David Mitchell: Back Story (42 page)

Throughout this tour Rob and I were powerfully sick of the sight of one another. We’d been working closely together for years – and that year, more closely than ever. Also, we were no longer desperate or poor so the fear that drew us together, that need for mutual reassurance, had lessened. We remained good friends – we knew that objectively – we just didn’t want to be in the same room for a second more than was necessary. I suppose we’d been thrown together into a situation as intense and stressful as marriage – but we didn’t fancy each other and we weren’t in love.

I wouldn’t want you to think, though, that we ever argued. Rob and I have virtually never exchanged a cross word. Neither of us likes confrontation or believes that it’s healthy to ‘have it all out’ (Rob learned that filming
Confetti
) and we’re both quite self-indulgent when it comes to rhetoric. I think we instinctively know that if we had a row, and particularly if we’d had one during that frantic and stress-charged year, we’d both have said TERRIBLE things. Unforgettable, dark truths about each other would have been slung around in a way that neither of us would ever be able to forget even if we managed to forgive. So, for months, we interacted with thin-lipped smiles – all icy politeness, passive aggression and significant pauses. It’s a feeling I’m determined to remember in case we ever play a gay couple in a film.

I certainly obsessed about all the things I was doing in the show, and for our act in general, that I felt Rob didn’t contribute equally to, and I’m sure he must have done the same. I would tell myself I didn’t need him and that, if he suggested we should stop working together, I’d agree in a flash. But I never seriously considered suggesting that myself. Other, wiser and nicer parts of my brain were counselling caution, reminding me of how far we’d come together and how foolish it would be to imperil this double act, the cornerstone of both of our dream careers, in a fit of pique. So I restricted myself to bitching to James Bachman.

On the tour, it got to the point when, in any sketch, we’d each be trying to upstage the other. Literally. I’m not talking about hamming things up or changing the performance at all, but just trying to be standing further upstage so that more of your face is visible to the audience and more of the back of the other performer’s head. (It may sound counter-intuitive to move away from an audience to get more attention but, unless you’re enough of a performance-whore to entirely dispense with the notion of looking at the other person on stage who you’re supposedly talking to, and neither Rob nor I is that bad, the best way for your performance to be more visible and better communicated to people watching is to stand further away so, while talking to the other person on stage, you’re the one facing the crowd.) I didn’t mean to do this unfairly, and I’m sure neither did Rob. I just wanted to make sure
I
wasn’t upstaged and was erring on the side of caution. But, as a result, in the many sketches where we were both talking to each other on stage, a small, almost imperceptible, dance away from the audience would commence.

I could no longer imagine Rob just as a friend. For all his good qualities, the thought of him was inseparable from the burden and stress of work and, I suppose, from this entity ‘Mitchell and Webb’ which had started to feel like a denial of my own individuality – whereas panel shows were an expression of it. On his side, I was pretty sure he’d started to hate me.

Just before Christmas that year, only a few days after the tour ended and a few days before the fourth series of
Peep Show
started filming, Rob and Abbie got married. Rob asked me to be his best man.

Oh God, I thought, I’m such a cunt. This is, basically, my best friend. And I’m so lucky to have been working with him for ten years. I haven’t ‘lost my individuality’, I’m just a bit knackered.

Obviously I was honoured by the best man thing. Obviously I was touched. Obviously I was annoyed. Those are always the chief feelings at such times: you’ve been asked to be part of a close friend’s special day – that’s in the plus column – and the terrifying prospect of making a speech will ruin it for you as a result – that’s in the minus. But I was just going to have to pretend, for one day, that I wasn’t a total cunt.

And in the end, it was easy. At the wedding, a wonderful Christmassy occasion on an ice-cold foggy London day, I actually went a bit ‘method’ and forgot I was a cunt at all. I thought about how much Rob had made me laugh at that first audition in Cambridge, despite his scandalous haircut and his ear jewellery, and how much he’d made me laugh since. I thought about the frantic first night of
Innocent Millions
, and all the other shows we’d done together when there was no money in it, only fun and possibility. Once again, I could feel our friendship rather than just remember it. And I felt properly happy for him, not just that I ought to feel happy for him. Having got to know Abbie better by then, as a result of the tour, certainly helped. She usually understands what I find annoying about Rob – she can see what I’ve spotted and will often commiserate. But she always sees beyond that in a way that I sometimes failed to, and certainly had done for most of 2006.

It’s always weird to see someone you’ve known for ages, a contemporary, get married – or at least I always find it so. Throughout the time that I’d worked with Rob there’d been something else going on in his head, something more important than performing or his career, or even his friendships, for all that he valued those things very highly. I realised, as I listened to his tearful speech about Abbie, and her tearful one about him, that he’d remembered and prioritised the attitudes and feelings that all loved children experience before anything else. Through all his ambition, failure and success, he’d kept a sense of perspective, while I had not.

As Abbie sat down, in floods of tears and to rapturous applause, I stood up to make some jokes.

- 34 -

The End of the Beginning

I’d met Victoria before, I was certain of that – briefly, at some after-show drinks years earlier. I could tell she hadn’t remembered. This meeting was different, though. Last time, I hadn’t fallen in love with her.

This was a very posh party. It was a film premiere party – the reward for having been to a film premiere (which, I’d just discovered, is quite a distracting way to watch a film). It was 2007 and I was starting to get invited to this sort of thing but usually I was filming or doing a panel show or my back hurt too much. But my back was on the mend, thanks to all the walking, and I’d been personally invited to this, rather than just getting an e-mail through my agent, so here I was. I was immensely glad.

There were lots of famous people there, some of whom had introduced themselves to me and said nice things. They thought I was famous too, it seemed, so there was a sort of implied acquaintanceship between us. I liked this, but it also made me queasy.

Then she’d been introduced to me – and I’d said we’d once met, just out of pedantry really, and she had neither denied nor remembered it. She was all chatty and sparky and gossipy and interesting and it seems ridiculous that I can’t remember a single thing she said, though I can still see her face looking up at me when I close my eyes.

After a while, the little chatting group developed and widened. She was a couple of yards away from me now and I was talking to a middle-aged woman who had some theory about comedy. I wasn’t interested but I still considered parties like this to be basically hostile environments so I was also grateful to the middle-aged woman for paying me the attention. But then she was back, in my eyeline again, interrupting the woman.

‘Do you smoke?’ She was gesturing towards the door.

I’m a moron. ‘No,’ I said. I was just answering the question. I hadn’t had a cigarette for about six months so I felt like I didn’t really smoke. I only ever have a bit. I didn’t want to lie to her. Amused irritation flashed noticeably across her face. Irritation, though, not disappointment. I suspect she already knew.

She went off for a cigarette – she kind of had to now – but was back quite soon, if not quite soon enough. She wasn’t trying to mingle. I was pretty sure she was flirting but was unwilling to believe my instincts as that seemed too good to be true.

We talked for a long time. I think the main topic of conversation was how awkward parties like this were and how some people seemed so adult and adept about working their way round them, but how we found that difficult and didn’t know how you were supposed to break into other conversations. We. I hoped she didn’t really want to break into another conversation because I certainly didn’t. I wanted to stay in this one forever. The pessimist in me said that she was just what she said she was – a bad mingler, someone shy at parties who didn’t know how to break away from someone else shy at parties.

Eventually she did: ‘I really should go and say hello to …’ I can’t remember who she said, I was suddenly too depressed to care. ‘Maybe see you in a bit?’ She walked away and I got the first wave of a sensation that would become familiar to me: missing her.

I date the current phase of my life from that party. I changed then. Everything that happened to me after that moment, even incidental things, are in a different context, a new world where different things matter.

We went on a few dates – I clumsily managed to organise that, self-consciously booking a restaurant for a time and a place and then feeling amazed, touched and flattered when she actually turned up – this beautiful, exciting woman, just to see me, wearing clothes that she’d picked out while thinking of me.

But it didn’t work out. She e-mailed me and explained, carefully, lovingly really, why it wasn’t a good time for her and how she felt something, in fact had strong feelings for me, but didn’t think it could work at the moment. But can’t one always get over that? Timing can’t be crucial – not outside the context of a joke? And she said she’d met someone else as well. Ah. She didn’t know what would come of that and who knows, maybe in six months or so …? But it was a bad time. A very bad time. Her father had just died. Everything was wrong.

It may sound strange but I treasured that e-mail. It was such a reluctant brush-off – I felt it was almost a sign of achievement for me. Part of me was amazed, overjoyed even, that I’d got so close so quickly to someone I’d fallen for. Because I knew I could only be with someone I’d fallen for and I wasn’t falling for people very often any more. And it had never been quite like this.

‘Close but no cigar,’ as Ellis says. Well that’s all right, I thought. Give it another 34 years and you’ll meet someone else nice.

I did not think that.

I didn’t blame her – she’d been clear, honest and fair and I loved her – but I didn’t really know how to cope. Being single had never made me lonely before – now the feeling was crippling. There were couples everywhere, it seemed. Everyone had someone. I wanted someone more than I’d ever done before at precisely the same moment that I realised that only one person would do.

Never was I more bitterly aware that I didn’t have three wishes. But what if I’d already had a wish? What if I’d used it up? I’d wanted my career success so much and for so long. Had I wasted my luck, my wish on that, something that seemed so trivial now? My career, acting, comedy which, at the time of every other crush, had been a consolation and a distraction, this time felt like a rebuke. That’s the cold, selfish glittery object of my desire that I get. Instead of her. Try and console yourself with that, sneers the genie.

Shepherd’s Bush Green is not a nice place to walk, I think to myself as I cross it diagonally northwestwards, weaving between bench-focused gatherings of chatting tramps. It’s noisy and ugly, but I’m used to walking in drab, boring, featureless places. For years, from the end of 2007, it didn’t matter where I walked. I wasn’t looking at the view. I started walking for my back, I kept going because of her. It made thinking about her more bearable. If I got more miserable, I could just speed up.

Drinking helped too. I’d always liked getting drunk in the pub or at parties – now I had a real use for it. At the end of a miserable day you could use it to speed up time – almost like cutting to the next morning’s hangover. So I did that a lot.

A few times, when drunk, I’d get off with someone. The booze allowed me to tell myself that it might make me feel better. Maybe I’ll manage to fall in love with this person instead, I always wondered. It seems that it can happen very quickly. And surely I should be doing something to shake myself out of my obsession with a woman who’s going out with someone else.

One of those pissed late-night snogs was captured by a paparazzo and printed in
Heat
magazine. That felt pretty humiliating. What a fool I’d been, I thought. I had no personal life to speak of, not even much experience of how to meet women and form relationships, and yet I’d already become famous. If I was ever to work any of this out, relationships, women, life, as I probably should have done as a teenager, I’d have to do it sneaking around because the press might be interested. I was snogging a girl outside a bar, for God’s sake – that is a normal thing to do, something I should have done more often, and now thousands of people will have seen. No one, I thought bitterly, can have had a higher percentage of their life’s snogs appear in the papers than me. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done but I was embarrassed for it to be shown to the world – as if someone had taken a picture of me washing my balls or having a shit.

It dawned on me gradually that quite a lot of people who I didn’t know were interested in my private life, or my apparent lack of one. My profile had grown slowly – initially
Peep Show
had barely been noticed but, as more series aired, more people became aware of it. Then some became aware of the sketch show. Others started to see me crop up on panel shows. Gradually the likelihood of a stranger knowing who I was had grown.

And, as it grew, I was interviewed more often by newspapers, and the nature of the questions I was asked in those interviews changed. They were fishing for details of my private life. I suppose that’s natural – people are always interested in that sort of thing, and my character in
Peep Show
has his private life very much to the fore. They wanted to know how mine compared. And I’d certainly implied in panel shows, as a way of getting a laugh and developing a persona that people could get a handle on, that I was a lonely, dysfunctional, OCD loser.