David Mitchell: Back Story (40 page)

The other way to go, and there’s a lot of pressure on men to be like this, would be to become a gadget fanatic. That’s another thing that some people assume I am: if not a Luddite then a geek who would love technology to a slightly weird degree. It seems I don’t come across as someone with much of a sense of proportion.

Or maybe that’s just the culture. We’re not interested in moderation. You get that with TV all the time – every new show is on a knife-edge. If it falls one way, it’s a massive hit; if it goes the other, it’s a humiliating flop. The whole industry and its critical scrutineers seem blind to all the things that are kind of fine. But I’d say that was the feeling you get from most of what’s on television: ‘This is okay – I might keep watching for a bit but I’ll happily watch something else if it comes along or indeed turn away when the microwave pings.’ TV assaults us with wave after wave of acceptable, mildly diverting mediocrity. Yet, to see it reviewed or hear it discussed by those that make it, you’d think it was a weird alternating barrage of unprecedented brilliance and inexcusable garbage. That’s just not how it seems to me – maybe I need to adjust my set.

So I feel slightly ashamed to neither despise nor adore all these new machines that are changing the world. My plodding, not particularly adept, reluctant but not resistant attempts to vaguely and half-heartedly sort of get to grips with some of these things is disappointing for people. I get it with cricket as well. I quite like watching cricket, as a result of which people assume that I’m a huge cricket fan. ‘I know you’re obsessed with cricket,’ people say, as if to be able to stand cricket at all must mean that I can’t get enough of it. But I just quite like it. I don’t want to be painted a fanatic, or real fanatics will think I’m a fraud. Or a moron who, despite apparently being obsessed with the sport, can’t remember who last year’s county champions were. By saying I like to go to the cricket, it feels like I’ve misrepresented myself as someone who can think of nothing else. ‘Not everything is like Marmite!’ I want to scream. ‘Including, I suspect, Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.

Maybe men are supposed to have fanatical hobbies – that seems to be a thing. ‘Men are from Mars, they like to go in their cave and make model ships or play fantasy war games or tinker with vintage cars.’ That’s the current off-the-shelf analysis. My lack of a real hobby or obsession on which to lavish all my spare time is probably a sign of a want of masculinity, a lack of testosterone.

Certainly, if you read men’s magazines, it’s made very clear that men are supposed to be massively into watches and gadgets and yachts and possibly golf clubs. It’s odd that the magazines push traditional masculine traits so hard – you’d think that would be counter-productive to their aims. One thing I’d have thought was definitely part of an old-school golf-watches-guns-and-cars view of men is that they shouldn’t buy magazines. Magazines, under that system, are surely for women. As are novels. Men should read the
Financial Times
or pornography. Of course many men’s magazines are fairly close to pornography but are trying to present themselves as something else. Or maybe it’s the other way round? Maybe it’s the pornographical element that makes men feel it’s okay for them to buy a magazine. The veneer of tits allows them to indulge their secret effeminate interests in jewellery and scent.

It annoys me to be living in an era where one of the few traditional male attributes that I naturally possess – an aversion to grooming, pampering and perfume – is no longer valued. Indeed, for transparent marketing reasons, it’s positively discouraged. My attitude that hair should be neatly cut, washed in shampoo but not conditioned or gunked up with ‘product’ is almost frowned upon now, as if displaying a want of personal hygiene. Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too – it’s seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations – millennia – to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

I only feel like this because I have a slightly perverse approach to my own appearance. I’m desperate never to be accused of vanity – which is a vanity in itself. I hate the thought that anyone could point to any aspect of my appearance and say, ‘You think that looks nice. You’ve chosen that in an attempt to stand out in a good way.’ That’s why, although I was pleased to become fitter from all this walking, and secretly a bit pleased to look it, the down side is feeling self-conscious about how often it’s triggered the question, ‘Have you been dieting?’ All I ever want is for my clothing, weight, haircut and smell to go unremarked on. I don’t think I’m particularly handsome or particularly ugly – if I’m to be deemed acceptable, or even likeable, it won’t be because of my appearance. So my aim is that my appearance should in no way be noteworthy. But then again, not so un-noteworthy as to be in itself noteworthy.

That’s how I ended up with this haircut. I was issued with it as a child. I used to have a standard kid’s ‘bowl cut’ and then, at some point, it was combed into a parting – and I’ve stuck with it. Not because I like it, or hate it, but because to change it at any point would have provoked comment and, even if it was kindly meant, that would have made me cringe.

But now the fact that I’ve never changed it and it looks so old-fashioned (or indeed Hitlerian, as some people say) itself provokes comment. So I’d probably have evaded more total comment in my life if I’d bitten the bullet ten years ago and changed to something less self-consciously unstylish. And all of this means that I’ve spent more time thinking about my hair than I either want to or consider consonant with being a man.

This is no good. I’m going to have to stop again and see who those e-mails are from. I pause in a slightly stressful bustling bit of pavement outside the West 12 shopping centre, which now looks across nervously with its ’80s shabbiness at the gleaming modernity of the new Westfield. Or maybe with pride: perhaps West 12 was the vanguard, and now here comes Westfield, the mother ship.

Hooray! They’re spam! Too much spam can be annoying but a little bit, every so often, can give such a welcome reprieve. You think you’re going to have to reply or in some way leap into action but you can just ignore them – lovely. I mainly get spam from malt whisky websites as a result of my habit of buying my grandfather a bottle every Christmas for most of his nineties. I also get regular correspondence from the Islington Folk Club where I once went to a ‘Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’ concert. Yes, I’d got the hang of dating at last. No, Robert Thorogood had organised a trip as research for a screenplay he was writing about a Hawaiian guitarist. (I think this is a guitarist with a ham and pineapple topping.) It was one of those places where, for reasons of their licence, you have nominally to join the club in order to be admitted once. They must have asked for an e-mail address. I hope the updates I’m ignoring aren’t draining their resources too much. I pocket my phone and continue towards Shepherd’s Bush Green.

Magic though the iPhone patently is (albeit a dark magic performed by thousands of exhausted Chinese fingers), Rob and I have reason to resent it. I’m pretty sure it’s what put paid to our Apple advertising contract. We were hired to make the British version of their ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ online campaign to raise awareness of their computers’ merits. But, when the iPhone came out, all focus swivelled to that. Computers and differentiation from PCs became a sideshow. They didn’t seem to want us to do an ‘I’m an Apple, I’m a Blackberry’ series of ads, which is a shame as the costumes might have been funny.

Rob and I got quite a lot of shit for doing that campaign, which genuinely surprised us. We thought adverts were just something that actors and comedians did to subsidise their income. You shouldn’t advertise something immoral, we thought, but everything else, whether you used the product or not, was fair game. And actually we did use Apple products – we’d both always had Macs, although I was nervous saying that in our defence because I wanted to make clear that I would have equally happily advertised Microsoft; it’s an honest company and I’m an actor for hire.

I was annoyed when people accused us of ‘selling out’ because I felt they were projecting onto us anti-capitalist views that we’d never held or expressed. At the same time, I felt guilty, partly because we’d been well paid and partly because I always feel a
bit
guilty – I think feeling guiltless is somehow impolite.

And there’s no doubt there’s an anti-corporate feeling abroad, which comedy fans are particularly susceptible to. A general suspicion of the motives of companies is very healthy. I like the fact that comedy enthusiasts have a tendency towards cynicism. But it’s a shame when the cynicism becomes unquestioning and automatic. Even though companies are self-interested, amoral organisations, the world wouldn’t be better off without them. They should be better regulated and more highly taxed, but they should exist and should be encouraged to trade. If you’d buy something from a company, as I would and have from Apple, it stands to reason that you would also be willing to sell them something. I don’t think that means my soul is forfeit.

Nevertheless, the reaction has had an effect on me. When I get offered adverts nowadays, which happens fairly often, I don’t just think: ‘Would this be a reasonable gig? Can I justify it?’ I also think: ‘How much crap is going to get hurled at me for this? How long am I going to have to spend justifying it?’ If the answer to that question is ‘several years’, then the ad might not be paying such an astronomical hourly rate as it initially seemed.

- 33 -

The Work–Work Balance

The Apple campaign came in the middle of 2006, a ridiculously hectic year for me and Rob. It had started with our filming a TV pilot of our radio sketch show which, with a very environmentally friendly approach to ideas, we’d called
That Mitchell and Webb Look
. It was immediately commissioned for a series, which we had to start writing straight away in order to shoot in June and July. We were thrilled with this commission. At last we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. That is literally what I’d most wanted to happen to me in the world as I sat watching
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
on VHS as a teenager.

The way we landed the commission taught me something about the TV business. In the autumn of 2005 Channel 4 was dragging its feet over recommissioning
Peep Show
after a predictably poor ratings showing for series 3. Someone at 4 got wind of the fact that the BBC had asked us to make a TV pilot and they panicked. They felt they were ‘losing us’ to the competition. They’d been seriously considering deliberately losing us but, if it looked like the BBC had poached us, then they’d have egg on their faces, they felt. (Unpoached egg. We’d be nicely poached, they’d be covered in raw egg. They’d go golden if baked. This sounds delicious.) Consequently Channel 4 immediately offered Rob and me a full sketch show series, as well as a golden handcuffs deal (where they pay you money for doing nothing – for literally doing nothing, as in refusing to work for the competition) and two ‘one-off specials’ for
Peep Show
.

This put us in a dilemma. Clearly
Peep Show
was dead in the water – Channel 4 didn’t want another series and were just offering two longer episodes as a sop to stop us, as they saw it, defecting to the BBC. But they were offering what we wanted: a full sketch show series. All the BBC were guaranteeing at that time was a pilot. That all pointed towards taking the Channel 4 offer.

But, to set against that, we’d made two series of the radio show with the BBC; they owned the rights to the characters, some of whom we wanted to bring to TV, and would be mightily pissed off if we suddenly (as
they
would have seen it) defected to Channel 4. And they’d have been fairly justified in that feeling as we would have been abandoning a pilot at the eleventh hour. On top of that, we wouldn’t be able to make the Channel 4 show with Gareth Edwards because he was a BBC staff member. Channel 4 wanted to slip us into a sketch project which Phil and Objective were already developing – it wouldn’t be ‘our show’ in the way the TV version of our existing radio programme, made by Gareth our long-time sketch show collaborator, would have been (and indeed proved to be).

After much agonising, we decided to stick to plan A and take the BBC pilot, hoping against hope that it would get a series – and resigned ourselves to the axing of
Peep Show
and Channel 4 being a bit pissed off with us for a couple of years. We felt this was the only honest course of action.

Well, it worked out so much better than we could have hoped. The BBC pilot did go on to be a series, and Channel 4, in order not to look like we’d jumped ship, promptly recommissioned
Peep Show
for a fourth time – a proper six-parter with no talk of ‘one-off specials’. It was the last sticky recommission that show had and this year we’re making series 8. Rob and I had only meant to be honest but somehow we’d also pulled off a Machiavellian coup.

That sketch show was the first of three big projects that we squeezed into 2006, as well as the Apple campaign. Next we shot a film,
Magicians
, in which we played childhood friends who fall out when their magic act is compromised by some shagging and beheading, written by Sam and Jesse. It was directed by Andrew O’Connor who, having been the man who had unconvincingly told me he was going to get a sitcom starring me onto television, had equally unbelievably gone on to say ‘I’m going to direct a film with you in the lead’ and been proved right again – he truly can pull rabbits out of hats. And lastly we were going on a national tour with a show, which we had to write (or at least compile from things we had already written) and rehearse.