David Mitchell: Back Story (41 page)

On top of that, I’d taken a regular part in a new comedy-drama called
Jam and Jerusalem
. I didn’t really have time for this as well: it involved getting late-night cars across the country after live shows with Rob in order to catch four hours’ sleep, spend the next day filming at Shepperton and then be driven back to another theatre venue. It was exhausting – but I couldn’t bear to turn down that series. It was written by Jennifer Saunders and, as well as Saunders herself, the cast included Dawn French, Joanna Lumley, Sue Johnston, Maggie Steed, Pauline McLynn, Sally Phillips and Patrick Barlow (star of
The National Theatre of Brent
, a brilliant two-man comedy troupe). I was hugely flattered to be in such company and, when we’d made the pilot, they’d all been so nice and so jolly. The atmosphere on that show, exhausted though I usually was when we filmed it, was uplifting.

The
Magicians
filming started straight after we’d finished the sketch show and just before we had to start rehearsing the tour. It fitted in perfectly, in just the same way as a night job fits in perfectly around a day job. It went well but it was exhausting; it had longer working days and longer working weeks than anything else I’ve ever filmed. That’s because, in Britain, film-making is sort of a hobby: the occasional script will manage to cobble together funding and get itself made by calling in favours and making people work against the clock on minimum wage. It’s odd how British film reviewers, who presumably know how this little cottage industry works, take the snooty approach of basically saying, ‘Welcome to the big league – are you ready for the big screen? It’s a much more demanding medium.’ They seem to sneer at people who work in television, which is an
incredibly
similar medium and is actually solvent.

All of which is just a roundabout way of saying that, when
Magicians
came out, it got bad reviews, but I think it’s quite a good film. Not amazing but certainly not shit. I think, if you like comedy, you’d find it an entertaining thing to watch over popcorn.

And then the tour. How had we got ourselves into this? We had to start rehearsing a week after the
Magicians
shoot ended, a week which I spent in Devon shooting exterior scenes for
Jam and Jerusalem
. When I got back, we had a week before our first preview at Pleasance London and a fortnight before our opening night at the Brighton Dome, which seats 1,500. Our last live comedy gig for a paying audience had been in front of 30 people, five years before, on the last night of the 2001 Fringe. We were seriously out of our depth, but were too busy to think this through at the time, which is lucky because I think we would have panicked.

At least the script, thank God, was written. The other factor militating against panic was our director, Lee Simpson, and supporting cast, James Bachman and Abigail Burdess, who was by this point engaged to Rob. They all behaved as if getting everything ready and putting on a storming show was an eminently achievable goal in the ‘over a dozen’ days that stretched out before us. And, in the end, it was fine. The first night in Brighton was a bit glitchy, to say the least, but the audience laughed a lot and Rob and I were so worried about quick costume changes that we barely gave our performances a moment’s thought, which is often a good thing.

It’s bizarre how things that seem impossible early on in the run of a theatre show – usually things to do with changing shoes or jackets in minuscule pockets of time – after a couple of weeks are ludicrously straightforward. You develop skills and aptitudes for them, dozens of useful knacks that allow you to transform your appearance at an almost magical speed – like Bruce Forsyth getting his trousers on and off in the gents of a comedy club with the aid of his teeth. It’s so easy to forget, in professions like mine which involve doing lots of different things, how, if you do the same thing over and over again, your brain can make you properly good at it.

Extrapolate from this and you get a tiny glimpse of what it must be like to be a craftsman – to do those things that seem miraculous to outsiders but are quite routine to the skilled, whether it’s putting in a hip replacement or a new shower, navigating the Bosphorus or a company database. Humans have the ability to do incredible things – more amazing even than gluing on a false moustache with one hand while tying a bow-tie with the other – if they put in enough time and practice. Actors, writers, journalists and politicians are apt to forget this and to think that, if intelligent people like them can’t master something in a week and a half, then it must be impossible for those poor dullards who can’t cut it in the media.

I saw a funny example of this on BBC News during the build-up to a recent London marathon. The journalist and newsreader Sophie Raworth was going to run the marathon and the news was doing a feature on it because, I think, only a handful of people had been shot in Syria that day. In preparation, she was televised doing a training session with a British Olympic runner. She ran along with her for a bit, at the athlete’s warm-up pace, and then they stopped. Raworth was exhausted and said something like: ‘That’s amazing! I’m totally destroyed and you’re not out of breath at all!’

Now, I’m sure Raworth meant well with this remark, and was largely trying to illustrate the situation to viewers, but that fact really is
not
amazing. She should expect the runner to be immensely better at running because her job is to run. She runs and runs and runs every single day. But Raworth, like a typical journalist, seemed to imply that there wasn’t much to professional-standard running other than not having a beer gut and pushing for the burn. She probably wouldn’t beat this runner in a race, she will have thought, but there’s no reason to assume that she’d fall massively behind. She was amazed by how much better the runner was at running because she didn’t really believe in skills. It’s the whole ‘It’s not rocket science’ refrain. Well, many things, while not being rocket science, simply cannot be picked up on the hoof.

Maybe I’m particularly aware of the power of a skill because I can’t drive. Sitting in the passenger seat while someone makes a car go along, navigating junctions, changing lanes, stopping at lights while simultaneously chatting, fiddling with the radio and eating a sandwich leaves me as amazed as Raworth. But clearly it’s the most routine of aptitudes – most people I know possess it.

I’d probably be less amazed if I’d never tried to do it myself. I’d assume it was easy. As it is, I’ve tried to just the wrong extent. Twice I’ve started, then given up at the point when my head was swimming with things to remember – mirrors, brakes, windows, indicators, coordinating feet and hands for gear changes, reversing round corners, finding the fucking biting point.

The first time was when I was seventeen, the age you’re supposed to learn. You’re used to learning things at that time of life – you’ve been doing it since before you can remember. Seventeen solid years, from sitting up, through talking and toilet training, reading and writing, autumn, basic maths, autumn, capital cities, autumn, all the way up to calculus, historiography and autumn. The prospect of those driving lessons and tests is a lot less intimidating in the context of so many other lessons and tests.

I had a nice instructor – he seemed kind and responsible. He was an ex-policeman. He told me I was doing quite well. I believed him. Then he said something quite strange: ‘Left here. So, the weirdest thing happened to me last night – watch your speed. I woke up at about 3am and there were these lights outside. Down to second, it’s a hill. Flashing lights – don’t flash your lights. Yeah, flashing lights. So I went to the window and looked out and – have you seen the cyclist? Aliens! There was this alien ship hovering over next door’s garden. Careful, it’s a mini-roundabout …’

I didn’t have any more lessons after that. Not for fifteen years, at which point I went on an intensive driving course in Norwich with Mark Evans. Mark had promised his girlfriend that he’d learn and suggested he and I get back on that metaphorical horse together. Norwich was chosen on the basis that when Mark googled ‘intensive driving course’, or possibly even ‘crash course’, a Norwich driving school came up first.

My new instructor showed no signs of having recently undergone an alien epiphany. He was a slight young chap called Eddie who smoked roll-ups and coughed a lot. He was a bit like a Dickensian waif – but more of a stickler for checking your mirrors.

On day one, ten minutes into my first lesson, I was tentatively driving around some suburban streets with Eddie when I stopped at a junction. Slightly abruptly. I hadn’t yet got the feel of the brakes and, I suppose, I was erring on the side of caution. Eddie screamed.

‘Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! What did you do that for?’

‘Sorry, I was just stopping.’

‘Christ that hurts! Jesus, careful!’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I dislocated my shoulder last night.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s right where the seatbelt digs in.’

‘I see.’

‘Why did you stop so suddenly?’

I wanted to say: ‘Because I can’t drive a car, you moron! What the hell did you expect!? When has anyone ever got in this car with you and known how to drive!?’

It was a weird week. Every day, Mark and I would go out with our instructors, meeting up every couple of hours at a lorry drivers’ caff on the ring road. On the first morning, Eddie ordered teacakes. A large plate duly arrived. Eddie smiled:

‘Massive plate of teacakes. And that’s only three quid. Pretty good, eh?’

To be fair, it was exactly what I was thinking.

In the evenings, Mark and I would go to the pub and discuss both Eddie and Mark’s instructor, whose name escapes me but who had a shiny nut-brown head, which was entirely hairless but for a magnificent moustache. He ran the company and Eddie looked up to him like a god. During the day, I would undergo hours of stressful tuition which would make me sweat profusely. It was January but, unless we kept the car windows wound down, they’d steam up within minutes. At the end of the course Mark passed and I failed. I blame Eddie.

So, when Rob and I were touring around the country in 2006, I still couldn’t drive. But that didn’t matter because the producers had hired a massive gold tour bus for us to travel around in. This was quite the ego boost, even if thoughts of rock bands on the road made us nervous about inspecting the upholstery.

Even more of an ego boost was the warmth of crowds that had specifically paid to see us. These weren’t Edinburgh audiences wandering in because they’d read a review or merely failed to get into the more successful show in the venue next door. These were ‘Mitchell and Webb fans’ – a new type of human whom the power of television had called into being. Consequently the show always went down well and was a huge pleasure to perform. Except in St Albans – that was a shit night. I don’t know what those guys were expecting but they sat there in baffled silence throughout. Maybe they’d seen a dog get run over on their way in or something.

I worried most in advance about our visit to Liverpool. You hear a lot, usually from Liverpudlians, about what a warm and lovely and naturally witty and comedic place Liverpool is. It’s as though you can’t fully understand humour if you’re not from there. To those of us with no real connection to the city but who still aspire to amuse, it’s an irritating claim. Being all kind and sentimental and northern doesn’t give you the monopoly on jokes, we want to say. I’m all southern and buttoned up and I don’t cry at weddings or give a single solitary shit about football but I still think I can make a reasonable stab at raising a laugh. I don’t want to accept that there’s this place, where I’m a stranger, in possession of the warm beating heart of mirth. I considered mentioning that my father’s from Liverpool in the opening sketch, but that would be cheating because I’d never been there before myself. The audience would only see a repressed public schoolboy and might be sceptical about his comic powers. Rob isn’t a repressed public schoolboy – he’s from a working-class family, he’s from Lincolnshire, and he went to a state school – but, damn him, nobody can tell. Thanks, Rob – way to suppress your fashionable underprivileged regional roots!

So we were a bit apprehensive about the night we were to play Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre and weren’t much enthused when we arrived. It is a beautiful theatre but, in 2006 at least, it was in a terrible state of repair. Everywhere, doors were blocked and signs warned of asbestos. The seats had been ripped out of the stalls and replaced with cabaret tables and there was a bar at the back – actually in the same room as the stage. This gave the place a discomfiting, cabaret, chair-throwing feel.

Nevertheless, the show had sold out and, half an hour before it was due to start, a long, chatty queue had developed round the block. It was a cold night and the theatre had no bar other than the one in the stalls, so the audience would have to remain shivering outdoors until the house opened. And there was a problem. Our technicians had discovered that the main lighting bar over the stalls – the large piece of metal from which other large, sharp, hot and electric pieces of metal were suspended – was only held up by a few flakes of paint and plaster. It was terribly unsafe and we couldn’t open the house with it in that state.

It was one of those problems that kept developing. Initially, it looked like the bar needed screwing in some more; then it transpired that the thing it was being screwed into needed screwing in; then some bits of ceiling came away in someone’s hand. This all made things much worse where the audience was concerned because the theatre management wouldn’t just say: ‘The show will be delayed an hour,’ at the outset. That would have allowed people to go off to the pub or ask for their money back, not just be left there shivering. Instead, the hour’s delay came in increments of ten minutes each. I know what that would have done to my mood if I were part of that queue round the block.

Soon Rob and I were desperately hoping that the lighting bar couldn’t be fixed and we’d have to cancel the performance. It would be a big blow to ticket sales but at least we wouldn’t get bottled off stage. So, when all was fixed and the audience came shivering in an hour late, we were extremely nervous. At the start of the show we went on and explained the situation and apologised. We were met with such an atmosphere of warmth from those freezing people that we were immediately ashamed for having expected them to be angry. It was a wonderful audience. Noisy, enthusiastic and determined to have a good time – every joke was relished. I’d been determined to leave Liverpool with something negative to say about that city’s attitude to comedy, but not only was I denied that, this audience gave such a positive demonstration of everything Liverpudlians claim for their city and its comic heart that I’m absolutely duty bound to mention it here. Grrr. Still, that building was in a shocking state.