David Mitchell: Back Story (28 page)

No one can spot an actor’s flaws as quickly and as mercilessly as an out-of-work actor. ‘I could do this!’ Rob and I thought and said to each other. Having so recently left an environment where you could just roll your sleeves up and get involved, this was a very frustrating feeling.

But I used to enjoy watching the productions decline. The one I saw most often, because it was on at a time when I had absolutely nothing else to do with my life so I was ushering every shift I could get, was
Mrs Warren’s Profession
. All I can now remember about that show, which at one point I could practically recite, is a moment when one character, a personable old duffer, meets a younger, more serious character. They shake hands. Early in the run, the old chap had done a very subtle movement or gesture to indicate that the younger man’s handshake had been rather too firm. It was beautifully done and got a big laugh. I then had the pleasure of watching that moment deteriorate.

The actor’s reaction got larger as the audience response got smaller. You could tell he was worrying about it between shows, fretting over how to recapture that comic moment from earlier in the run. Sadly for him he only ever came up with the same answer: he needed to do it
more
. He started to wince and exhale visibly. The laughs got quieter. He cheated his body round to project his apparent discomfort across the stalls. They got quieter still. ‘Why aren’t they noticing?’ he must have wondered. By the end of the run he was desperately wrenching the tiniest titter from the crowd with a shameless piece of tremendous ham.

But such moments of schadenfreude were few and far between. Mainly I was wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and bitterly reflecting how I had left everything too late. Why didn’t I have an agent? Because I hadn’t really tried to get one – I hadn’t written to any agents and then I hadn’t rung them up and persuaded them to come and see shows at Cambridge or in Edinburgh. And now there wasn’t anything for them to come and see. Maybe I was too shit to be an actor or comedian, I bitterly reflected to myself in bed every lunchtime, but I hadn’t even checked.

I now know that persuading agents to attend student shows is like drawing teeth, so a concerted letter-writing and phone-call-making campaign might well have led to nothing. But still, as things were, I could hardly say I’d tried everything.

And actually, one agent did approach me early on. A good agent, Christian Hodell, who’d seen the Footlights show in Edinburgh, wrote and asked me to come and meet him. I knew very little about agents, having been too useless an idiot to find anything out, but Robert Thorogood told me that this guy was proper. The agency he worked for represented Fry and Laurie, Robert told me.

I thought that sounded bloody promising. Unfortunately our meeting was at 11 in the morning, and getting myself into the centre of London at that early hour was pretty much beyond me during this period. I’m serious, it felt impossible. It meant getting up in single figures – the wrong sort of single figures. As a student, I had had no early mornings. My mean time of rising was 1pm. My whole constitution was used to a ten- or eleven-hour sleep from about 3am onwards. Breaking that cycle for a day took a tremendous act of will.

I nearly managed it and arrived at Christian Hodell’s office, hair wet from the shower and armpits wet from the brisk hungover walk from the Tube, at about 11.13am, which I considered fairly respectable for an 11 o’clock meeting.

‘Hello, how are you?’ said Christian Hodell.

‘Nice to meet you. Very well, thanks.’

‘Well, I have a stye, so I’ve been better.’

Do you know what a stye is? It’s like a spot on your eyelid.

They can look a bit gruesome but they just go away – a bit like an aspirant comedian before lunchtime. This struck me as a very specific ailment for him to refer to. Not quite like saying piles but not like saying you’ve got a cold either. Like referring to a bad case of water on the knee. It made me slightly miss my conversational stride as I was checking in my head that a stye was what I thought it was, and that he hadn’t made a more serious revelation to which my reaction may have been deemed inadequate. He was also American and quite camp, which further rocked my little provincial soul, trembling in the face of London’s West End. But he was very nice about the show I’d been in and said he wasn’t saying he’d represent me yet but that we should keep in touch.

‘Great. Nice to meet you,’ I said as I left.

He never heard from me again. Good move, eh, Mitchell? It’s slightly embarrassing, having to ring people up and tell them what you’re doing. So I didn’t. Rob and I wrote and starred in a pantomime on the London Fringe over Christmas 1996, called
Oedipus the Pantomime
, in which I played Jocasta as a dame. It’s difficult to get agents to fringe venues, but one who
specifically asked me to keep him up to speed with what I was doing
might have been prevailed upon to come. But I never mentioned it. Neither did I mention the production of
The Miser
that Rob and I were also both in at a pub theatre in Camden in the spring, nor the production of
Latin!
, a play written by his own client Stephen Fry, that we did in Edinburgh that year, or our own two-man show that was on in the same venue. I told him nothing. I maintained a dignified silence. At some point, he rang up and said he sadly wasn’t able to represent me and suggested another couple of agents. I said that I understood. Looking back, he was lucky that I even took the bloody call.

Christian Hodell made one final attempt to help me. Later that year, after he’d let me down gently, I did send a photo and CV round to agents, including him. I got some serious-looking photographs taken by a friend and chose one to be blown up to 10x8 format and reproduced dozens of times. But the shop blew up the wrong photo. I didn’t notice until I’d got it home. It was quite a bad photo with my mouth sort of half open, looking weird. It was more appropriate to a charity’s website than the CV of an aspiring TV star. But the photos had cost me £70 and I didn’t have another £70 spare. I suppose I could have gone back to the shop and complained but this was not a good patch for me, competence-wise. So I sent them round anyway and heard nothing back except standard rejections. Except from Christian. He sent a note, which read something like this:

‘I hope you won’t think it’s not my place to say this but that is a TERRIBLE photo. Seriously. Don’t send any more out. Burn all copies.’

He was right. It was good and kind advice. But it was too late. ‘Well, looks like I’ve pretty much fucked up my whole life,’ I thought. I went next door: ‘Pub, anyone?’

Throughout that difficult time, what sustained me and distracted me, what helped me stick to my guns but also, for hours on end, leave my guns unattended, was the community of people I lived with in Swiss Cottage. Don’t be put off by the word ‘community’ – this wasn’t anything hippyish or communistic. It was three flats above the shops on Winchester Road (with entrances on Fellows Road), in a building that’s since been demolished, full of friends from Cambridge.

The first flat, 169 Fellows Road, had initially been rented by Katie Breathwick and passed on to Rob, Jon and Ellis a year later. Jon then noticed, in the summer of 1996, that two more flats were up for rent and suggested that some of his friends who were graduating that summer might want to take them as they were quite cheap and spacious. We jumped at the chance and so 161 and 163 Fellows Road were added to the roster.

I lived in 163 with Leila Hackett, Rob’s then girlfriend and a fellow Footlighter, and Sally Watson, Tom Hilton’s partner these days. Back then, Tom and Sally were entering the second year of an incredibly slow-moving Beatrice and Benedick mutual spikiness scenario. They’d gone out for about 25 minutes in 1994, then fallen out, then become friends who were ‘completely over each other’, then fallen out in a way that friends who are ‘completely over each other’ never do, then become friends again – and by friends I mean two people who constantly bickered. This remained the situation for about another eight years before they finally got together, a few months after the last person who always said to them ‘You two should get back together’ had stopped bothering to do so.

Tom lived in 161 with Charles Dean, who’d handled the technical side of Footlights for many years, and an ever-changing third occupant. Matthew Holness was there for a while, as were Robert Thorogood, James Bachman, Mark Evans and my friend Ed Paleit from school.

Because there were so many of us, we became a sort of centre of gravity for people who’d recently left Cambridge and wanted to act, write or tell jokes. We had quite a few parties, since all that involved was announcing the intention and buying a bottle each. Even such niceties as crisps and dips we considered to be the preserve of a royal garden party. In a way that was basically awful, friends started to refer to us as ‘Swiss College, Cambridge’.

It was like a sitcom. It really was. We were a bunch of fairly charismatic losers with lots of time on our hands. And funny things happened. Ellis came back from a long IT contract in France with case after case of cheap wine which turned out to be undrinkable, but we were so desperate to mobilise that alcohol resource that we spent more than the wine was worth on gallons of orange juice to mix it with, calling the resultant concoction Sangria. We invented a game called hand tennis, played on the roofs of the shop storerooms below, which had special rules for when the ball went into the fetid piles of bin bags or the area of discarded pot plants outside the doors of 161 and 163. One night, Rob and Jon, after several bottles of wine, decided to put some posters in frames up on the walls of 169. They literally smashed 60 per cent of them. That all sounds funny, doesn’t it? It felt it at the time. Maybe you had to be there.

I think we were a bit obsessed with its being like a sitcom, particularly those of us who aspired to write and/or be in a sitcom. The dream was to live glamorous and successful lives by being in funny shows about lovable failures. Instead we were broke, stuck in our flats watching
This Life
, a programme about glamorous, successful people our age. Everything seemed to be the wrong way round.

- 25 -

Real Comic Talent

I’m at the top of the Long Water, which is not a good place to be. I’ve dipped into Hyde Park to get away from the traffic noise, and of course this is a more attractive place to walk. It’s the kind of place where people without bad backs might stroll anyway, for non-medicinal reasons. For the sheer hell of it. Laughing about their healthy spines as they go. Lovely. There are fountains here and everything. Unfortunately, my bladder seems to be able to hear them. Somehow it’s been distracted by other thoughts since I swerved the public conveniences in Regent’s Park, but now it’s put its metaphorical hand to its metaphorical forehead and metaphorically said: ‘I knew there was something!’

That reminds me of a night on stage – or rather an afternoon. The production of
The Miser
on the London fringe that I mentioned may sound like an unusual gig for me. You probably think that a play by Molière is a bit arty for a low comedian. The whole
Oedipus the Pantomime
thing sounds a bit poncy too, I dare say, though only in the clever-clever undergraduate way that you’d expect. But a straightforward production of a classic play? You may doubt my long-term passion for French literature.

Well, rat correctly smelt. The main reason Rob and I took part in a production of
The Miser
was that it could be paid for by a tour of independent schools, in a way an original comedy show featuring the word ‘fuck’ could not. You pick a play that’s on the A-level syllabus, ring up a series of private schools, and say that you’re touring a production of it, suitable for teenagers, and would they like to book you in for a performance? You also offer to throw in some ‘theatre workshops’. Each school agrees to put us up for the night and pay a few hundred quid, which, if you get enough schools, covers production and transport costs, a bit of spending money for the cast and crew, and enough left over to hire the Etcetera Theatre, Camden, for a few weeks – so that we can invite agents along in the hope of using the production to kick-start our careers.

The Etcetera Theatre, Camden, I should add, is not a theatre. It’s a room above the Oxford Arms pub from which you can hear the football match being watched by the regulars downstairs. Nevertheless it is, for some reason, on the London theatre map. Agents, casting directors and the like have heard of it and, in a quiet week, can be prevailed upon to go there.

This seemed like a workable scheme (and less financially flawed than
Oedipus the Pantomime
, which I had largely bankrolled using dead relations’ bequests that had been in a Post Office savings account for my entire childhood, and for which hardly anyone had bought a ticket). Robert Thorogood was directing and he decided on a cast of four: Rob, who played Harpagon, the miser of the title; Thorogood himself, who played Cléante and Valère; Olivia Colman, who played Élise and Mariane; and me, who played everyone else. Let me tell you, this is not enough people to mount a production of
The Miser
.

Actually, though, I think we made a decent job of it. There was an ingenious set, built by Tom and Charles, which was easily transportable in a small van and looked like an old-fashioned pound note, but with lots of doors and flaps opening from it. All the doubling and costume changing added to the frenetic pace that Robert felt was crucial to the production. It wasn’t an atmospheric
Miser
, it wasn’t an insightful
Miser
, but it was quick and entertaining. It consciously borrowed the chaotic feeling which Rob’s and my two-man shows tended to have in their closing stages.

It was certainly good enough for schools and its flippancy alone ensured it went down well with sixth-formers. We were a bit worried about the ‘theatre workshops’ we’d promised as we had no idea what such things involved. But we reckoned none of the kids coming to them would either. I suggested we could paint their faces like clowns and show them how to balance a hockey stick on one finger, but nobody could believe a school would stand for that kind of crap.