churned out cheaply.

Now, all of these factors are rightly relevant to the decision about whether or not a programme should be made but, in my view, they aren’t reason enough on their own. For a programme to justify its existence there should be someone involved who loves the idea – whose ‘baby’ it is; someone who has always thought, rightly or wrongly, that the concept is a properly good one. All really successful shows, as well as some terrible ones, have that. But even those terrible ones have integrity and fail nobly whilst actually trying something. ‘You’ve Made It to the Board!’ (that was not its title) would have had nothing noble about it because no one involved would have really cared. Far better to make shows for yourself than for Sebastian.

But it’s quite a pleasant way to work really – it’s hardly coalmining. You sit and think of funny ideas while people bring you tea and sandwiches. As long as you don’t mind the ideas subsequently being ruined and/or ignored, and if you can keep your terror of Sebastian under control, it’s a pretty decent life and, if that sort of work were still the mainstay of my career, I hope I’d still count myself lucky.

My existence had become a little less studenty by this point, so regular income was a higher priority. The landlord of the Swiss Cottage flats had finally turfed us all out, saying that he wanted to redevelop the properties (in fact, they lay empty for the next seven years), and so most of us decided that the time had come to get mortgages. Financial pressures consequently forced our group’s centre of gravity three Tube stops outwards from Swiss Cottage to Kilburn, where Sally, Ellis and I separately bought flats. Robbie Hudson (who was in
Go to Work on an Egg
with me at university and is now a novelist) became my flatmate in Kilburn, as he still is.

In a very nice way, the Swiss Cottage community has continued in mortgage-holding Kilburn. University was a bit distant for anyone to come up with a Cambridgey pun, but Robbie would occasionally refer to us in e-mails as ‘The Kilburn Social Club’ before appropriating that name for a book he was writing.

Satisfied though I’d probably have been with getting regular writing work, making regular mortgage payments and enjoying regular nights out in the pub with people I’d known for nearly a decade, the ‘POV’ series commission felt like a rescue. We’d had so many chances of getting our own show off the ground and somehow muffed all of them, but then, at the eleventh hour, the least likely of all the pitches we were associated with, the one which had been partly filmed with cameras on our heads, the one made by a company no one had heard of owned by one of the country’s least fashionable comedians, had suddenly come off.

I think Sam and Jesse felt the same. They’d had a similar career trajectory to ours. Their equivalent of our
Bruiser
and
Daydream Believers
failures was
Days Like These
, the British version of the American hit
That ’70s Show
which they’d been commissioned to adapt for ITV. This had felt like a tremendously exciting opportunity, had been well paid and involved trips to Hollywood to meet important American producers. But it had not been a success. I imagine Sam and Jesse’s comic instincts were defied by interfering executives from both sides of the Atlantic at almost every turn. They had little creative control over what was being done in their name. ITV, who were basically moving out of comedy at that point, dumped the show to a graveyard slot after disappointing ratings and reviews. So, for Sam and Jesse as well as us, ‘POV’ was a reprieve.

But that title had to go. Most people wouldn’t get that it’s an acronym of ‘Point of View’, we thought. And we couldn’t call it ‘Point of View’ because of the BBC feedback show
Points of View
. We needed to think of a better name – preferably something classy.

- 30 -

Peep Show

‘
Peep Show
?! They want to call it
Peep Show
.’

‘Mmm,’ said Rob.

‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

‘I think it’s better than “POV”.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You always say it doesn’t really matter what things are called.’

I do say that. Titles are difficult but I think, basically, they don’t matter. Once a show is up and running, the title loses any significance. As long as it’s not called
Some Wood and a Pie
, which is an extreme case. Usually, after a while, the title just refers to the show and carries with it the feelings or associations of that. You stop wondering if it’s a good title in the same way that you never stop to think whether ‘carrot’ is a good name for a carrot. No one would ever say: ‘Carrot, ooh I’m not sure – doesn’t seem very carroty somehow. Doesn’t say carrot to me. Wouldn’t “splandeb” conjure up something orange and pointed more effectively?’

Actually maybe it would – maybe if carrots had been called splandebs, they’d have been 8 per cent more memorable or tasty-seeming over time and consequently 4 per cent more consumed. That’s a vast increase in vegetable consumption over hundreds of years and billions of people. It would have saved lives. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, may have died because no one ever thought to call a carrot a splandeb.

But I think that’s unlikely. Even awful names for people don’t matter post-playground – they just become a label. Of course the awful names – the Fifi-Trixiebelles, the Apples, the Peacheses (which are perfectly good names for an apple or some peaches, although dugnid and famp would be better) – will always end up referring to people who are scarred by having spent a childhood with an awful name (and growing up with the sort of parents who’d give them an awful name) so this is an experiment with no control. But what I’m saying is that should you, by some miracle, reach adulthood with a viable personality despite being called Moon-Unit, then Moon-Unit will cease to sound odd to your friends and just come to refer to the perfectly decent human you’ve miraculously found a way of becoming.

Have I Got News For You
, for example, is an abysmal name. There’s definitely an implied exclamation mark at the end. It’s a weird rhetorical question – and the imagined poser of such a question is a total dick. ‘Hey guys, have I got news for you! Margaret Thatcher’s resigned! I wonder what idiot they’ll pick next’ … ‘Listen, dudes, have I got news for you – you’ll never believe this, the flat’s full of asbestos!’ But people don’t think about that after a while;
Have I Got News For You
is just a noise denoting a great TV programme.