- 22 -
‘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.
This was the first night of Innocent Millions Dead or Dying – A Wry Look at the Post-Apocalyptic Age (With Songs), the first two-man show I performed with Robert Webb. It was a late show at the ADC and, by mid-afternoon of the day we were to open, panic was setting in. We’d just remembered that we needed props. Usually, in shows, someone sorts out all the props. What we’d just discovered was that, for that to happen, someone else has to ask them. A low point had been during the technical rehearsal when Ellis had popped in to see how we were getting on and said:
‘Yeah, you’ve got a bit of work to do, chaps.’
Ellis had said that. The personification of the ‘it’ll all be fine – let’s just kick back and get pissed’ approach. He had a look in his eye of concern, but also of respect. ‘These guys,’ he was thinking, ‘have managed to fuck themselves even more royally than I could have done in their place.’
All was not lost, though. We were thanking our lucky stars that we’d been too disorganised to put any posters up, because we reckoned that would cancel out our having been too disorganised to learn our lines or rehearse the show. A handful of mates might turn up and we could do a sort of open rehearsal in front of them – it was all going to feel very casual and relaxed, a work in progress. That’s what we hoped.
But, no, the theatre was almost full. This was unheard-of for a late show other than a Footlights smoker. There was nowhere to hide. Except the wings. Which would leave the stage bare. Which would mean they’d ask for their money back – and we were both secretly totting up the amount of money we stood to make and what that bought in Kronenbourg. Backstage beforehand, we listened to the auditorium filling up excitedly and were conscious of a huge opportunity that we were about to screw up.
‘But what’s going on?’ you may be asking if you’re in the habit of talking to books. ‘A minute ago you were doing a short and derivative sketch taking the piss out of people so unhappy they want to kill themselves. Now you’re fucking up a show with Robert Webb. What happened in between?’
I’ll tell you. The genesis of this flawed theatrical creation, or conception of this sickly comic child or the botched laser surgery behind this fuzzy humorous vision, had occurred six months earlier. When we were both in Edinburgh for the 1994 Fringe, Rob asked me if I wanted to do a show with him. Rob was one of the stars of that year’s Footlights tour show, The Barracuda Jazz Option, and I was there in a play called Colin, written by Charlie Hartill, the new Footlights president and starring Robert Thorogood, the old one. I was just a lowly first-year but I found the whole presidential vibe very exciting and hoped it augured well for me.
As a play, Colin was fine but nothing special. It was about a man called Colin, but the main reason it was called Colin was because the writer-performers of the previous year’s Footlights tour had been prevented from calling their show Colin by … well, the story goes that it was the tour manager and the techies, but I don’t really believe that as, in my experience of Footlights, the tour manager and techies were never consulted over the name of the show. I suspect it was the director and then the tour manager and techies agreed. The view was that you ‘can’t’ call a show Colin – the joke that Colin is more usually a name for a human or pet than a comedy revue would not come across. So the show had been called Some Wood and a Pie instead. How bizarre that Some Wood and a Pie is deemed a sensible, apposite, appropriately wacky name for a sketch show but Colin is seen to be taking the piss – but not taking the piss in a good way. Taking too much, or the wrong sort, of piss.
I’m not sure that the joke of calling a sketch show Colin would have worked – but jokes in show titles seldom do. They’re hilarious when you think of them and then they get printed on everything and read constantly and have the mickey taken out of them by hostile reviewers, and the joke slowly and painfully dies while you helplessly listen to its screams – like a fridge-magnet joke, impaled there by physics, miserably catching your eye every time you go for the milk, losing its humour at a hundred times the rate that the natural light can bleach the writing.
But Some Wood and a Pie is a terrible name for a comedy show. It reeks of unthinking, artless, unjustifiably self-confident wackiness – the very thing that Footlights is always accused of and should be doing everything it can to distance itself from. It’s an off-the-shelf kind of revue title; the people who insisted on it must have thought that (even if it wasn’t amusing) it was safe, a usual sort of comedy name. But audience members or reviewers will assume that the writer-performers think it’s funny – not just appropriate but actually comical. They’ll imagine those young people pissing themselves at the hilarious randomness of ‘Some Wood’ and ‘a Pie’, these two unconnected things, ho ho ho, how simply mad – and consequently hate them. That’s not the end of the world – some people will hate you whatever you do, particularly if you’re an enthusiastic Oxbridge student, but they might as well hate you for something you actually find funny, not something that you think is a bit of a lame compromise.
Calling the show Colin at least would have had an idea behind it. People might not get it but there’s something to get. I think it would work better if they’d given it a surname – called it Colin Jenkins or even Mr Jenkins. But it would definitely have been preferable to Some Wood and a Pie.
You may wonder why I’ve got so much to say about the controversy over the naming of a Footlights show I was never in and didn’t see. It’s because I think it’s illustrative of an interesting and maddening phenomenon in creative circles: fundamentally unentertaining people trying to make things like other things that have gone before. They believe that properly creative people, who actually have ideas, will try and drag a project off track. So, a student sketch show should have a wacky name, a TV programme should begin with the host saying: ‘This is the show in which …’ and then summarising the format, a pop song should be three minutes long, people will be more entertained by daytime TV if the presenters constantly use puns, a TV detective should always have an assistant who relentlessly questions his judgement and books should be described on their covers as ‘rollercoasters’.
Conventions like these are clung to and defended by people who have no real ideas of their own, and lack the self-knowledge to forge careers using other skills such as their efficiency, diplomacy or application. They want to make things that are like other things – to ‘play shop’, which means you’ve got to have a till and a brown coat and a counter with a shelf of tins behind it like in real shops. When they hear something that diverges from that – say a series of aisles with all the produce and then a bank of checkouts where people pay – they instinctively oppose it because they can seldom tell the difference between a properly original piece of thinking and a mad divergence from sensible practice. As in this case. There is no earthly reason to consider Some Wood and a Pie more appropriate than Colin as a name for a random collection of sketches – but one title has an unsettling air of originality which this type of person shrinks from, apparently without realising that such originality is where comedy comes from and therefore exactly what they should be attracted to.
Charlie Hartill was a man very much of my mind in this regard, and called his own play Colin as a sort of revenge on the dullards who overruled the comedians the previous year. (Of course, it was a completely hollow revenge. The play was about a man called Colin. The title wasn’t off-kilter at all. The Some Wood and a Pie advocates would have been fine with it. If he’d really wanted to rattle their cages, he’d have called it Some Wood and a Pie.)
Unfortunately it was a pretty patchy play. It had some good bits, some good lines, some nice characterisation, but the story didn’t really cut the mustard. My main memory of it is a scene where, while the hero is talking or doing some work or somehow otherwise engaged, my character, an argumentative, tweedy man, reaches into his inside pocket and removes a large battered sausage which he then proceeds to eat. We’d hoped people would laugh at this more than they did.
But Charlie was a talented man, albeit one who combined moments of frightening drive and intensity with long periods where he lost focus. He could be very funny in an angry, analytical way, which influenced me enormously. I remember his doing a long analysis, as part of a stand-up routine, of the rhyme ‘See a penny, pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck’ which ended with him emphatically saying: ‘And a penny isn’t worth making yourself blind for, is it?’ I can’t recall how he got there but it involved dog shit.
As president of Footlights, he could be withering in the face of incompetence. Rob told me of an occasion at a production meeting for the 1994 Footlights pantomime Dick Whittington, to which Charlie arrived late to find an argument going on. He interrupted everyone, saying, ‘What is the problem? I shall solve it instantly’ – and then did.
Charlie adopted a lot of his managerial technique from his mentor Christopher Richardson, who founded and ran The Pleasance, an all-conquering Edinburgh Fringe venue where Charlie had a summer job. My favourite quotation attributed to Christopher Richardson, said in the context of a technical rehearsal in a theatre, is: ‘I find these inexplicable delays intensely depressing.’ If I were the sort of person who got phrases printed on T-shirts, that’s what I’d go for. It so perfectly encapsulates my feelings for about 60 per cent of the time I spend working in theatres, television studios or on location, where getting up early and then waiting around for hours is the order of the day. It’s also a fairly appropriate general response to life.
Charlie Hartill wrote plays and sketches, performed stand-up, acted, was a brilliant designer of posters and programmes, organised the Pleasance computer system and was a director of the Edinburgh Fringe for eight years. He was often an inspiring leader for Footlights and he was an intensely loyal friend. Sadly, that was only one side of him. The other was dominated by an unfathomable anger and unhappiness that were the root of his less impressive and dependable periods of behaviour, his heavy drinking and ultimately his suicide in 2004.
Charlie and I were both fans of John Buchan novels, both for the exciting plots and the slightly laughable boys-own adventure style. After a mixed run at Edinburgh for Colin, in which Charlie had been by turns fun, funny, supportive, irritable, busy, absent and drunk, he wasn’t my favourite person in the world. Then, soon after the end of the Fringe, he gave me a beautifully preserved copy of John Buchan’s autobiography in which he’d written, rather formally: ‘To David Mitchell, With gratitude and fond memory for Colin! Charlie Hartill’ – and I forgave him all. I treasure it and yet it’s probably the saddest object I own, reminding me not just of Charlie’s death but of the times when his behaviour led me to resent or avoid him, not realising the time limit on our friendship. The book’s title is Memory Hold the Door.
The Edinburgh run of Colin was a slightly muted end to my first year as a theatre-obsessed student. While the Festival itself was a dazzling event, the reality of trying to sell a mediocre show starring nobody anyone had heard of was even more of an uphill struggle than the sweaty walk across Edinburgh from the flat to the Pleasance. We sold a respectable number of tickets but, having spent the year playing to full ADC houses of enthusiastic students in Noises Off and What the Butler Saw, doing some patchy new writing in front of fifteen indifferent punters was an anticlimax.
But when Rob asked me to do a show with him, it more than made up for that. I was incredibly excited. He popped the question in the Pleasance bar on a very drunken night which ended with my having a long row with Richard Herring about Eric Morecambe. Richard Herring had come over to say that he’d enjoyed Rob’s performance in the Footlights show and we’d got talking and I was hammered. I’m not sure how the subject of Eric Morecambe came up, though I fear that I probably introduced it. My feelings of insecurity about the Edinburgh comedy world, on which I was dismayed not to have immediately made an impact, led me to be dismissive of it. These transient stars of the Fringe are nothing compared to the great treasures of the golden age of television, I thought bitterly. ‘You can’t beat Eric Morecambe’ was basically my argument.
Richard Herring didn’t refute this, but contended that other sorts of comedy were also valid. I’m afraid that line of reasoning was slightly too sophisticated for me after so many lagers and I became incensed and basically accused Richard of saying he was funnier than Eric Morecambe. Eventually Richard managed to extricate himself. I should have apologised when I saw him at the Pleasance the next day, but to do so would have been too much of a tacit admission about my own behaviour. It was many years before I was comfortable admitting even to myself what a dick I must have seemed to him. Having worked with Richard on several occasions since, and always found him a very nice and funny guy, I hope he’s never made the connection between me now and some spotty kid who had a drunken go at him in Edinburgh 1994. If he has, he’s a very forgiving man.
Despite my embarrassing him in front of someone off the telly only minutes after our double act was formed, Rob remained willing to stick with the plan of doing a show with me. And I was hyper-keen. Rob was a Footlights committee member, star of the tour show and the next year’s vice-president. Doing a show with him meant I’d arrived.
My own credentials, for a first-year, weren’t bad. I’d been in the panto, taken part in smokers and written material for both the Spring Revue and the tour show – including the worst sketch they performed. This was an item entitled ‘Most Feet Competition’, the details of which you can probably make a reasonably accurate guess at. I felt that I was unlucky to have written the worst sketch in the show. The material was chosen from a huge pile, so to be the worst that made the cut it had to be well above the average standard of what was written. Yet, because it wasn’t great but had to be performed dozens of times, the cast hated it, while they fondly remembered worse items that failed to make the cut at all, and consequently didn’t die a death every night at the Wimborne Theatre.
I had also organised my own sketch show, Go to Work on an Egg, with Robert Hudson (now a novelist and my flatmate) and a few others. It had gone down very well. I, if not gorged, at least heavily snacked on that joyous sensation of getting a laugh from my own material which I’d felt at my first smoker.
One of the sketches in that show was the first thing I ever wrote with Rob, entitled ‘War Farce’. We’d written it for the tour show but the director, Mark Evans, had refused to include it on the basis that it was terrible. Nevertheless I foisted it on the Go to Work on an Egg team because of its glamorous associations with a member of the Footlights committee. Rob had come to see the show and (‘War Farce’ apart) pronounced it very amusing and congratulated me in a meaningful way which, what with Rob’s whole metrosexual earring-wearing schtick, a man more sexually and less comedically confident than I might have taken as a come-on. But I knew it meant he thought I was funny, in a way that he hadn’t particularly in Cinderella. Aglow with the triumphs of such sketches as ‘Date Date’, ‘Librarian’ and ‘Use Them as Trestles’, I knew that he was right.
And now he was suggesting we write a whole show together! We didn’t start work for a few months after that, during which time I was able to narrow the gap a bit between me and my glamorous comedy senior. Most of the old Footlights committee had graduated; only Rob, Charlie and Tristram were still around, so Matthew Holness and I were quickly co-opted to organise smokers, reel in freshers and hold panto auditions. I realised how green Rob must have been feeling when I’d met him at the Cinderellarecall audition a year before, and had an important epiphany: ‘knowing what you’re doing’ largely involves pretending to know what you’re doing. Or, at least, it does in showbusiness. I choose to believe that it isn’t like that with surgery or nuclear power.
Alongside these exciting new responsibilities, I played Mr Worthy in Ellis’s shit production of The Recruiting Officer and wrote a musical with Ellis and Adam Cork (a brilliant and now Tony Award-winning composer) called Stud in which I also acted. (I didn’t play the title role.) And in the panto that year, Rob and I were the leads, playing Dick Whittington and his cat respectively.
We didn’t really know how to write our own two-man show, which, in retrospect, was a good thing. We didn’t, for example, start writing self-contained two-man sketches, which would have led to a stop-start show with too many blackouts. Neither did we approach it in the sort of two-man stand-uppy way of which I’d seen a lot around that time – where the two men address the audience alternately along a theme such as ‘A History of Love’ or ‘A Guide to Being a Dick’. We just sat down and started a silly story. It was about a Victorian inventor and a semi-alcoholic rustic programmer travelling through time to try and foil the apocalyptic ambitions of a crazed Welsh super-computer.
This was to be how all the stage shows of our early career were formatted. Pairs of characters would talk to each other, hopefully in a funny way, and then separate. Another pair of characters would do the same. Then maybe another. Then they’d start to mix pairings, in a way that was obviously limited by who was playing which character. Only by cheesy theatrical sleight of hand could anyone Rob played ever meet anyone else Rob played. We milked these limitations for laughs. As the show progressed and our stupid, often James Bond-style plot became dafter, any consequent slackening in audience interest could be made up for by the frequency, speed and desperation of our costume changes. The story didn’t have to be gripping if they were entertained by the sight of us frantically trying to tell it with inadequate resources.
To put it another way, it’s funny when people fuck up. That’s what we learned in our first attempt – the Innocent Millions debacle. From memory, we occasionally got a laugh from a pre-written joke, but largely our desperate attempt to struggle through the story and be wearing the right costume at the right time was what the audience were enjoying. At the end, they clapped and cheered like they’d properly enjoyed it. It felt like we’d done something good.
We learned a lot that night, some of which did us good. We learned that we worked well together as performers – that we were somehow greater than the sum of our parts. We learned that an audience wants to hear jokes or be told a funny story by people they’re enjoying watching and that not much else about a comedy show matters – that sometimes it’s okay, as Mr Sleigh at New College School tried to tell me, for the giant rabbit to take its mittens off. And we learned that our approach to writing material was basically sound.
But some of the other lessons we took from that night were harmful. However often we told ourselves in the years to come that rehearsing wasn’t just for pussies – and that this year, finally, we were going to take a slick and professional show up to Edinburgh – neither of us could quite shake our infatuation with winging it. We knew that hard work and professionalism were important in the career we’d chosen – and yet we couldn’t forget the first night of Innocent Millions when we’d wandered on stage with only the barest clue of what we were doing and it had gone down brilliantly.