David Mitchell: Back Story (37 page)

And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m now pleased that
Peep Show
has a distinctive filming style. I think it’s interesting, often helps the jokes and seldom hampers them. Basically though, I think the show succeeds in the same way as a conventional British sitcom. It’s about two people, with whom the audience can identify, trapped in a situation with which the audience can also identify. Like all of us, they want love, money, success, security. But they probably end up pepper-spraying more acquaintances, urinating in more churches and burning more dogs than most of us:

JEREMY:   There’s a hell of a lot of steam.

MARK:      Yeah. As it turns out, dogs do seem to be mostly water.

JEREMY:   
(poking with a stick)
It’s going a bit, just … not the legs.

MARK:      Put the legs back on in the middle – maybe it’ll burn better.

JEREMY:   Oh right! I have to put the legs back on? If you hadn’t refused to pay for firelighters it would have gone by now.

MARK:      You shouldn’t need firelighters to burn a dog, Jeremy!

JEREMY:   How would you know? Shit – it’s going out.

Jeremy bends down, starts blowing at it.

MARK:      Look I’ve got to get my pitch sorted before I see Malcolm.

JEREMY:   We’ll have to bury it. Get the spade.

MARK:      What spade?

JEREMY:   You didn’t bring a spade?

MARK:      Do you think I’m some kind of freelance dog-murdering mafia man?

JEREMY:   Oh, great. So we’ve got no fire, no spade … we’ll just have to dig with our hands.

Jeremy tries pathetically to dig a hole in the earth with his fingers and a stick.

MARK:      Jeremy. There are many things I would do to help you. But digging a hole in the wintry earth with my bare hands so that you can bury the corpse of a dog you killed is not one of them.

Mark and Jeremy are caught between jeopardy and opportunity in the same way as Steptoe and Son, Tony Hancock, the various incarnations of Blackadder, Gary and Tony from
Men Behaving Badly
and David Brent. In many ways it’s a classic comedy masquerading as a ground-breaking one and, as a small ‘c’ conservative, I mean that as a compliment to the scripts, not a criticism.

The extended interior monologues, when you can hear the characters’ thoughts, were a proper innovation in TV comedy and one that massively adds comic potential. Here are the thoughts that we hear going through Mark’s mind as he attempts his first-ever jog:

MARK:      
(interior monologue)
Hey, wow … I’m actually good at this. Maybe I’m a natural? Yeah, I’m a jogger! Of course, there had to be a sport for me! I just never realised – I’m a natural jogger! Feel the legs, like two great steam locomotives, pumping away. I’m Cram, I’m Ovett, I’m unstoppable, I’m – … Jesus, is that a stitch? I … fuck. I think I’m going to be sick. I’ve got to slow … I need to walk … Urgh. I think I’m going to puke. I am literally going to die. What an idiotic boob I was, back ten or eleven seconds ago.

If you only saw what Mark did and heard what he said out loud, he wouldn’t be nearly so funny. He’s such a model of conventionality that you’d have comparatively little (just the occasional desk-pissing or stationery-cupboard-ejaculating incident) from which to infer his inner turmoil. As it is, his thoughts can be funny even when his behaviour is meekly shy or just normal. Mark partly came out of the character I’d been chalked down to play in
All Day Breakfast
(the show that Sam, Jesse, Rob and I wrote together, which never got made) who was called Phil. We’d found him harder to make funny than Conrad, Rob’s character on whom Jeremy was partly based, because he was so buttoned-up and controlled. But when you can hear the thoughts of such brittle pillars of the community as they begin to crumble inside, there’s a lot more potential for comedy.

A world away from the concerns of two twenty-something men sharing a flat in Croydon was my home life: sharing a flat in Kilburn with another twenty-something man. In fact, one of the things that struck me when I first walked into Mark and Jeremy’s flat for filming was that it was slightly nicer than mine. Certainly anyone stumbling into my Kilburn residence could have been forgiven for thinking that I was a method actor who’d taken things a bit far (if that’s not a tautology).

But Robbie Hudson and I get along a lot better than Mark and Jeremy. I own the flat and am an inept landlord who doesn’t know how to repair anything and finds even the process of contacting those who do very stressful. Things just go wrong in flats, it seems. All the time. It isn’t just the doorbell. Things that used to work – washing machines, boilers, lavatories, lights – just stop doing so, for no reason. It’s like a Microsoft application – except you can’t just turn a blocked sink off and on again. And apparently, if you own the flat, it becomes your fault and you have to sort it out. Well, I’m not very good with that but, in compensation, I don’t notice if the rent’s a bit late. I’m not saying Robbie ever pays his rent late – just that, if he had, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Of course we have our differences. He likes the place to be clean but doesn’t mind a bit of clutter – whereas I’m not very fussy about cleanliness but do like things to be tidy. So we’ve compromised on neither of us getting his way.

But mainly we have lots of things in common: we drink a lot of tea; we work from home most of the time; we take any opportunity to be distracted from work by something stupid on the internet; we enjoy mocking daytime TV while avidly consuming it. And, most of all, we both believe that, if you’re going to share a flat with someone for any significant length of time, you should never express annoyance. This principle, while it would hobble a sitcom, is vital to a calm life. It is so much easier to live with being annoyed by someone than to live with someone being annoyed by you: the first state is one of irritation, the second is a tyranny. So it’s much better to suck it up and never get cross while, in return, all the maddening things about you are reciprocally overlooked.

We’ve had the occasional point of conflict, however. Robbie likes football, which I do not. During one international football tournament, he took to putting up England memorabilia around the flat. This was only to annoy me – he’s not a moron. There were flags on the fridge, lions on the windows, bunting along the bookshelves, etc. He was clearly trying to wind me up, but I rose above it. And, as I rose, so did the tide of memorabilia. More and more household items were decorated with England-liveried plastic, including a large poster of one of the players on my bedroom door. The flat looked like we were celebrating a sort of nationalistic version of Christmas. But the more there was, the more determined I became never to mention it. I knew he was trying to provoke me and reasoned that the most annoying thing I could say was nothing. In a conflict, you should always do what your opponent wants least. One day, all of the memorabilia was suddenly gone. We have never spoken of it. In fact, only if he reads this book will he know for sure that I noticed.

And then there was the partial rent strike. It was over my failure to put in a shower. When we moved in, I promised I’d get a shower fitted and then did nothing about it as I had no idea where to begin. (Anyway, baths are fine.) Robbie would occasionally mention this. Then he would often mention this. I felt guilty. Then he said he was going to dock the rent he was paying until a shower materialised. I was very relieved by this strategy as it meant I no longer felt guilty. He wasn’t paying for the shower any more, so I wasn’t being unfair by not providing it. I was able to massively scale back my shower-procuring efforts.

I know what you’re thinking: two eligible young men with their own pad in London’s glittering Zone 2. What happened when one or other of us wanted to invite a young lady back? Well, it would be unfair of me to discuss the existence, extent or nature of Robbie’s love life here but, on the rare occasions when I’ve had a one-night stand, and for the brief period when I was in a relationship, I avoided spending the night in the flat – but this was largely because, until 2007, I still had a single bed. Ridiculously monkish of me, I know. But for years, while single, I didn’t like the thought of getting a double because it would feel like I was doing it in the expectation of starting to go out with someone or having more sex. There it would be: all big enough for two people, rebuking me as I lay there alone reading history books. And wanking.

It was my friend Benet Brandreth who finally made me snap out of this attitude, saying it was absurd not to have a double bed, whether I was alone or in a couple. He took me to John Lewis to choose one – which is (I’m sorry to disappoint some readers), without a doubt, the gayest thing I have ever done.

That’s not been the only improvement to the flat over the years. I eventually got a shower and new carpets and even, under intense pressure from my parents, a new kitchen. We also got a cleaner. Robbie says ‘she doesn’t clean things properly’. I agree but counter that she’s being paid so that we don’t have to not clean things properly ourselves. I am heartened by the thought that this isn’t an exchange Mark and Jeremy would have. Jeremy certainly wouldn’t care how well the cleaner cleaned but would resent paying for her – and so wouldn’t do it. Mark would both want a cleaner and worry that he was being fleeced. In fact, come to think of it, it’s a conversation that Mark might have with himself, in his interior monologue. Oh God! Maybe Robbie’s just in my head, like in
Fight Club
?

After filming that first series of
Peep Show
, there was a long wait for it to be broadcast. In the gap, Rob and I recorded our other new series: a radio sketch show,
That Mitchell and Webb Sound
(and there at last is the ‘That’!). This was produced by Gareth Edwards – six years after we’d met him, we were finally working together on something that was going to be broadcast. And it was just a normal sketch show, which was a very refreshing change. For years, since we were in Footlights in fact, Rob and I had been trying to come up with ways of dressing sketch shows up as other things – giving them ‘themes’. Maybe all the characters know each other, or do the same job, or are related, or live in the same place? Maybe the end of one sketch leads into the start of another? Maybe there’s a theme of ‘modern life’ or ‘relationships’ or ‘food’ or ‘totalitarianism’?

For ages we’d bought into the notion that a sketch show needs something like this – something unifying to make audiences keep watching, like they do with a sitcom. But, by 2002, we’d realised that was nonsense. No sketch show theme can ever give it a through-line which will attract anything like the audience loyalty that you get for a sitcom. In a sitcom, you can properly get to know characters and follow their lives – a good one like
Cheers
inspires huge audience love and support. People will keep watching just to spend time with those characters, even in patches where the scripts aren’t as good as they could be. In terms of repeat-viewing appeal, even the most heavily themed sketch show is hugely outgunned by the most lazily-plotted sitcom.

The only way a sketch show clings to viewers is by being funny and by providing variety – so, if an audience member dislikes one sketch, they’ll have some faith that the next might be different and therefore preferable. An overarching theme hampers both of these potential strengths: it makes the show less varied and it precludes some jokes. In my experience, you’ve no sooner decided on your sketch show concept than you’re frustrated by the discovery of a nugget of comedy gold that doesn’t fit in.

So, if you want audience loyalty, write a sitcom. If you’re doing a sketch show, accept the limitations of the form: you’re only ever as funny as your last joke. To try and deny that truth is like putting on a ballet and complaining that all the performers have to dance the whole time. But, when discussing radio pitches with Gareth, we were almost shy to say that we wanted to do a straightforward, theme-less sketch show. But he was fine about it, saying the theme could be that ‘every sketch has one of David Mitchell or Robert Webb in it and sometimes both’. That suited us, and theme-less it was. We could have a pair of snooker commentators, bemoaning the teetotal approach of modern players:

PETER:       Look at John Parrott sitting there, staring mournfully at his water.

TED:           Look at that. You could put a goldfish in that glass. And it wouldn’t even die.

Some eager party hosts reminiscing about the tremendous fun they’d had hanging out with Hitler:

ROBERT:   I love it when he goes off on one. It’s so funny, and not a little persuasive.

DAVID:      I know. But some of the things he was saying about Tube workers. I mean, we know him, so we know it’s not racist, it’s just very very clever irony.

Or an animal charity appeal:

Soft-spoken voiceover

For the price of a cataract operation which would restore this Sudanese woman’s sight, you could fund months of trawling up and down motorways looking for kittens. For the £3 a month that could equip an Ethiopian farmer with seeds and tools, you could be providing a lifetime’s doggie biscuits for this Labrador that wees itself every time it hears the Hoover.

After recording a pilot at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2002, Radio 4 commissioned a series.

In some ways this was more promising than
Peep Show
. As an opportunity, it had fewer possibilities but it was a more established, respectable achievement: our own comedy show on the old Home Service, rather than a late-night Channel 4 experiment that might disappear. It was a good thing for my parents to tell their friends about. Also, it was a show Rob and I were primarily writing ourselves. Getting laughs both for your material and your performance isn’t just twice as good as one or the other. It is roughly 3.2 times as good. I have done the maths on this.