David Mitchell: Back Story (15 page)

Del Boy’s pratfall is far from a cheap laugh. It has years of the writer’s narrative skill and the actor’s characterisation invested in it. It is a culmination – a sign of mainstream comedy’s power to move people, to be welcomed into the homes it initially invaded. This is something all comedians (whether they’re at the dark/cult/niche end of the spectrum like Jerry Sadowitz, or mainstream stars like Graham Norton, or somewhere in between like me) should celebrate. It shows the power of comedy. It’s why television commissioners persevere with it when it’s much more expensive than, for example, cookery programmes. They know how great the potential rewards in audience numbers and appreciation can be.

Those cool comedy fans, who turn their noses up at
Only Fools and Horses
, never sneer at Basil Fawlty thrashing his car with a sapling. That scene also usually comes high in the favourite clip polls and, in isolation, is equally unsophisticated. But
Fawlty Towers
isn’t such a slow-moving target. For all its popularity, it also has comic credibility. When the aficionados of edgy comedy see that clip, they don’t just see slapstick – they see the greatest sitcom character ever created giving vent to his frustration. Yet they don’t give
Only Fools and Horses
fans credit for appreciating Del Boy in the same way.

Fawlty Towers
is in fact a rare exception to the sell-out argument: the certainty of some fans that cultish comedy gets worse when it gets successful. This argument makes me uncomfortable. While wide appeal is no guarantee of artistic merit, neither is obscurity. The cachet of non-mainstream or obscure comedy is all tied in, to my mind, with notions of what’s cool. And that gets my hackles up. Comedy shouldn’t be swayed by what’s cool. Some people say it’s cool to be funny – if so, that has to remain completely incidental. Let’s not allow the comedy world to become any more infected with empty-headed notions of trendiness, fashion and zeitgeist or we’ll be reduced to the absurdities of the music industry.

It may be cool to be funny, but people who try too hard to be cool, who make that their primary aim, are laughable. It’s no coincidence that Del Boy’s exact words, before falling through the bar, are: ‘Play it nice and cool, son, nice and cool.’

People who aspire to be cool are one of the main groups that comedians prey on. But it’s difficult for us to do that if we’ve been reduced to having the same hollow aim ourselves. Far better to aspire to be a mainstream family comedian. The very greatest comedies –
Fawlty Towers
is a shining example, as are
The Morecambe and Wise Show
and
The Simpsons
– are as funny for niche comedy fans as they are for the mainstream family audience. Like panoramic views, they can be enjoyed by all.

As I stare down Primrose Hill, taking in the London skyline, I feel somehow important and victorious. I’m sure the appeal of high ground is an evolutionary thing. When you’ve got a good vantage point, you know you’re relatively safe.

By the end of prep school, I had this feeling a lot of the time. Nervous though I was about it, the whole growing up thing was basically going okay. It felt like I was occupying high ground with a good view of a promising future. I wasn’t just a tedious, bookish nerd – I had the beginnings of a personality. I’d also had a tiny but instructive experience of injustice and adversity, and been given a few ideas about how to cope with it.

I’m a bit worried about telling this story because I’m not sure it reflects very well on me. I might come across as a little shit who bears grudges, and that is the last thing that even little shits who bear grudges want to come across as. Well, I say last – it’s preferable to ‘paedophile’. But it’s not ideal. Still, I’m going to take the plunge because one of the things you’ve presumably bought this book for is to find out what I might actually be like. So even if I reveal truths that make you think less of me, you’ll also think more of me for revealing those truths honestly, right? I might end up about evens, in terms of what you think, and a quid up for what you paid for the book in Poundland. Unless you’ve borrowed it from a library – but fortunately, libraries are all being closed down while Poundlands are opening everywhere. I think it’s to do with the Big Society.

Okay, here we go then. There was an annual academic prize called the ‘Form Prize’. In my second year, I won it. In my third year, Butch called me into his study to explain that, while I deserved to win it again, they’d decided to give it to another boy because I’d won it the previous year and they wanted to spread around the encouraging book tokens. Magnanimously, I thanked him and said that I understood.

The following year, I once again did best in the exams and was not awarded the prize – but neither, on this occasion, was I granted an explanatory interview with Butch. My mother went spare. She had a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the school’s attitude, you see. She thought that it was biased in favour of boys whose parents were dons at the university and slightly scornful of the likes of us – former hotel managers, now lowly polytechnic lecturers. The father of the boy who won was an English fellow of an ancient college. Furthermore, a boy in another form whose family also had university connections had won a prize
every year
. There was no talk of giving it to someone else to spread the love where he was concerned.

Mum felt, and told me, that the school didn’t quite like the idea of a bright boy not coming from academic stock but from trade. She also, in rather more respectful language, made her feelings known to the headmaster. It’s interesting to note that this is a woman who, only four or five years earlier, seemed perfectly happy for another school to send me home covered in sick. But this suspicion of bias was enough to make her speak out. I don’t know if this was a sign of her growing confidence, her prioritising of the academic over the alimentary, or just inconsistency. I’ve never asked her. I suspect I will get an answer soon after publication.

Anyway, she extorted an apology from Butch, delivered personally to me in a moment of acute embarrassment for both of us, and got him to concede that the prize was rightfully mine (although I didn’t actually receive it – nobody suggested that the winner should be stripped of it like an Olympic medallist after a drugs test). The following year I won it again – and the year after that. She’d made her point. Or perhaps she’d just terrified him.

I don’t know if my mum was right about this bias. At the time, I accepted unquestioningly that she was. After all, I was being told it by the same person who had introduced me to the notion that it might not always be a good idea to shit in my trousers; looking to corroborate all facts when dealing with your parents can be a barrier to development in early childhood. Bias or not, it was unfair I hadn’t won, but was she right to speak out? Or should she have told me to accept the injustice as the way of the world, or reminded me that one boy’s academic attainment in a prep school didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? (My mother talks exactly like Humphrey Bogart.) Whose sense of perspective was at fault – hers (and mine) at the time, or mine remembering years later and wishing she hadn’t said anything because the teachers must have thought I was a horrible, snotty little swot? And an unconnected one at that.

I think I’m now glad she spoke out and explained her reasons to me. It gave me a small insight into how authority can be flawed and unjust – that the people in charge aren’t always right. I don’t want this to sound like a clip from
The X Factor
but, in order to succeed, you have to endure periods where the only support your ambitions receive is from your own self-belief. And your mum.

But what the hell, it’s an unfortunate world. The majority of the vast population of Bangladesh live on a flood plain. It was good for me that, when I turned thirteen and strode out from New College School with as much confidence as I ever have about any new experience (i.e. not much), I was armed not only with a reasonable level of belief in my own intelligence and personality but also with the unsettling knowledge that life isn’t fair.

- 15 -

Teenage Thrills: First Love, and the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition

Down from Primrose Hill, parked on Regent’s Canal near London Zoo, teetering on the edge of the water, is a Chinese restaurant. On a boat. It’s one of the most inviting-looking restaurants I’ve ever seen: two storeys high and delicate, like an elaborate, claret-coloured imperial barge. It actually looks delicious. I’ve passed it many times, so the fact that I’ve never gone in must show how much I dislike Chinese food.

Whenever a plan to eat out is in the offing, my priority is always to push fellow diners towards a venue where one of the many things I already know I like will be available – which means that my comparative unfamiliarity with Chinese, and for that matter Japanese, cuisine becomes self-perpetuating.

I realise it’s not logical. If I’d never tried new things I’d still be eating rusks and goo. Somehow my food tastes have become acceptably broad and I’m grateful for that, even as I call a halt to further broadening. I’m glad I’m not one of those people who are genuinely intimidated by menus and are always trying to order something plain. They get silently sneered at for their fussiness – it’s considered unsophisticated.

These people, I’m afraid, include those who suffer from ‘wheat intolerance’. I know there is such a thing, which can afflict even the sturdiest, most no-nonsense of souls and causes the consumption of foods containing wheat to bring on unpleasant symptoms that, while not at the same level as an allergic reaction, the sufferer would still want to do something about, such as stopping eating wheat, and that wouldn’t necessarily make them a tedious, attention-seeking wuss.

However, I think the vast majority of people who cite the condition
are
tedious, attention-seeking wusses who mistake the normal symptoms of daily life – feeling sluggish after meals, tired in the morning, hungry before breakfast and generally not as though they want to leap around like someone in an advert – for there being something wrong with them. It’s not just wheat they’re intolerant of, it’s everything. They’re so dissatisfied with the sensation of being human, with the world’s constant assaults on the temples that are their bodies, that they’re now unwilling even to coexist with a grain.

I sometimes think about this when I’m sitting on my special back-pain-reducing giant yoga ball. Basically, I’ve become chair intolerant. For me, the furniture equivalent of a wheat rejector, the long-established human way of sitting, handed down through the millennia, has been dispensed with in under a generation. Now we suddenly know better. Unlike all those stupid twats from the past who were wrong about everything. Those sexist, racist, homophobic idiots like Henry VIII, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Beethoven, Aristotle, Florence Nightingale and Julius Caesar. They didn’t understand human rights and the solar system, so why should we have any faith in their recipes or furniture designs? We’re so much wiser now, so let’s throw the eating bread and milk, using normal soap and sitting on proper chairs baby out with the stopping women from voting bathwater.

That’s my problem with new-age stuff. In common with many irrational views it harks back to a sense of something ancient while rejecting anything provably historical. It’s like the miserable concept of Original Sin. There seems to be an obsession with the idea that there were ancient humans, uncorrupted by their capricious intellects, who lived in the ‘right way’.

They didn’t eat too much dairy or any wheat. They didn’t sit down too long for their spines or walk around in posture-ruining shoes. They didn’t consume too many sugars or fats for their unblemished guts to digest, or pop painkilling and antibiotic tablets to deal with the short-term symptoms of long-term problems that should be dealt with by wholesale lifestyle change. They didn’t drink or smoke. They were perfect and we should sling out all our stuff and emulate them. Except they had an average life expectancy of about 18 and the planet could only support a few hundred thousand of them. Apart from that, good plan.

But I am capable of sitting on a normal chair to have a meal. So nobody could call me fussy. I don’t insist on a ball. I won’t even mention it. To see me out dining, you’d never suspect I was anything other than a conventional, non-intolerant fellow. And the last thing I’d want to do is cock up this excellent semblance of normality by being fussy about my food. So, I avoid going to Chinese restaurants. I never know what everything is, what to order, how many of these things constitute a proper meal. I can just about cope with chopsticks but I’m not comfortable with them and I feel self-conscious. Yet I lack the social confidence to ask for a knife and fork.

I know I should get a grip (metaphorically – a lighter grasp seems better with chopsticks) but the trouble is that I don’t tire readily enough of the dishes I already like to incentivise a search for new flavours. I would get bored if I had steak and chips for every meal. But I’m pretty sure that if I had it for one in four meals, I’d be fine. If it were one in ten, I’d be thrilled every time. Which means I only really need ten things I like in order not to be bored – and I’ve long since overshot that. So why would I go to restaurants with weird cutlery where they don’t serve any of them?

The culinarily adventurous often deploy the phrase ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’ to try and persuade me – but I just think: ‘Well that’s all right then.’ Imagine if I’d never tried alcohol and didn’t know what I was missing there – well, that would be brilliant! I’d find other ways of avoiding boredom – read more, work harder, go to the theatre and cinema more often, and I wouldn’t have this expensive, health-jeopardising habit. I’m very glad I don’t know what I’m missing where cocaine’s concerned.

I’m not saying Chinese food is a global scourge similar to alcohol and cocaine. But there was a terrible Chinese takeaway in Abingdon which once made me iller than either of them ever has. (To be fair, cocaine hasn’t really had a fair crack of the whip.) It left me with images of beansprouts and gloop, saccharine-tasting, psychedelic-coloured sauces clinging to gristly lumps of meat, of which Chinese restaurant food today, although better, still puts me in mind.