David Mitchell: Back Story (21 page)

I’m really not as bitter as this makes me sound, or at least not in the case of the
Cinderella
audition. They thought I was funny and gave me a recall for the show, which I was hugely excited about, a feeling I didn’t yet know I was supposed to conceal. Like a goth looking at a winkle-picker, all my desire was flaming in contemplation of Cambridge, acting, the theatre and, most of all, Footlights.

- 19 -

God Is Love

I’m passing a round church: All Souls’, at the top of Regent Street, next to Broadcasting House. It’s only really the entrance that’s round – the porch bit under the spire. In Cambridge, next to the Footlights clubroom, there’s a properly round church. A lot of students from my college seemed to attend services there – people I was chatty with for the first few weeks and seldom spoke to afterwards. With that guilty thought, I’m glad to turn down Cavendish Place and leave it behind.

For the first couple of weeks at Cambridge, I thought maybe everyone was Christian. When I arrived at Peterhouse, there was a nice note in my pigeon-hole from a group of second-years asking me round for a cup of tea. I jumped at this opportunity, as I’m sure most people jump at any sign of friendliness when they first arrive somewhere strange. Certainly, when I went round for tea, a lot of other freshers seemed to be there. It was all very friendly – a bit boring, a bit safe, as conversations between strangers often are, particularly when most of them are nervous and homesick – but a reassuring induction into a new place and a good way of meeting the other recent arrivals.

And that’s how the first few days were. We freshers would meet up for cups of tea and biscuits with one or other of this friendly group of half a dozen second years who had taken it upon themselves to be so welcoming. And, as you will have suspected, they kept mentioning church – in a very natural, low-key way. ‘We’ll be going to church on Sunday’ … ‘We go to the Round Church’ … ‘Do come to the college Christian society lunch’ … and all we freshers nodded along.

I don’t think there was anything sinister about this. They were never nasty about my not going and, as people who thought it was good to go to church, it’s natural that they should advocate it. They thought it would be a good use of my time, to say the least. And I’m not even sure they really advocated it, they just mentioned they were going.

What amuses me in retrospect is that I was so baffled by the experience of being somewhere new on my own, so weirdly deracinated, that I genuinely thought: of course! This is a Christian country. I’ve massively over-estimated the pace of historical change and my background must be much less normal than I’ve always assumed. It turns out, basically,
everyone
is still C of E. That’s what’s still going on: everyone’s still going to church every week apart from my mother, who’s a Christian Scientist and goes somewhere different (Why does our family always have to do something weird, I used to grumble. It was the same when they bought me that odd brand of disc drive for my BBC Micro which my dad said was better, but I just wanted the one everyone else was getting), and my dad, whose religion is ‘Ask your mother’. So fine, everyone in Britain is still Christian.

I’m not being sarcastic when I say ‘fine’. I really would have been fine with that, if that was the system. I can spare an hour a week and I like a bit of ritual, a bit of a routine. If I’d grown up, as most humans have throughout history, in an unquestioning religious community I would happily have gone along with that – probably not got too involved but certainly not been the first to quibble with it. In fact, I would have been grateful not to be encouraged to address the eternal questions on my own. I would have been soothed by the solace it provided and avoided over-analysing it for fear that it might collapse in my head if I did. And I wouldn’t have been stuck, as I am now, an agnostic who vaguely feels there might be a God and likes carol services, hemmed in by enthusiastic worshippers pushing various morally discredited organisations on the one hand, and the Dawkins brigade gleefully telling children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist on the other. For the week when I was duped into thinking that we were still a Christian country, I was happily looking forward to some hymn-singing and certainty.

A lot of people assume I’m an atheist. I can see why. I don’t seem to be practising any religion and I slag off homeopathy and astrology a lot. I think there is a perception that I have a rational and analytical approach to the world. I certainly try to, as far as is consistent with an aversion to the cracks between paving stones and to page numbers in books containing recurrent digits. But, yes, I try to analyse things rigorously – partly because that’s a good approach to life in general and partly because it’s easier to find comic angles that way than by trying to nudge myself into flights of surreal invention.

What I don’t understand is why so many people, the religious and the irreligious alike, have swallowed the idea that atheism is the most rational conclusion to draw about humanity’s position and state of grace. Even those who oppose atheism do so in terms of its being too rational: lacking imagination or faith. ‘Just because there’s no actual reason to believe in something doesn’t mean it can’t be there,’ they say.

But atheism isn’t the most rational approach – agnosticism is. You can’t know, so it’s irrational to say that you do. An atheist or religious observant might counter that agnosticism – saying you don’t know if there’s a God or gods – isn’t a conclusion at all. They’d have a point – but in that case, I say it’s irrational to draw a conclusion. We don’t know and we can’t know.

Atheism also requires a leap of faith, albeit a nihilistic one. It might as well be a religion – many of its adherents evangelise about their philosophy and beliefs as much as the religious do. They claim their opinions to be certainties. They viciously criticise those who believe otherwise. They are, in some cases, emotionally attached to the idea that there’s no God and dislike being gainsaid as much as a Pope or an Ayatollah does. They then wrap up this annoyance as anger at the terrible suffering religion has brought to the world – as if they truly think it’s the religious beliefs themselves, rather than humanity’s in-built urges to kill, persecute and suppress, that led to the Crusades or the Troubles or the failure to address the AIDS Pandemic.

Don’t they get it? Humans will always find an excuse. The avowedly atheist communist states of the twentieth century killed greater numbers than any regimes before or since and needed no religious justification. A politically ideological one served just as well. Humans don’t kill, or boss each other around, or say sex is evil and should be controlled or that certain people are wicked and should be oppressed, or that certain clothes are inappropriate or compulsory, because of their religious beliefs – we do it because some of us want to and religion is a convenient excuse. Atheists are being incredibly naïve if they think that, in the absence of religion, other reasons won’t be found for disguising violence as virtue – or indeed that atheist belief systems aren’t just as potentially susceptible to murderous extremism as any of the religions they oppose.

Sorry, I don’t mean this to be a diatribe against atheism. Believe me, I get just as cross with aggressive god-botherers. Just as cross, though. No crosser. I’m always struck by how similar the two groups seem, and how we poor agnostics, who aren’t trying to convince anyone of anything, are laid siege to by these irreconcilable yet uncannily similar groups.

I’m striding along the north side of Cavendish Square now, heading west. I pass a man with lots of piercings, including one of those massive ones where the lobe-hole is widened by the earring so that you could almost get an egg through it. You can see air and sky the other side, as if you’re peering into another dimension. I try not to stare – but at the same time, surely, on some level, he wants me to stare? I mean, it’s there to be noticeable, right? Maybe even to look nice? Is it okay to stare as long as, if questioned, I say: ‘I like the huge hole you’ve fashioned in your ear’?

But have I stooped to the reasoning of the tit-starers? ‘If she didn’t want me to gawp, she shouldn’t wear a low-cut dress!’ That’s certainly not a line of argument with which I want to associate myself even if, to be honest, I can’t immediately see the flaw in it. But it’s definitely a very stupid thing to say, as I assume it’s likely to annoy women showing a lot of cleavage – and that’s not something that it’s in the interests of anyone apt to tit-stare to do.

Or is the ear hole supposed to look challenging? A big ‘fuck you’ to all the tweedy hypocrisy that I stand for, striding through Cavendish Square in my jacket and cords, too complacent to self-mutilate in the face of a horrible world. Or maybe, among his group of friends, everyone’s got massive holes in their ears so it just seems normal. Perhaps, if I asked him, he’d say: ‘Ooh, I don’t really think about it – I’m just used to it being there’ – like I am with a pocket handkerchief.

The second thing I noticed about Robert Webb was his earring. The first was that he was holding a gun. That’s a lie. I was just trying to take a leaf out of Raymond Chandler’s book but I haven’t lived an exciting enough life. No, the first thing was his long hair – by which I mean the fact that it was long. I don’t want to accidentally sound romantic: ‘As soon as he walked in I was dazzled by the sheen of his golden locks.’ No, I noticed he had long hair which, I’m sure he’ll mind me saying, at that point in his life was a touch mullety.

He looked like a bit of a rebel, a bit cool, left-wing, metrosexual. ‘Even if almost everyone’s Christian, I bet he isn’t,’ I thought. He certainly didn’t seem very Footlights, which was surprising because he was one of only two second-years on the Footlights committee and, consequently, automatically got through to the recall audition stage for
Cinderella
. The recalls were held in groups, which was the occasion of our meeting.

I know it’s a bit of an obvious thing to say about someone with whom I was soon to form a twenty-year double act but, as soon as the audition started, I thought he was funny. We were reading out little sections of script as a group and he made every character he played properly, physically funny. One of the reasons I was struck by it is that he didn’t look like he was going to be funny. He looked like he was going to be serious and talk about politics and betrayal – he came across a bit mopey, a bit damaged. But then suddenly he was putting on a silly voice and pretending to be an old-school musical entertainer, a pampered effete prince, an unhinged and impish king or a comedically tedious palace servant. Those were the parts we were auditioning for. I expect you can guess which ones he and I were cast in. Unfortunately I can’t hear if your guesses are correct because this medium is so damned uninteractive. Well, he was the prince and I was the palace servant. Did you get it right? Why aren’t you answering me?

That Footlights show,
Cinderella
, was by far the most exciting thing that I’d had anything to do with in my life so far. I don’t know that it was a particularly brilliant show – although I think it had its moments, and it was well received by packed houses of drunken students – but being involved in it felt amazing. Comedy and acting had been obsessions of mine throughout my teens but I’d hardly ever got the chance, or been enterprising enough to make the chance, to actually do much of it. It had all been watching videos, listening to cassettes and writing a few sketches that were never performed. Saying you wanted to be a comedian didn’t feel any more worth the breath at Abingdon School or Oxford University Press than saying you wanted to fly. But suddenly I was in an environment where loads of people were openly sharing their ambitions to act, write, sing, improvise comic characters or do stand-up.

And we were getting to put on this huge show, with a large cast and a band and an original comic script and songs and a big colourful set and even a couple of pyros for the finale. I suppose I’d doubted that Footlights, and Cambridge drama in general, would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be. In that term of rehearsals and performances, I found it to be so much more than I’d hoped. Not necessarily in terms of the quality of the shows we put on (they were seldom ‘professional standard’ although that was always the boast) but in the vibrancy of the creative atmosphere. This was a place to play, full of people of like mind. My hopes and ambitions crystallised very quickly in the autumn of 1993. I realised I wanted to be a comedian and an actor – to entertain, to write jokes, to be on TV like the people I’d admired through my teens. And I was in an environment where that all felt eminently achievable. It didn’t feel like the ridiculous long-shot that in fact it was.

Robert Webb – Rob to me – wasn’t the only friend and future collaborator I met on
Cinderella
. I got to know a whole new circle of exciting people, many of whom went into entertainment or broadcasting in one way or another: there were the writers of the show, Dan Mazer (who I met at the squash) and James Bachman, a comic actor and writer who I think I find more naturally, effortlessly amusing than anyone else I’ve met. There was Robert Thorogood, then president of Footlights, who played one of the ugly sisters and now writes the BBC One drama
Death in Paradise
, and his girlfriend Katie Breathwick, now a radio presenter. They got married after leaving Cambridge; it was at Katie’s behest that I wore a spy’s trilby to the National Gallery in order to pass Robert T a special birthday microfilm.

And of course Olivia Colman – Sarah Colman then, but always known as Collie – a brilliant actress with whom I’ve been lucky enough to work almost as often as I have with Rob. She’s tremendously nice and kind, without being the sort of tremendously nice person who doesn’t like it when you make horrible jokes about other people. On
Peep Show
, I married her. I think I made a good choice. Shame we got divorced.

I think it was Collie more than anyone else who made me realise that Footlights was a totally different environment from a school play. She was a first-year (at Homerton, the teacher training college – in fact, she never finished her degree but subsequently went to drama school) so I had her pegged as a beginner in the acting world, like me. She certainly seemed a bit ditzy – fun, funny, good company, but not what you’d call focused. She seemed talented in rehearsals, but slightly ‘all over the place’ and easily distracted.