- 27 -
A pink limo pulls over to the kerb a few yards in front of me. I doubt that it’s local. It’s not that sort of area. I’m back on the Bayswater Road now, having run out of park. The posh houses of Kensington Palace Gardens stretch down to my left. I’m not saying their owners are immune to vulgarity when it comes to choosing cars – they could probably be tempted to one of those slightly chavvy new two-door Bentleys – but this vehicle is full-on Vegas kitsch.
Various participants in a hen do, still fairly sober at this hour of the afternoon, get out to stretch their legs and finalise plans for their assault on the West End. They’re all wearing devil horns and short skirts except for their two male friends who, for some reason, are dressed as pirates. I pity those men. The girls’ devil outfits look perfectly sexy, while the two blokes are encumbered with cutlasses and parrots. When the paparazzi hope to glimpse a twat getting out of a limo, this isn’t what they mean. What are these two doing there?
Maybe they’re gay. A gay friend of mine was once invited on a hen do. He went along but couldn’t quite get the rationale clear in his head. Surely, he thought, stag and hen nights have to be demarcated along the lines of the gender of the participants, not that of whom they aspire to fuck? Would a lesbian be made to join the stags?
Take that to its logical conclusion and loos, the gender division of which is presumably to preserve decency and avoid funny business, should actually not be for ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ but for ‘Gent-Fuckers’ and ‘Lady-fuckers’. So straight men and lesbians can happily pee in the same area, safe in the knowledge that mutual sexual attraction cannot occur – while the gay men are in with the straight women, happily talking about [insert sexist/homophobic generalisation of your choice here].
I really must stop thinking about loos. I stop briefly in Starbucks on Pembridge Road to relieve the problem. To clarify: I use the Starbucks loo. It’s not an anti-capitalist demonstration.
Those poor pirates! I have awkward and mixed feelings about fancy dress. I’m very happy to dress in whatever stupid costume I’m given when appearing on TV. I won’t be nude but any sort of ridiculous outfit, in a context where it’s supposed to look funny, I’m fine with. That’s probably because I can say I didn’t choose to wear it, it’s just my job (although that’s a pretty flimsy excuse when it’s a costume for a sketch I’ve written). But when a party invitation says ‘fancy dress’, it’s different. I don’t think it’s right to turn up dressed normally, although people do and God knows that avoids hassle and embarrassment. I just think it’s a bit rude and churlish. It’s both failing to observe a clearly stated dress code and refusing to join in with the fun of a social event. Rather than that, I think one should probably just not go.
At the same time, though, a perfect, gleaming, hired costume would feel a bit OTT – a bit ‘Look at me!’ A friend of mine regularly has a Hallowe’en party for which some form of horror-inspiring outfit is required. Perhaps, to reflect what inspires horror in me, I should go as a party invitation requiring fancy dress. Instead, I make a lame nod towards compliance. The first year, I went to a ‘party shop’ and quickly bought a plastic vampire cloak and a wizard’s hat and went wearing both. I felt this would do the job. It would be saying: ‘Look, I’m joining in – clearly this is not how I’m normally attired.’ The problem was that the first question everyone asks you at a do like that is, ‘What have you come as?’ and those two items don’t really provide an answer. A vampiric wizard? A magic vampire? A wizard going to the opera?
The next year, I eschewed the hat but slicked my hair and said I was a vampire. A vampire with normal teeth. The year after that I thought I’d have to do better and so I cut up a furry hot water bottle and sewed bits of it to the backs of fingerless gloves and other bits to a T-shirt. No one got that I was a werewolf, even though I’d put fake blood round my mouth.
‘You just look like a normal bloke who’s trailing fluff everywhere,’ someone said.
Why are the British so comfortable with this extroverted form of social event? What happens to our trademark repression when an accountant and his wife cheerfully get into a cab dressed as Sylvester and Tweetie Pie? What is it that makes an otherwise inoffensive man happy to go to a social event wearing round glasses, a false beard and sporting a stethoscope so that he can spend all night saying ‘Yes, Shipman’ in answer to appalled gazes?
And when did it start? To my eyes, before about 1950 most people were wearing fancy dress anyway. What on earth was a Restoration-era costume party like? Could a gentleman be persuaded to remove his ridiculous three-foot wig before donning the comparatively conservative horned Viking helmet? (I know, before you balk, that the Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets, but I can’t help feeling that’s their mistake, not ours.)
What does the Queen go as, when she’s asked to a fancy dress party? That must happen all the time – aristocrats love masked balls and other eccentric events that show breeding and conceal inbreeding. But she’s got a problem. She’s basically in fancy dress her whole life. She has to go to everything as the Queen. On a normal day, she’ll be head to toe in canary yellow, salmon pink or frog green and, if she’s opening Parliament, she’ll be wearing a sparkly dress and a crown. Like me, she seems perfectly comfortable wearing weird outfits for work. But, if the footage of her from Millennium night, awkwardly holding hands with Tony Blair while singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, is anything to go by, she finds it difficult to let her hair down at parties, which is also like me.
Where we differ, and where our Millennium nights differ, is that I didn’t light a beacon, then cruise down the Thames to the sound of a 21-gun salute en route to a party at the Dome. I didn’t watch 400 carnival performers do whatever carnival performers do (which is whinge about hamstring injuries and touch their parents for cash, I imagine; we may be a country that can cope with fancy dress, but the concept of ‘carnival’ is beyond us and I suspect that British carnival acts are the preserve of those intellectually sloppy but counter-culturally inclined children of the middle classes too lazy to train as homeopaths and too prudish for burlesque).
Me, I just had a few drinks in Swiss Cottage. We didn’t even have a proper party because we thought any potential guests would have something better to do. So a handful of us got pissed and then walked up Primrose Hill to watch the fireworks on the Thames, which at that distance looked tiny. I somehow mistimed my drinking and got a headache that I couldn’t shift.
It may have been a dull night but it was a fairly uplifting time for me professionally. For the last three years, everything had consistently got better. In 1998 Rob and I had met Phil Clarke, a BBC producer who had been given the thankless task of making a late-night sketch show for £29,000 an episode. That was the budget of the show, I hasten to clarify, not his fee. If it had been his fee, that would have been thanks enough. (You may think that £29,000 sounds quite a lot for half an hour’s TV but, trust me, for a sketch show, with lots of cast, crew, locations and editing needed, it really isn’t. A prime-time sketch show would have a budget ten times that.)
Phil cast us in it and so we got our first TV job. The show was called Comedy Nation and, if you look it up, maybe on IMDB, you’ll see that it had a stellar cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Ronni Ancona, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Peter Serafinowicz, Sally Phillips and Phill Jupitus. Stephen Merchant was the runner.
Unfortunately Rob and I didn’t meet any of those people, as all the different bits of the show were filmed separately. Also, it wasn’t a very good programme. It consisted of sketches, written by the performers and then little more than camcordered by a tiny crew. For the first series, we had to provide our own costumes and props, and our sketches were filmed in an office at the BBC while its usual occupants were out at lunch.
But its artistic failings certainly weren’t Phil Clarke’s fault. For that budget it is basically a miracle there was a show at all. What felt equally miraculous to us was that, for our contribution (the writing and performing of half a dozen sketches) we were each paid literally hundreds of pounds.
Phil Clarke is another of those magic producers like Gareth Edwards who, having been comedians themselves, can come up with jokes without the help of writers or performers and who, consequently, get their best work. He is mildly spoken, calm in a crisis, accommodating to other people’s views but very firm when he’s convinced that he’s in the right. But he picks his moments to speak out and is, in general, a civilising and humour-injecting influence in a stressful environment. I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with the strain of dealing with commissioning editors, but he’s also a black-belt kick boxer.
Comedy Nation was a resistible viewing pleasure but, for Rob and me, it led to other work. Ash Atalla, who was later to produce The Office, had been Comedy Nation’s script editor and, when he was commissioned to produce a Radio 4 sketch show about disability issues, he asked us to contribute some material. So it was that Yes Sir, I Can Boogie, a show predicated on the flawed premise of being for the disabled what Goodness Gracious Me had been for Asians, became Rob’s and my first Radio 4 writing credit.
Phil also put more work our way when he left the BBC and moved to Absolutely, the production company founded by the team of writer-performers behind the terrific late ’80s/early ’90s Channel 4 sketch show of the same name. They were making the second series of Armstrong and Miller and Phil asked us to join the writing team. This was a brilliant experience. Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong were not only very funny, they were welcoming and enthusiastic to us and had an appealing, analytical approach to comedy. All of the writers would turn up with half-thought-through notions of what might make a sketch and then the group – Ben, Xander, Phil, George Jeffries and Bert Tyler-Moore were the other regulars – would discuss it, find the comic kernel and knock it into shape. It was like a more professional version of the Footlights system. Half-arsed ideas would be fitted with their second buttocks and everyone would leave the meeting with a list of coherent pieces of material to write up.
Armstrong and Miller was a massive turning point for me because that’s when I started to make a living from comedy. For the first time, I didn’t need to do anything else to supplement my income and I never have since. Fingers crossed, touch wood, turn around and touch the ground, etc., etc., etc. I was 24 years old and it was an enormous relief. I get asked a lot in interviews about ‘breakthrough’ moments in my career, presumably to elicit a glittering anecdote set in a revolving restaurant where a cigar-smoking producer screams, ‘This kid’s got something!’ Instead I tell them about when the jobbing writing work started to cover the bills. That’s when I properly became a professional comedian.
And I suddenly felt rich. Hundreds of pounds were entering my bank account every week and I hardly had any overheads. I seemed to have instantly gone from never having enough money to having more than I could imagine what to do with. This is not because I was very highly paid but because my spending imagination had atrophied through underuse. It felt beyond the dreams of avarice that, rent and bills taken care of, I was able to get my round in at the pub and occasionally go to Pizza Express. I couldn’t think of much else to spend it on. In the same way that starting to get regular work was a bigger moment for me than the showier career successes that came later, those first regular arrivals of a few hundred quid felt like more money to me than any of the fatter fees I’ve earned since. It turns out money is like a drug – to start with, it doesn’t take much of it to get you high.
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!
(-es).
In the show, Rob and I played the supposed representatives of this sponsor, unimaginatively named Gunther and Klaus. The opening scene included a joke by James Bachman, which may be my favourite of all the jokes I’ve ever performed on stage. Gunther and Klaus are performing sections of Strike a Light – My Künty Career, the autobiography of the matches’ inventor Dr Hermann Künty, who was a well-connected German industrialist in the 1930s.
They take up a position.
KLAUS: Hello, Dr Künty.
GUNTHER: Hello, Herr Hitler. I have heard so much about you.
KLAUS: All good, I hope.
It was our most successful Edinburgh show ever, which isn’t actually saying much, but it was well reviewed and sold out the whole run and, back in London, even more people wanted to give us cups of tea and talk about our ideas.
Among those who meant business were David Tyler and Geoff Posner. Geoff’s first directing job had been Not the Nine O’Clock News and he’d worked with most British TV comedy stars who’d come to prominence since. David had cut his teeth on Spitting Image and Absolutely. The pair’s own company had recently made Coogan’s Run and Dinnerladies and they wanted their next project to be with us. They quickly obtained a BBC commission for a TV script in the style of our Edinburgh shows – a silly story full of characters all of which were to be played by us. The idea was that, in a series, each episode would have a different context – the Middle Ages, Outer Space, Snooker in the 1970s, the Wild West – but the characters would recur, a bit like The Goon Show. The working title was Extraordinary Tales of Exceptional Goodness.
This was a very exciting prospect. It was only a script commission but David and Geoff weren’t time-wasters. They were funny and successful, and the show, if we could get it made, might be relatively original. Original in TV terms – in that it would be a rip-off of a show that happened forty years before, rather than six months ago. It would also be the natural continuation of the stage shows Rob and I had been writing for years. If we could make this show for the BBC and Daydream Believers for Channel 4, maybe after a second series of Bruiser, we’d be well set-up men indeed.
And still more people wanted to have meetings with us, although they seemed less exciting now that we had so much proper work. As I surveyed the enviable position I found myself in at the start of the new millennium, as I looked proudly at my new BBC diary for the year 2000, I remembered that Rob and I had agreed to meet a couple of jobbing writers, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, to talk about an idea they’d had. We’d met them on an ill-fated team-writing project organised by David Tomlinson, which attempted to make eight men committee-write a sitcom about squatters. Nothing came of it but we’d got on well with Sam and Jesse. We liked what they’d written and vice versa.
We’ve got a bit too much on, we thought. We’re getting proper commissions now. But it would be rude to refuse to see them for a chat – we didn’t want to seem grand. Still, we were experienced enough to know that nothing ever came of that sort of meeting.