David Mitchell: Back Story (32 page)

I was looking for ways to spend. And one night, I came up with the idea of going to one of those Angus Steakhouses (or possibly Aberdeen Steakhouses – they look identical) that were still dotted around central London. I’d long wondered about those places. The combination of their prominent (and therefore presumably expensive and sought-after) locations, their shabby ’70s decor and the fact that they always seemed to be at least three-quarters empty had long baffled me. How did they survive? Outside, they gave a partial clue: a blackboard listing the unremarkable beef products they proposed to serve, alongside the prices. Those weren’t ’70s at all. In fact, they were positively futuristic. In the years of being broke, I would certainly never have set foot in such a place (if I was going to splash out on a restaurant, I’d go somewhere cheap where I knew what I was getting, i.e. a curry house) but now I had the chance to indulge my curiosity.

So one night, after a few pints in the pub, Rob, James Bachman, who was also finding solvency in comedy writing around this time, Tom Hilton and I decided to soak up the booze in an Angus/Aberdeen Steakhouse on Leicester Square. We wandered in and were favoured with a table in the window.

Our expectations were not high. We were basically going there because we thought it was funny. But I think we reckoned that we’d get competent steak and chips, for which we’d then be overcharged. Maybe slightly poor steak and chips but, as steak and chips is fundamentally nice, that would be okay – more than worth enduring for the adventure of going to one of those inexplicable restaurants. We were pretty determined to enjoy the experience: James ordered a side dish of Brussels sprouts purely because he was amused that they offered such a thing.

All seemed well when the food arrived: it looked funny. It reminded me of our very occasional trips to the Berni Inn when I was little. There were tomatoes in the garnish that had been sort of crinkle cut and all the food was served on enormous heaps of cress. I hadn’t seen cress for years – which didn’t bother me, it’s a pointless food – but the reason for its disappearance was apparently that the Angus and Aberdeen Steakhouses had bought up the entire world’s supply.

Then we tucked in, at which point the joke was on us. All of the food was terrible. Inedible. Burnt and unchewable. Apart from James’s sprouts, which seemed to have undergone 40 per cent of the process of turning them into soup. The wine was expensive and like vinegar. We were sad. We’d wanted dinner.

‘We should complain,’ said James.

He was met with a cressy splutter from the rest of us.

‘Typical American!’ (James is half American) was our response. ‘Why add the nightmare of embarrassment to the horrors of the meal itself?’

But he insisted. And, very gently and politely, he asked to see the manageress.

Well, she wasn’t taking any shit. I think she was Russian. She was certainly cold and warlike. She wouldn’t accept anything James said and, from the off, implied that we were only trying to avoid paying. At some point, I saw red. I hate complaining, I hate conflict – I’d rather nod and smile and then bitch behind people’s backs. Or nod and smile and then ring my agent to get her to complain. But at one point James said something perfectly reasonable, and she interrupted and directly contradicted him.

This flew in the face of everything my parents had ever said about how you run restaurants and hotels. When people complain, you have at the very least to say sorry and accept that the complaint is sincere. So I sprang into action and gave this unpleasant woman what I remember as a devastating tongue-lashing. That is also how the others remember it, although it must be said that we were all a bit drunk.

I do know that I never raised my voice or swore. I merely contradicted the woman back and, when she tried to interrupt me, told her to be quiet and to listen to what I had to say – which was that she was running the worst restaurant I’d ever been in. To the last, she rejected all our complaints and refused to say sorry. Meanwhile, behind us, one of her staff started glumly hoovering.

We left feeling better for having had our say. But, ridiculously, we paid. In full. The manageress’s technique of accusing us of trying to get a free meal tricked us out of the only action that could have hurt her. She didn’t care about the argument or that we were unhappy, she had no hopes of repeat custom – that wasn’t the business model. She needed only to get our money once. The next day, there’d be another bunch of dupes to fleece. Well, at least we didn’t leave a tip. Still, we contributed to that miserable chain’s survival. For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to go to the Angus Steakhouse once.

Writing on
Armstrong and Miller
led to other work. Ben and Xander asked us to help write their radio sitcom,
Children’s Hour with Armstrong and Miller
, and Phil suggested us to the production team of
The Jack Docherty Show
, a Channel 5 chat show also made by Absolutely, as regular writers.

Meanwhile Nick Jones, the director we’d met in Edinburgh, had some excellent news. He’d finally got his name printed on his business cards. Also, he’d put together a BBC Two sketch show pilot called
Bruiser
with a producer and writer called David Tomlinson. Rob and I had written a fair bit of the material and Rob was cast as one of the performers. The BBC had sat on this tape for a few months before giving the green light to a full series. In February 1999, at the end of a writing day on
Jack Docherty
, David and Nick took us to the Hand and Racquet pub near Leicester Square to tell us about the commission, and to say that the only cast members they were planning to retain for the series were Rob and Mackenzie Crook (who subsequently dropped out to make the first series of
The 11 O’Clock Show
instead). They also said that they wanted me to join the cast and for Rob and me to head up the writing team. Suddenly, out of the blue, we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. Rob and I were so excited we immediately went to Pizza Express.

And we had yet another iron in the fire. Nick Symons, a producer at Carlton who’d seen our 1998 Edinburgh show, asked us to develop a sitcom with him. The idea was to pitch this to Channel 4 rather than ITV in the hope that it would initially be staged at the Channel 4 Sitcom Festival, where several promising sitcom scripts were staged as plays in front of an industry audience.

After years of indolence, suddenly we were extremely busy, writing sketches for
Bruiser, Armstrong and Miller
and
Yes Sir, I Can Boogie
, the sitcom pilot for Nick S (which we called
Daydream Believers
and featured Colin and Ray, characters who had been central to several of our Edinburgh shows) and a script for a new Edinburgh show which, in an act of brand simplification, we decided to call
The Mitchell and Webb Story
. No ‘That’ yet.

Then we had to perform all of those things, starting with the five-week
Bruiser
shoot which was my first experience of a concentrated period of filming. The
Bruiser
cast were almost all people we knew from Cambridge whom we’d introduced to Nick and David: Collie, Matthew Holness and Charlotte Hudson (who’d done a lot of acting at university but was best known professionally as a co-presenter of
Watchdog
). The only stranger in the cast was Martin Freeman, of whom we were consequently suspicious and whose naturalistic and charismatic performance style was immediately annoyingly entertaining.

Filming usually involves an early start in anyone’s temporal currency. Even a farmer couldn’t call you a slugabed during a location shoot. As an actor you have to be ready to film by 8am, which means, for a sketch show where you have to keep being made to look like different people, you start costume and make-up preparations at about 7am, by which time you need to have got to the unit base on the other side of London and eaten breakfast, so you’re usually leaving the house at about 6. This prospect genuinely frightened me. As someone still accustomed to getting up at lunchtime, unless I had a pressing reason not to, setting an alarm for 5.30 seemed like a sick joke. Surely I just wouldn’t hear it or would be unable to function? I was aware that other people got up early every day of their lives, but I was convinced that there was a significant metabolic difference between me and them. Clearly, tiredness didn’t affect them as keenly. Maybe I had some mild form of ME.

One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow. ‘Don’t lawyers only have to be in court at 10?’ I thought. How had I made such a massive misjudgement?

What came as a surprise and a huge relief to me is that I loved location filming. The mornings were painful, vast amounts of the day were spent inexplicably waiting around because of unfathomable technical hitches, and the work itself was incredibly repetitive, involving performing the same shard of material again and again and again from different angles while everyone worried about light and sound and costume and make-up and practically ignored the performances. So most of the minutes and hours spent filming are stultifying. But the days are brilliant. The feeling of achievement at the end of each day is very satisfying. The camaraderie of a crew all working together to achieve the same unlikely and frivolous aim – the making of a funny show – is warm and inspiring. The breaks for lunch and tea, the relishing of comfort food, the ridiculous chats about nothing while waiting around with a cup of tea somewhere incongruous, are all great fun. When that five-week shoot ended I was deeply sad and desperately hoped that it wouldn’t be the last such period of work I’d experience.

We then went straight into rehearsing
Daydream Believers
for the Channel 4 Sitcom Festival. The director was Gordon Anderson, who has since gone on to direct
The Catherine Tate Show
and
The Inbetweeners
but who, at the time, had mainly worked in theatre. He was great with our script. When he made an editing suggestion, it was concrete and achievable. His first was simple: swap the first and third scenes. It was an excellent note and meant the show started in the living room of Ray’s disgusting house, with Colin recording an answerphone message:

COLIN:   
(into answerphone)
Hello, you’ve reached Colin and Ray’s house – well, Ray’s house. Well you’ve reached Colin and Ray, or have you, because actually we can’t make it to the phone at the moment, so if you want to leave a message, and we hope you do, then by all means do so. Excellent. So, we’ll speak to you soon. Right. Cheerio. Bye bye. Hope that’s okay. And – ooh it’s after the tone. Oh erm …
(to Ray)
Shall I ask them to leave the date and the time?
(into answerphone)
Could you leave the date and the time and a number we can contact you on, unless we’ve got it, in which case don’t bother. But, if in doubt – oh it’s run out of tape, I think that was too long.

RAY:       Colin, you should thank them for calling. It’s rude otherwise. You should thank them and say sorry we’re not in. It’s just thanks, sorry, goodbye – it’s like the end of the British Empire.

COLIN:   No, I know, let’s do a funny one – one, with music. No, no, just a funny one. Like I say, ‘Leave a message or Ray gets it,’ and you go
(muffled)
‘Mmm. Don’t hurt me!’ in the background.

RAY:       We could do that, Colin. My only reservation is that we might then be mistaken for a couple of twats.

COLIN:   Yeah, that’s true. Okay, let’s do a really cool one, really brief. Yeah I know.
(He presses the button and talks into the machine)
You know what to do.
(He lets go of the button with an air of cool finality)
That’s it! I’ve done it! Although I’d better say who we are, in case it’s a wrong number.
(into machine, very casual)
Hi, it’s Colin and Ray, you know what to do – oh, I let go of the button.
(again, dismissive)
Hi, it’s Colin and Ray, you know what to do. Oh, is that a bit arsey? You know, a bit ‘you know where to stick it’.

RAY:       What if they don’t know what to do?

COLIN:   
(again)
Hi, it’s Colin and Ray. We assume you know what to do. If you don’t, what it is is that we’re out or we can’t make it to the phone so do leave a bleh bleh bleh, oh this really is all just bollocks. I’ll do it later. Ray, I’m doing it later. All right? I mean, if it’s not all right then say. I just can’t be fagged at the moment.

It’s a very efficient, and hopefully amusing, introduction to the characters: what they’re like and their circumstances. The show went down well and was, I think, the only one from that year’s festival to be developed further: we were asked to write another couple of scripts with a view to making a pilot.

We went straight from the sitcom festival into rehearsing
The Mitchell and Webb Story
for Edinburgh, with James Bachman directing. As a publicity gimmick, our show that year was supposedly sponsored by a company called Künty Matches from Bremen, Germany. I expect you can see the joke. We even had thousands of little books of Künty Matches manufactured for distribution round Edinburgh (it’s surprisingly cheap to have things printed on books of matches) and, with James, wrote an advertising jingle for them:

Künty Match, Künty Match,

Made one at a time and not in a batch.

From schoolboy to parson, for smoking and arson,

You’re never alone with a Künty Maa-aaaaa-aaaa-aaaaa.

Maaaaaaatch!

Künty Match!