David Mitchell: Back Story (24 page)

I don’t remember much about that night – because I was drunk, not because it blurs in with the myriad of other, similar encounters. I remember going back to her room. I remember having to go off and perform a sketch in a late-night revue at the ADC. I stumbled onto the stage, just about spat my lines out, got the giggles, finished the sketch and then hurried back to her. And I remember, quite clearly, forming the impression early on in the evening that the main reason she’d been attracted to me was that I was president of Footlights. I was one of the ‘famous’ people in the university and, because of that, she liked the idea of having got off with me. And, do you know what? I didn’t mind that at all. I was turned on by it. That status was something I valued and was proud of, so it seemed reasonable, complimentary even, that someone else should value it in me. This office, this job title, was, to my mind, the closest I could get to a proof of achievement – to having something to show for a string of successful but fleeting attempts to amuse students. So, if she found that attractive, it was fine by me.

It all felt terribly exciting. The next day it all felt terribly terrible. I was consumed by embarrassment and guilt and I didn’t really know why. I somehow felt as though I’d taken advantage of her. I didn’t
think
that – I knew it had all been her idea, even if I hadn’t taken much persuading – but that’s how I felt. I also didn’t want to see her ever again and felt guilty about that. Half of my brain felt that she must now think I was loathsome or ridiculous; the other half was scared that she might now want to be my girlfriend, the thought of which utterly appalled me. Not because she wasn’t perfectly nice but, I suppose, because she wasn’t perfect – unlike whoever it was I was hung up on at that point. The thought of having been intimate with someone I didn’t really know and, in the cold light of day, wasn’t particularly keen on, was excruciating. And I knew I couldn’t explain that to her. Of course I was wrong in thinking I’d have to. But I couldn’t shake the horrible sensation of having been dishonest and unfair.

I’ve had a few one-night stands since – not many but a few – and I’ve always felt the same. I’ve always deeply regretted it but never been quite sure why. I don’t think I’ve ever been nasty or unfair – I think that in every case the encounter was embraced in a mutually casual spirit by both parties. And in every case I’ve thought in advance: ‘Why not? You’re single. This is what people do.’ And I’ve thought, while it was happening: ‘This is great.’ And then afterwards I’ve
hated
myself. Hated the thought that I’d behaved differently because I was drunk, hated the fake shared intimacy of sex with a stranger.

Still, I’ll never forget sliding my hand above her stocking – that was a good bit.

Back in my first year at Cambridge, I wasn’t yet president of Footlights; if women were going to let me touch their arses, it was down to my rugged good looks and smooth chat-up lines alone. So I had plenty of spare time for comedy. Unfortunately Footlights seemed to have had enough of me for the moment. After the pantomime, the next big Footlights show of the academic year is the Spring Revue in the middle of the Lent (spring) term. This is a sketch show made up of new material written by the cast, director and other prominent Footlighters. It usually has a cast of about eight, of whom five or six will go on to be in the May Week Revue, Footlights’ main show of the year which goes on national tour and to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Having been in
Cinderella
, I fell at the second hurdle – I wasn’t cast in the Spring Revue. This was the decision, and by ‘decision’ I mean fault, of Tristram Hunt, the director of the show and now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. I was incredibly disappointed and slightly bitter about this at the time, but it was a perfectly fair call. There were lots of funny people around, and it was unusual for a first-year to be in a Footlights revue (although of course Collie was, talented cow). So I have long since dropped any grievance I had against Tristram – and I’m a slow grievance dropper. He was a tremendously enthusiastic, energetic and irreverent influence on Footlights, certainly never pegged by me as a future TV historian, serious opinion former and democratic representative of the Midlands. But I will say that he passed up the opportunity to have my undying gratitude.

I had to make do with appearing in normal plays: in the Lent term, I played Dr Rance in
What the Butler Saw
and the Reverend Parris in
The Crucible
and even helped out as assistant stage manager for
Into the Woods
, which mainly involved pushing a wooden cow on and off stage (I am not referring to an inexpressive and truculent actress). Boring though that was, the excuse to hang around the theatre even more was irresistible.

But I was obsessed with Footlights and desperately wanted to break back in – and I knew the key to that was writing and performing my own material. I’d written some sketches at school – Leo, Harry, Daniel, Ed and I spent several months pretending we were going to do a sketch show, amassed reams of material, and then very sensibly decided to put on a production of
Ten Times Table
by Alan Ayckbourn instead. On closer inspection, the reams of material, certainly the ones I’d written, were unusable shit. My approach had been to take a potentially comic situation – say the boardroom of an old company – populate it with comic stereotypes and then make them converse for page after page. I must have been watching
You Rang, M’Lud
at the time. It was uncomfortably close to the technique I’d used to write that playscript fantasy epic in front of the TV as a child. The sketches were very long and had no point to them, no premise. Clearly I needed a completely different approach.

Though not a cast member, I was invited to help write for the Spring Revue. The Footlights writing system was straightforward and ruthlessly effective. The writing team would meet at eleven in the morning for a general chat about the sort of material that was needed. Then we would divide up into pairs who would go off for an hour or so, write a sketch or maybe even two, and return at an appointed time to read them out. This process would be repeated in the afternoon. If you do that for a couple of weeks, you’ll generate quite a large pile of material from which to construct a show.

This system may sound plodding and uncreative, but I am a big admirer of it (or should that be ‘so I’m a big admirer of it’?). In my experience, if you want to write comedy, you just have to get on with it. You have to crash through the invisible barrier caused by the combination of the vast sense of possibility – a sketch could be about anything, could be the wackiest, most surreal, yet most satirical, wide-ranging, specific, general, flippant, profound piece of material ever written – and the terrifying, narrowing, diminishing feeling caused by scratching the first inadequate words of it onto a sheet of A4. As soon as you start to write, you also start to close doors (metaphorical ones as well as the one to the shop where the sketch is inevitably set). The new sketch emerges and obviously isn’t the next ‘Parrot Sketch’ or ‘One Leg Too Few’ but just today’s effort, something that’ll do.

There’s no point in resisting that or being ashamed of it. Brilliance will strike you, if it ever does, as a complete surprise sailing out of the clear blue sky of competence. The key is to get stuff written down, and this Footlights system forces you to. It gives you a simple, achievable task – writing a sketch in an hour – and a friend to do it with. It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to be written. You can write a funny one in the afternoon or the next day, you tell yourself – your task in any given moment is not to go back empty-handed. Great sketches come out of that approach, as well as unusable ones. But, most precious of all, it produces sketches that aren’t good enough but have the kernel of a good idea which someone else, later in the process, can often turn into something better. When that happens, you’re genuinely mobilising the creative power of a team.

The best stuff generated by this system went into the show, but anything you wrote that was left over, you were free to use yourself – which meant you could audition it for a ‘smoker’. That’s the name Footlights gives its informal late-night performances. A contraction of ‘smoking concerts’, in the old days smokers were cabaret nights watched exclusively by cigar-smoking men in dinner jackets. By the early ’90s, they were under-rehearsed one-night-only comedy shows made up of songs, sketches, character monologues and stand-up, where smoking was no longer allowed but women were. They played to packed houses of drunken and easily-amused students.

The first big roar for a joke you’ve written yourself is the best laugh you’ll ever get in your life, the rest of which you spend trying to recapture it. It’s a transformative moment. You are redeemed from your own personal hell and launched into the firmament. There you are, a foolhardy unoriginal idiot who’s engineered a situation where hundreds of people are sitting looking at you, expecting you to say something so good that it will make them spontaneously and simultaneously emit noises of amusement. It felt doable before you wrote the sketch; it felt possible afterwards; in rehearsal there were moments when it felt likely. But in the two hours preceding the performance, it has gradually dawned on you that, of course, it’s impossible – particularly with the irredeemably unfunny piece of material you’ve perversely saddled yourself with. You’ve watched all the other acts, many of which have gone well, and thought of each of them: ‘Of course! That’s the sort of thing to do! A sketch using the word fuck, some stand-up about wanking, that mad thing about a man with a dog called Fisticuffs who keeps getting into scrapes.’ But not
your
thing – not your stupid, risky, obscure, uninventive piece of nothing.

And then it works! The joke works! They get it, they laugh loudly, you can feel their warmth, their appreciation. They like you – it’s like a Vitamin B shot of confidence to your whole system.

My first smoker sketch was about the Samaritans, I’m not particularly proud to say. There’ve been lots of sketches about the Samaritans so I wasn’t at any great risk of originality. Then again, in my defence, putting an organisation with associations of people in despair, who are possibly suicidal, into an overtly comic scenario is a pretty solid approach. You get the credit for being daring and edgy, in a context where you’re not in much danger of causing offence.

The sketch, which I’d written with a friend from college, Robin Koerner, opened in a risky way laugh-wise. A man (me) is on the phone (probably because the Alan Bennett sketch I’d read out to audition for the panto was on the phone and it had gone well, so I was trying to recapture that success) saying something like this:

MAN:   
(on phone, in a dry unconcerned way)
Oh. Oh. Yes. Oh dear. Yes, I see. Oh dear. Well, yes, I should go ahead then. Yes, absolutely. I can see why you would. Yes, I completely understand your position. I’d do that, if I were you. Yes. All right then. Bye then. Bye bye.

He puts the phone down. It rings.

By this point, as comedy connoisseurs will realise, nothing funny has been said. To be honest, I think the man talking into the phone went on even longer than that but I can’t remember it. Anyway, there hasn’t been a joke. Maybe I’ve got a couple of warm titters of expectation, maybe not. The joke is coming up. Having told you the subject of the sketch, you’ve probably anticipated it. So I hope you can imagine my stress levels, my intense concern at this instant, as I sat under a bright light in front of a couple of hundred people, twenty seconds into my first ever performance of something I’d written. Suddenly there’s nowhere to hide – they either laugh at the next line or the sketch has been a disaster. There’ll be no redeeming it, no winning them round. It’s all or nothing. Not all sketches are all or nothing, you know. You can have material that slowly wins people round and doesn’t stand or fall on one surprising moment. And I knew it at the time. So why had I decided to debut with one that does? Because I am a stupid cunt, I thought in my whirring, self-loathing, idiot’s brain as I tried to time the next bit of the sketch:

He answers the phone.

MAN:   Hello, Samaritans.

Massive laugh.

I know it’s not the best joke in the world, but it worked – I promise you it really worked. The satisfaction of having made an audience think backwards and laugh at the fact that the character had been casually advocating suicide was immense – of having taken a punt, reasoned that people might find something funny and been proved right. I can’t remember any of the jokes from the rest of the sketch but I’ll never forget that moment.

It was my laugh – I’d thought of the joke, I’d written it down, I’d learned it and I’d delivered it. This is just the best thing in the world, I thought. I want to do this again.

- 22 -

Mitchell and Webb

‘Bread for the ducks, nice to get ooooouuuuuttttt!’ Rob and I sang, to the tune of the ‘Eton Boating Song’ – desperately but also with a tinge of relief because that was one of the few lyrics we were confident on. Somehow the crowd sensed that and laughed. But was that why they were laughing? No, we were somehow out of sync with the music – it was ahead of us, or behind us. Only now was it doing the ‘Nice to get oooouuuttttt!’ bit, so we sang that again. And the audience laughed, screamed, howled.

Now we couldn’t hear the backing track at all. I was supposed to sing the next verse. I think it was something else about a duck – I’d known it earlier this afternoon, but my brain couldn’t multitask to this extent. I was simultaneously trying to listen through the screams of audience mockery for the moment to come in, remember the hastily learned lyrics, compose my features into a look other than that of absolute bafflement and defeat, and work out whether the fact that we were getting laughs was basically good news, or whether our having completely lost control of why we were getting them undermined the achievement entirely and disqualified us from taking any credit.