David Mitchell: Back Story (11 page)

The first piece of news about the circus skills afternoon was that, sadly, not everyone would get to have his face painted like a clown. ‘Ohhhh noooo!’ the class moaned – and I assume I joined in, just like I’d have joined in at Nuremberg. What I was thinking, of course, was: ‘Thank God for that, I don’t want my face made up like a clown’s by someone I don’t know. That would be awful! And what if the make-up wouldn’t come off?!’

‘I’m sorry but two is the absolute maximum for face painting,’ lamented Miss Brown, ‘and as you all obviously want to have your faces painted like clowns …’

‘Oh yes, madly – please pick me, Miss Brown!’ we all interjected.

‘… I’m just going to have to put your names in a hat and pick out the two lucky ones who will get to spend the afternoon looking like clowns.’

I was already familiar enough with sod’s law to have a sinking feeling at this news. There seemed no way of volunteering to be left out of the hat. It was just assumed that we’d all want make-up all over our faces. Where, I thought, did that idea come from? Why is there this weird consensus about this weird thing – this bizarre concept that everyone else seems to think is a lovely treat? And why am I being swept along in it?

And yet I knew any attempt I made to opt out pre-hat would be dicing with pariah status. I was facing another, and quite unexpected, challenge in my quest to be normal: I was going to have to make it seem as if I wanted to look like a clown. I really hadn’t seen that coming. But still, I reasoned, it probably won’t be me.

Of course it was me. First out of the hat. I forced a smile onto my soon-to-be-vandalised features. Oh God, life is awful, I thought. And I distinctly remember thinking that this was doubly unjust because, not only was I going to have to endure something terrifying, but one of the many among my classmates who, it had recently become clear, had always been obsessed with greasepaint would be denied the smearing of their dreams.

And it was fine, obviously. It didn’t hurt – I walked around with everyone saying ‘You look like a clown!’, they cleaned it all off before I went home, and I had that buzz you get from having endured something you were dreading and found it, while not actually pleasant, less alarming than you’d feared.

Other than sitting still while a stranger daubs your face, the other ‘circus skills’ which the out-of-work actors were teaching turned out to be balancing a hockey stick on one finger – which takes a bit of practice but isn’t that difficult, or at all impressive, or a circus skill – and lying on a bed of nails. This involves just lying on a bed of nails. If the nails aren’t that sharp – they weren’t – the fact that there are such a lot of them means that it’s basically painless – your weight is comfortably distributed among the hundreds of nails. It’s supposed to sound brave or impressive because you’re lying on
so many
nails, so people (idiots) think it must be many times the pain of lying on the point of one nail, which is agonising. But of course it isn’t. I hated Field, but there’s no doubt that afternoon would have been better spent if I’d been outdoors running away from a football as usual.

You may be wondering why, as the sort of freak who wandered around inexpertly disguised as Louis XIV all weekend, I wasn’t more enthusiastic about spending an afternoon disguised as a clown. I think my horror largely came from the novelty of the activity and the people inflicting it on me. I’m not really attracted by novelty, as you will almost certainly already have guessed. (If not, wait until I start talking about Chinese food.)

That selection process for the clown make-up is the earliest recollection I have of my knee-jerk hatred of consensus. I just don’t like it, particularly when it relates to fun or fashion. Not only did I dread the thought of having to wear make-up, I hated the feeling that I was supposed to think it would be great. I hated that pressure to join in and be like everyone else. I hated it, but I did it anyway.

Who are these morons who want stuff putting on their faces, I thought. And why does their opinion prevail? I get the same shiver of contempt when I hear inane radio DJs talk to listeners about their weekend plans to ‘just chill’, ‘have a large one’ or ‘party with my mates’. These people are welcome to such pleasures, but I balk at the implication that that’s what everyone’s doing or what everyone should be doing; that these are the lives that the uncool are so often exhorted to get. I’d love to hear a caller to XFM or similar announce that they’ll be spending all weekend at a steam fair, seeing a relative with dementia, decorating eggs, desperately looking for a vital but lost bit of paperwork or just frantically masturbating to the Eroica symphony.

This is a world where people no longer indicate their enthusiasm for a TV series, actor, celebrity, band or snack bar by saying ‘Oh, I love it’ but with ‘I’m loving it’ – you know ‘I’m loving this season of
Strictly
’, ‘I’m loving Heston’s mini fish burgers’, ‘We’re loving Alan Carr’s new glasses’. That’s the fickle present continuous. There’s a silent ‘at the moment’ after it which there isn’t with ‘I love’. These consumers are just passing through, waiting to get their head turned by something sparkly which, once tarnished by their gaze, they’ll turn away from. They like what’s cool because it’s cool and for no other reason, and I hate them for it.

Another example of their hatefulness while my dander’s up: in order to get themselves off the hook of sometimes liking uncool things, they refer to them as ‘guilty pleasures’, which is a ridiculous expression. What? So you like Abba, or Roger Moore as James Bond, but have been led to believe that this taste is somehow infra dig, so you style it a ‘guilty pleasure’, thus demonstrating you’re sufficiently relaxed and self-deprecating to own up to it – when in fact the way you have chosen to express it lays bare your bland and inane obsession with the worthless trappings of the zeitgeist.

Doing those list-interviews which newspapers print nowadays because they lack the resources to fill their pages with proper articles – the
Guardian
Q&A, that sort of thing – I’ve been asked dozens of times: ‘What’s your guilty pleasure?’ I usually reply ‘A fry-up’ or ‘Watching
Bargain Hunt
’ or ‘Eating toast in bed’. On one occasion, bored, I replied: ‘Well, I must say, I do like to fuck a prostitute.’

I’m proud of that (saying it, not doing it – I’ve never actually fucked a prostitute) but now unfortunately the pride I’ve confessed to will have made it less funny. Sorry.

But honestly … ‘Guilty pleasures’? It’s prudish and judgemental and yet it’s referring to harmless things people do in their spare time. I mean, I’ve watched and enjoyed
The X Factor
and I know that it’s not exactly the Proms or
The Wire
or whatever worthy thing I’m supposed to be watching, but why should I feel the least bit guilty about having taken pleasure from it? Or, for that matter, from eating a Findus crispy pancake, watching a
Brittas Empire
DVD or reading
Country Life
in the bath?

It has occurred to me since, as it almost certainly occurred to you, that there was probably more than one timorous child only pretending to want his face painted. But that just makes the idea of consensus all the more terrifying.

- 11 -

Cross-Dressing, Cards and Cocaine

Having turned right after the Hampstead Theatre down Winchester Road, I am walking between two gleaming new blocks of flats, under one of which will be fragments of rubble from the first flat I rented in London – a time when I had no money and no paid work. I’ve been standing on stages for years, I thought in those days. If someone doesn’t pay me for a public performance soon, it’ll be as if they’re trying to starve me into stopping.

After inexpertly miming the life cycle of a staple crop and being made to look like a clown, my next public performance (unpaid) was when I was ten years old, and it was the role of ‘Dancing Girl’ in a production of
A Christmas Carol
. This wasn’t the lead. I was only in one scene: Mr Fezziwig’s party. You know, when the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge what he used to be like when he let his hair down (or, in most productions, before he’d let it get all grey and straggly). I didn’t have any lines. Basically I was an extra in drag. I was part of a group of eight boys, half of us disguised as women, who were doing a sort of line dance in order to make the atmosphere of Fezziwig’s Christmas party seem appropriately festive.

It’s impossible for me to infer anything flattering from being cast in this role, and God knows I’ve tried. Clearly the school wished to involve as many boys as possible in the production; if you auditioned, they’d try and give you something to do. Their decision to put me in a wig and a dress at the back of the stage in a single scene does not suggest that my acting showed much promise. And obviously, it was embarrassing to have to cross-dress – but then, it was an all-boys’ school so I wasn’t alone and some of the boys had to play actual female characters, which involved talking and (in the most nightmarish examples) pretending to be in love
as a woman
– inevitably, there being very little lesbian theatre performed at my prep school,
with a man
– which I considered much, much worse than what I had to endure. (Obviously, if there had been lesbian theatre at my prep school, both of the lesbians would have had to be played by boys, so that wouldn’t have helped either.)

I’ve worn drag a few times on stage since then – I pretended to be Cilla Black at a college rag week version of
Blind Date
, and played the dame in a couple of pantomimes in the part of my career before anyone paid me, when I was living on the very road I’m walking down now. Later, when Robert Webb and I were doing our sketch show, I appeared on television as Mrs Danvers (Daphne Du Maurier’s terrifying housekeeper), Mrs Patricia Wilberforce (our vision of a 1940s British version of Oprah) and half of a two-headed Mrs Hudson. On every occasion I enjoyed it; it’s so much easier to get laughs when you’re a bloke in a dress. Audiences just find it funny and seem well disposed to whatever line you deliver.

I don’t really understand why that is, although I can certainly feel that hilariousness myself when I watch the
Monty Python
team pretending to be housewives – particularly, I think, the Batley Townswomen’s Guild re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor (essentially they just run at each other in a muddy field wielding handbags). There is something about male impersonation of female mannerisms, however inexpert, that makes people giggly – possibly because it consists of the right combination of silliness and taboo-breaking. Fluidity of gender is not something we’re culturally confident about, however much we try to be outwardly accepting.

This is one of the reasons transsexuals get such a hard time. They’re doing something which, for some, offends against principles which are deeply, if only instinctively, held. A minority of the offended, the angrier, stupider minority, then lash out. But, even for those of us who aren’t remotely offended by what transsexuals do with their bodies or their lives, there’s the problem that, when a large man decides to live and dress as a woman – and to have what surgery in that direction they can to help the process – what most of us still see is a bloke in a dress.

And it does often seem to be quite a large man, wearing quite an old-fashioned twinset and pearls type of get-up – although they may just be the only ones we notice. And they look very much like the Batley Townswomen’s Guild. So it’s funny. But we’re not supposed to find it funny – so it’s even funnier. The person who’s made that choice is deadly serious and very sensitive about it – which makes it funnier still. To the comedy-appreciating parts of the brain, it’s as if someone has solemnly announced their intention, in order to be more completely themselves, to live a life of constantly slipping on banana skins. And then we see them doing it. All seriously.

Unfortunately, that immediate entertaining effect of a man in a dress didn’t really happen for me when I was ten – partly because I didn’t have any lines but mainly because, if you put a pre-pubescent boy in a dress and a wig, he looks exactly like a pre-pubescent girl. The very effect that large hairy blokes who feel they’re women trapped in men’s bodies are so desperate to achieve, I couldn’t at that age avoid. The photographs of the production were humiliating, as my true gender was completely undetectable – and this was at an age when I identified quite strongly with being a boy and the thought of blurring that line was intensely threatening. I was proud to be penis-bearing and considered girls to be basically silly and unnecessary. It was disconcerting to discover that I was a few months without a haircut away from being indistinguishable from one.

On stage, I did my dancing steps as rehearsed while the action of the play continued around me. I had little or no idea what went on in any of the other scenes – it was only later that I found out the plot of
A Christmas Carol
. I was only on for two minutes and I spent the rest of the time playing cards with the other dancing boys.

That was why I fell in love with the stage: it gave me the opportunity to play pontoon in the gaps. There was a huge amount of waiting around involved in this show. School would finish, after which you’d either have boarders’ tea or go to McDonald’s – but then there were still hours to wait before the show, during which you’d change into your costume and get made up by one of the team of female teachers and mothers. They ran a sort of greasepaint production line to make sure that every member of the huge cast was properly painted orange with red lips (if they were pretending to be girls) or with thick black worry lines (if they were pretending to be old) and a great big scarlet dollop in the corner of their eye whoever they were pretending to be.

The older boys would earnestly explain that, without this bizarre caking, human facial features were almost totally unnoticeable under the powerful lights of the school hall’s stage. Obviously this was nonsense. We would have looked completely normal under the lights without make-up; with it, we looked like we were absolutely covered in make-up. But I must say, in contrast to my experience as a clown, I found being made up for the play quite fun. It made me feel important and I liked the smell.