David Mitchell: Back Story (33 page)

(-es).

In the show, Rob and I played the supposed representatives of this sponsor, unimaginatively named Gunther and Klaus. The opening scene included a joke by James Bachman, which may be my favourite of all the jokes I’ve ever performed on stage. Gunther and Klaus are performing sections of
Strike a Light – My Künty Career
, the autobiography of the matches’ inventor Dr Hermann Künty, who was a well-connected German industrialist in the 1930s.

They take up a position.

KLAUS:         Hello, Dr Künty.

GUNTHER:   Hello, Herr Hitler. I have heard so much about you.

KLAUS:         All good, I hope.

It was our most successful Edinburgh show ever, which isn’t actually saying much, but it was well reviewed and sold out the whole run and, back in London, even more people wanted to give us cups of tea and talk about our ideas.

Among those who meant business were David Tyler and Geoff Posner. Geoff’s first directing job had been
Not the Nine O’Clock News
and he’d worked with most British TV comedy stars who’d come to prominence since. David had cut his teeth on
Spitting Image
and
Absolutely
. The pair’s own company had recently made
Coogan’s Run
and
Dinnerladies
and they wanted their next project to be with us. They quickly obtained a BBC commission for a TV script in the style of our Edinburgh shows – a silly story full of characters all of which were to be played by us. The idea was that, in a series, each episode would have a different context – the Middle Ages, Outer Space, Snooker in the 1970s, the Wild West – but the characters would recur, a bit like
The Goon Show
. The working title was
Extraordinary Tales of Exceptional Goodness
.

This was a very exciting prospect. It was only a script commission but David and Geoff weren’t time-wasters. They were funny and successful, and the show, if we could get it made, might be relatively original. Original in TV terms – in that it would be a rip-off of a show that happened forty years before, rather than six months ago. It would also be the natural continuation of the stage shows Rob and I had been writing for years. If we could make this show for the BBC and
Daydream Believers
for Channel 4, maybe after a second series of
Bruiser
, we’d be well set-up men indeed.

And still more people wanted to have meetings with us, although they seemed less exciting now that we had so much proper work. As I surveyed the enviable position I found myself in at the start of the new millennium, as I looked proudly at my new BBC diary for the year 2000, I remembered that Rob and I had agreed to meet a couple of jobbing writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, to talk about an idea they’d had. We’d met them on an ill-fated team-writing project organised by David Tomlinson, which attempted to make eight men committee-write a sitcom about squatters. Nothing came of it but we’d got on well with Sam and Jesse. We liked what they’d written and vice versa.

We’ve got a bit too much on, we thought. We’re getting proper commissions now. But it would be rude to refuse to see them for a chat – we didn’t want to seem grand. Still, we were experienced enough to know that nothing ever came of that sort of meeting.

- 28 -

The Magician

‘Well, they’ve got a brand new cooker now, so we’re having to shoot it all the other way.’

‘How’s that going to work?’ I said. ‘It’s POV – the camera has to keep swinging round. How can two people have a conversation in a tiny kitchen without either of them catching a glimpse of the cooker?’

‘It’s going to be tricky.’

‘Anyway, how come they’re messing about, changing their kitchen? You’ve paid them a location fee.’

‘That’s how they bought the cooker.’

‘Terrific.’

‘We’re also a bit worried about Rob’s tan.’

‘What about it?’ asked Rob.

‘Well, you haven’t got it any more.’

‘Yes, well it’s February now –’

‘It’s March.’

‘Shut up, David. So what do you want me to do – go to the solarium?’

‘We haven’t really got the budget for that.’

This is how I remember the conversation Rob and I had with the producer, Andrew O’Connor, in early 2002 as we returned to the tiny flat where, eight months earlier, we’d made a ten-minute ‘taster tape’ for Channel 4 of a programme called ‘POV’. The channel had apparently enjoyed the taste – the way it was filmed from the two main characters’ point of view was deemed to have worked and they’d liked the interior monologues – but not quite enough for a whole meal (or series – I’m going to abandon this metaphor with the parting image of
EastEnders
being a seemingly endless supply of gallon after gallon of gruel). Instead they’d asked us to show them the other half of the episode – the end of the story which had started in the taster tape. The only trouble was that we hadn’t shot the other half so we were doing that now.

‘This,’ I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘is not the way television should be commissioned and made. We make a thing on the cheap, hoping against hope that its potential will show through the low production values. It takes us two days to shoot the ten minutes but, it seems, over half a year for the execs to watch it – and then they ask for the impossible.’

I wanted us to say: ‘That’s not the deal – you don’t get to see the second half because you didn’t pay us to make it. Make the call, commission a series – or even a proper pilot where we’re not slipping a couple of flatmates a cooker’s worth of cash on the quiet to make themselves scarce over a weekend. This is not how things should be organised!’

I have this feeling so often when making TV. With huge amounts of money at stake, stupid costs are cut and compromises made, causing crews on the ground, who are actually trying to make the programmes, huge logistical problems. I always angrily want the suits in offices who make arbitrary budgetary or policy decisions to come and answer for it at seven in the morning in a freezing field. Why was
Comedy Nation
made in a disused office while proper TV studios lay idle two floors below? Why do money constraints mean that sunny picnic scenes have to be shot in the pouring rain; that hundreds of man hours are wasted, when shooting at a cheap location near Heathrow, waiting for the tiny quieter intervals between planes passing overhead; that cutting back on vehicles means props and costumes get left at the previous location by tired, over-worked people, causing more hours to be wasted and costs to be incurred which are much higher than having an extra car on stand-by? These costs, which look cuttable on a balance sheet in an office, are slashed through with the pen of someone who doesn’t have to live with the consequences of their actions. Meanwhile vast sums are thoughtlessly spent on public relations, rebranding, expensive advertisements, management consultants, etc. I’m not just talking about the BBC or Channel 4 but all of them, by the way – all broadcasters, all production companies, probably all large organisations. The consequences of bad decisions made by essentially unaccountable managers make me want to scream.

And yet, what do the TV crews do? They work round the problems. They wait for the missing prop and agree to work late. They listen uncomplainingly for the gap between planes. They make the show happen. This is a far nobler response than mine – and it keeps in mind the most important truth: that it’s fun and a privilege to get to make TV shows, particularly comedy shows, and we should be grateful for any opportunity, however compromised by managerial incompetence, to do so.

This was very much the approach of the producer of ‘POV’. Andrew O’Connor, whose fledgling company Objective Productions had made the taster tape, was of the opinion that we could work with all difficulties. We’d film round the cooker, we’d put a bit of fake tan on Rob, we’d make the second half of the taster tape like good boys and girls. Keep them sweet and we might just get a series.

Andrew O’Connor is one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met. A child actor, former Young Magician of the Year, impressionist and quiz show host, he was one of the last old-school non-alternative comedians. He became famous by the old route, having been a Pontin’s Blue Coat. One of his best stories is of the time that Bruce Forsyth explained to him the technique for changing your trousers in the gents of a club without trailing any part of them on the inevitably piss-drizzled floor. The first stage, as I remember it, is to grip the end of one or both of the trouser legs between your teeth.

Unlike colleagues of his such as Gary Wilmot and Bobby Davro, Andrew saw which way the wind was blowing in the early ’90s and, after stints in musicals and as a theatre director, he dramatically changed career paths and went into independent television production. When Rob and I first met him, over a coffee with Sam and Jesse in the memorable surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects building on Portland Place, he was charming, energetic and obviously intelligent. But could we trust him? His company had made no more than a couple of children’s shows – certainly no comedy. I don’t think there were even any permanent staff. Could we believe him when he said that he, a former star of
Copycats
, a conjurer, a song-and-dance man, aspired to make the kind of comedy that we were into? Was he the right man to bring a dark show about loneliness and self-doubt in an urban environment to the screen? I don’t think any of us were sure he was – I don’t think Channel 4 were either – but somehow, as we struggled with kitchen and sun tan discontinuity, we were all going along with it.

If we did get a series, it would be mainly thanks to Sam and Jesse for having written a terrific script. It felt like a long shot, though, and all four of us had higher hopes for the proper sitcom we were simultaneously pitching to the BBC. It was called
All Day Breakfast
(for reasons none of us ever quite understood) and it was also about two flatmates who didn’t get on. A feckless layabout, played by Rob, and a dutiful dolt, by me. It was going to be a proper big studio sitcom; we’d done a reading of a pilot script only a couple of weeks earlier for the controllers of BBC Two and BBC Three, which seemed to have gone down very well except for the fact that the controller of BBC Three hadn’t turned up.

The idea for
All Day Breakfast
had been hatched in the early weeks of the new millennium, as a result of the original meeting with Sam and Jesse that we’d squeezed in only to be polite. They’d treated us to tea and sandwiches at a little café between Wigmore Street and Oxford Street and basically said: ‘How about the four of us try and do that team-writing thing properly? And, if the show gets off the ground, you two can star in it as far as we’re concerned.’

Sam and Jesse are immediately engaging and entertaining people to spend time with – they’re funny and interesting but they don’t have the attention-grabbing megalomaniacal streak that compromises the personalities of most professional performers. We thought they were very talented and would be good people to work with. We were already involved in far too many other projects but we said yes to working with them mainly so as not to be rude. (You may begin to understand why we were involved in far too many other projects.) Nothing has ever made me gladder that I was brought up to be civil.

But by 2002 we were feeling a bit less busy anyway. We’d had a few knocks.
Bruiser
had been broadcast in February 2000 and no one had really noticed. We’d got the odd negative review but basically been ignored. And then we heard nothing. I don’t think it was ever even axed. It was insufficiently important to warrant the meeting time for the bigwigs to decide not to order more. But it gradually became clear that it wasn’t coming back.

Our pilot of
Daydream Believers
(broadcast as a
Comedy Lab
in 2001), in advance of which we’d written and agonised over four or five new scripts, had also been received with a rapturous silence. Though it was too painful for me to admit at the time, we hadn’t made a very good job of it in the end. It came out as somehow just muted and odd. I realise now that it should have been an audience sitcom, like it had been in the Sitcom Festival. The characters were eccentric enough and the dialogue sufficiently cheesy and gag-bearing that it could sustain the sound of audience laughter – and indeed needed it. As well as Colin and Ray, Rob and I also played two characters in a parallel universe of Ray’s creating. These were Info, a man pretending to be a robot, and an evil space villain called Baron Amstrad (this was nearly a decade before Alan Sugar’s ennoblement). We thought it was funny but it was fairly wacky stuff. Shot single camera, in a supposedly realistic style, it seemed hollow.

Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness
had also hit a brick wall. We’d written and rewritten a script of which we were really proud and the BBC had um’d and ah’d and then suggested a reading.

This is my second mention of a ‘reading’, so I should explain what I mean. It is the habit in television comedy not to trust decision-makers, whose main job is to read scripts and decide whether they’re of sufficient quality to warrant production, to be able to do so. The received wisdom is that they need to be helped to imagine what it would be like if the words on the pages were spoken by actors in a funny way. So little half-rehearsed plays are put on for them, just in offices, with actors hired for the afternoon, holding scripts in their hands, miming the mimable stage directions (e.g. ‘he takes a sip of water’) while others are read out (e.g. ‘a fireball rips through the ice cream parlour’). It’s all an attempt to give a sense of how something might be televised.

This is another thing that makes me want to scream (maybe I just, in general, fancy a scream; it might do me good if I occasionally had one). Obviously reading a script and seeing its potential is a skill that not everyone possesses – but highly paid commissioning jobs in television should be the preserve of those who do. I feel that making a small, under-rehearsed, un-costumed attempt to make it seem exciting and televisual is a deeply flawed strategy: the commissioner sees something clunky and amateurish which cannot possibly live up to the production values of their imagination. Better, I always think, to refuse to do a reading and just provide a script. Then, if the decision-makers want to see that dialogue or action played out, they’ll have to at least pay for a pilot to be made.