- 31 -
The trendy, scuzzy expensiveness of Notting Hill Gate gives way suddenly to the leafy fashion-proof expensiveness of Holland Park. Whoever was spraying ’60s buildings around wasn’t allowed west of Ladbroke Terrace. From this point, until the end of Holland Park Avenue, the only interruptions to Victorian stucco and brick are elegant London plane trees.
One of the other things my dad talks about is how London plane trees were the only species of tree that could survive the Victorian smog. He’s told me that several times. But that’s okay – it’s an excellent fact. London was so dense and polluted, such an unprecedented environment, that it had to find its own sort of super-tree that could survive it. Normal trees were too feeble for these circumstances in which millions of humans thrived. I also like the fact that, despite so many of the common decencies of life having been abandoned in order to make the brave new metropolis work – breathability of the air most notable among them – nobody considered tree-lined avenues to be surplus to requirements. The air was so poisonous that it killed trees (imagine how much weed-killer that would take), but the sheer quantity of airborne herbicide wasn’t a matter of much concern, as long as they could find a tree which, like London, could take it. It’s a perverse but somehow inspiring approach.
Soon after Holland Park Tube station, there’s a pleasant-looking pub called The Castle around which a semi-circle of drinking, suited people, who have left offices early on this warm spring Friday, has developed. Why don’t they go in? For years, I assumed that pubs with crowds around them must be jam-packed inside, but it’s seldom the case. Some people, those who’ve spent all day sitting in stuffy offices, I suppose, prefer to stand outdoors and drink. It must seem a confusing choice to the tramps in the park.
The smoking ban has had an effect too. Rather than reducing the appeal of tobacco, it’s given standing outdoors a new cachet. I’ve certainly smoked a lot more since the ban came in. I’m still only a cadger, who’ll go days without one and then have two or three at a party, but for the couple of years before the ban I’d pretty much stopped entirely; I was down to a festive one or two on New Year’s Eve. And I only smoked those for the benefit of nicotine addicts who were making resolutions, to rub their noses in my peculiar take-it-or-leave-it relationship with the drug.
Post-ban, I’m back up to about five a week – a lot of them smoked outside pubs in preference to staying inside looking after smokers’ bags with the other non-smokers. I’m not saying smokers tend to be more interesting people – I’m sure that’s a nicotine-induced illusion. I think the real appeal is the little trip, to break the monotony of pub drinking: ‘Let’s pop out for a cigarette.’ It’s like going for a quick swim when you’re spending an afternoon sitting round a pool.
Maybe you can tell but I’m quite proud of my approach to smoking – that I can do it occasionally without getting hooked. You may think I’m a fool; after all, even a few cigarettes aren’t exactly a health boost. But I reckon the amount I smoke is no more dangerous than going for brisk walks along busy roads – although that doesn’t quite answer the question of how I reckon I can get away with doing both. This is the smug and complacent position that many have been in on the eve of a forty-a-day habit – then again I’ve been adhering to the upper stretches of this slippery slope for years now, so I reckon I’m a sort of Spiderman figure in the world of this metaphor.
But in December 2004, I must have been outside the pub for reasons of space; this was two and a half years before indoor smoke was banned without an associated chimney.
‘I’ve got to go in about half an hour,’ I was saying to whoever would listen. ‘I’ve agreed to do a try-out for a stupid pointless thing.’
This had been my sole topic of conversation all day. It was the afternoon of the BBC Radio Comedy Christmas party which I’d been massively looking forward to. The comparatively brief business of the lunchtime party having finished, everyone had now gone to the pub. In general things were going well for me. Both Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Sound had been given second series and so I reckoned I had a pretty viable career. I felt I was owed a nice relaxing Christmas, kicked off by an afternoon of heavy drinking at this most fun and least wanky of all media events.
It feels very much like the office party for a lot of people who don’t have offices. Even those not invited to the do itself would wander along to one of the post-party pubs round the corner from Broadcasting House: the Yorkshire Grey or the Crown and Sceptre. I was outside the latter explaining to the umpteenth person that my ‘end of term’ piss-up was basically ruined.
‘I’ve been nursing two beers for five hours,’ I repeated sadly.
The ‘try-out’ that I’d said I’d go to was for a new Channel 4 panel show unappetisingly called ‘FAQ U’. So, a bit like ‘Fuck You’. Splendid. FAQ obviously stands for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, and the ‘U’ for ‘You’ but, as the phrase ‘Frequently Asked Questions You’ makes no sense, it was impossible not to conclude that they’d wanted the show to be called ‘Fuck You’ – that they thought that would be good or funny. So I wasn’t very hopeful about the project, but I also felt that refusing to go to a job audition because I’d earmarked that day for a nine-hour drinking session would be crossing some sort of Rubicon in a march away from professionalism.
Also, I wanted to do panel shows. Despite being in a genuinely award-winning sitcom and a well-reviewed Radio 4 show, Rob and I didn’t feel like we’d quite broken through. Maybe it was the fact that fewer people had seen Peep Show than read some of its complimentary reviews.
I really liked the thought of trying to be funny off-the-cuff as part of my job. I enjoyed the warm-up chats we always had with the audience at the beginning of radio recordings. I didn’t want to do stand-up, but I wanted an arena in which I could try and just ‘be funny’ in public.
I’d had the occasional opportunity. I’d been a team captain in a show called Fanorama which had been broadcast on E4 in 2001 and 2002, long before E4 was a channel with an audience. The two series were hosted by Claudia Winkleman and Lauren Laverne respectively and the other team captain was Rhys Thomas. It was a show in which obsessive fans of bands, actors, celebrities or TV programmes competed to prove theirs was the deepest fanaticism. Rhys and I were supposed to keep it all light. We’d shoot three or four shows a day and get a series of twenty in the can in under a week.
It wasn’t brilliant but I really enjoyed it and, as I’d hoped, it led to an invitation to appear on a proper panel show on a terrestrial channel. I’m afraid it might not be one of the ones you’ve heard of – in fact I’ve just checked and it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Even Bruiser has its own Wikipedia page. It was called Does Doug Know?
You get asked a wide range of questions if you’re on TV – particularly since the advent of Twitter – but no one has ever asked me if and when Does Doug Know? is coming back. Neither, to be fair, have they slagged it off. Or mentioned it at all. Most spookily of all, there’s no trace of it on Dave.
I’m beginning to suspect that I dreamt Does Doug Know? It feels like a dream. I can’t remember a lot of the details – the premise, for example – and there were odd and incongruous people from the telly there including both Jimmy and Alan Carr. I remember that it was on Channel 4, that I appeared on two episodes and that I wore a brown shirt for one of them.
The choice of shirt was my key creative decision on that show as I had very few shirts fit for national consumption. My non-folding policy had rendered most of my shirts unpresentable even if you tried to iron them. They were beyond ironing now – they’d gone feral. But I remembered with relief that my mother had recently given me this brown one so it was still in acceptable condition. What I didn’t know, and have since learned, is that if you turn up to do a panel show looking like a dog’s breakfast they give you a shirt anyway.
I don’t remember Does Doug Know? being a huge humiliation, but it can’t have been a triumph because I wasn’t invited on another panel show for three and a half years. I hadn’t had a single invitation between then and the pavement outside the Crown and Sceptre (which a lot of people call the ‘Hat and Stick’ to convey familiarity; you may find that that makes you want to be sick – it does me). And this try-out wasn’t a proper invitation – it was just an audition for another new Channel 4 show with, if anything, an even less promising title than Does Doug Know? (which isn’t very good but would, as discussed in the previous chapter, have been fine if people had liked, or indeed noticed, the programme – and in support of that, let me introduce They Think It’s All Over and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, for fuck’s sake, into evidence).
Yes, my Does Doug Know? performance must have been terrible. Panel shows are hungry beasts and always looking for fresh meat, more panellists – I know that now. But whatever I did on that show led the entire industry to conclude that such programmes were not for me, a conclusion that thankfully it subsequently revoked. Not mentioning any names, but just think of the most annoying person who keeps popping up endlessly on panel shows (apart from me). Think of the one you find most grating and annoying (which, actually, is unlikely to be me in your case unless you have a masochistic taste in books). The most awful witless twat whose continued employment you cannot understand. Done it? (I wonder if we’re thinking of the same person?) Anyway, I must have been worse than him (and it is a him, let’s be honest. Hardly any women are allowed on panel shows so the ones that break through tend to be pretty good).
I’d had the occasional invitation from clip shows, usually with Rob – to appear on the I Love 1987 style of programme and affect nostalgia for Sodastreams – and I’d jumped at them until Rob said he hated doing them so we largely stopped. And he was quite right; they’re a shit form of television and contributors seldom come across well. The context is too unflattering: you simultaneously look like a cheap rentaquote and someone sufficiently arrogant to think their opinions are fascinating. Oddly, a panel show doesn’t carry the same implications, probably because there’s usually a nominal game being played to conceal the fact that it’s really some people behind a desk pontificating. Give Loose Women some sort of quiz structure and I reckon it would only be about half as annoying – although that is still very annoying.
So the FAQ U try-out sounded enough like it might be a reprieve for that foundering side of my career for me to forgo seven pints of beer. At 7 o’clock I stumped miserably away from the pub towards another pub, the Bricklayers Arms, in the upstairs room of which the audition was taking place. I got the job.
FAQ U was to be a nightly comedy discussion show, on at about 11 or 12, even later than Peep Show. I think Channel 4 was trying to recapture the success that they’d misremembered The 11 O’Clock Show as being – but with a simpler format. Some young comedians talk about vaguely topical stuff while sitting on sofas in front of an audience. The show had a three-week pilot run and they wanted to try out a new host for each of the weeks. I was given the job for week 2.
This show was not a success and did not get a series after this trial run. But not only did I hugely enjoy doing it, somehow it put me on the panel show map. Within a week of its first transmission in May 2005, Objective was developing a late-night show for me to host on More 4, and I’d been invited on Have I Got News for You and QI. Just like that, I was on the list. I didn’t have to work my way up via 8 Out of 10 Cats and Mock the Week – I went straight in at the level of the two premier panel shows. I don’t know what it was I’d said on FAQ U – I mean, I felt it had gone well but not amazingly – but before it I’d only ever been asked on Does Doug Know? and after it I was asked on everything. Not getting pissed at the radio party had been the right call.
It’s difficult to describe the combination of feelings that my first appearance on Have I Got News for You evoked in me. That programme started in 1990 when I was 16 and at the height of my comedy fandom. I think most people are at the height of whatever fandom they tend towards at about that age and I wasn’t into music or even films particularly. I was into clever, wordy comedy. And HIGNFY was a new, clever, wordy comedy show that was suddenly part of the national conversation, leading the satirical assault at a time when Thatcher was falling from power. I watched it avidly every week with my version of the fanaticism that led some women to throw their underwear at the Beatles.
Doing TV comedy in general has always been all the more exciting for me because it’s informed by nostalgia for those feelings of teenage enthusiasm. But with HIGNFY it was on another level because this was exactly the same show as I’d watched when I was at school. The set was the same, the team captains were the same – the only major difference was the presence of Des Lynam in the host’s chair rather than Angus Deayton – but apart from that, it was literally a teenage dream come true. My unformed brain, only six years after it stopped aspiring to a career as a Time Lord or wizard, had looked at that show and said to itself: ‘I want to be there.’ So, as I sat in that studio and the lights darkened and the signature tune played, and those boards at the back of the set turned round like I’d seen on hundreds of occasions for the last fourteen years, it felt like I was flying the TARDIS: amazing and impossible and terrifying. Ancient childhood synapses were re-firing and I just wanted to soak it all up – but I simultaneously realised that this was no time to enjoy the atmosphere. I had somehow to give a decent account of myself. I was the newbie and I could sense the audience’s fear.
That’s the main battle with an audience – to help them deal with their nerves. They’re seldom hostile to a new performer (and I have always carefully avoided performing in places where they might be) but they’re often fearful for you: nervous that you’re nervous and consequently won’t be funny. In that mood, they can’t properly laugh because they’re on their guard. You need to put them at their ease quickly – say something confident and funny which gives them the impression, however dishonestly, that you’re not nervous. Making reference to the unnerving nature of the situation can be a good way of doing this. In a TV panel show, if you say something that dies – totally fails to get a laugh even though it was clearly meant to – the consequent audience tension can often be defused with something as simple as: ‘Blimey, I fucked that up!’ You’ve got to be careful, though. If nerves creep into your voice at that point, you’ll only make matters worse.
The bravest and most successful example of this approach that I ever saw was when I went to watch Ken Dodd’s show in Oxford aged 15. He’d packed out the Apollo Theatre and the show was going fine, if mutedly, in front of the rather staid Oxford audience. Clearly this wasn’t good enough for Doddy, who was used to more appreciative northern crowds. So, after a few minutes of respectable but not massive laughs, he put his old, knobbly hands together on either side of the microphone as if in prayer and looked upwards to the heavens.
‘Please God, make me funny!’ he said.
It got a massive laugh – the biggest of the night. All tension immediately dissipated as we all realised we were in the presence of a performer who was so supremely confident, he felt able to refer to the ultimate elephant in the room: the fact that he was supposed to be making us laugh more than he was. It was amazing, and I often think of it when I see comedians say outrageous, edgy things that ‘other people are thinking but won’t say’. But would they have said that? Ken Dodd was willing to go to a more frightening place than any Frankie Boyle or Jerry Sadowitz routine when making reference, as a technique for warming an audience up, to the fact that he wasn’t being funny enough.
I wasn’t quite up to that level of confidence on my first HIGNFY but I managed to give the false impression that I was expecting to be funny, which meant that I was able to get some laughs. And, to my surprise, I hugely enjoyed the experience. The honour, the excitement and then the terror all fell away quickly and soon I was quite straightforwardly having a good time.
This probably makes me a pervert. Having to appear and/or speak in public always comes high up people’s list of worst nightmares – the sort of list which tells you that farmers always kill themselves and moving house is more upsetting than divorce. And to do so on TV while having to get laughs would presumably make the prospect even worse for most people.
I’m not completely unfamiliar with the feeling. When I first went on QI, a couple of weeks after HIGNFY, I found it much harder. It was a terribly pleasant, civilised environment. The producer John Lloyd, a brilliant and kind man, told me just to chat as if it was an interesting dinner party, and Stephen Fry and the panellists (who, as well as Alan Davies, were Phill Jupitus and Bill Bailey) were welcoming and inclusive. But I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to say. Without the focus of ‘trying to be funny about the news’ I got a bit lost and went quiet.
It’s like vertigo. You sit there, listening to other panellists chatting easily and getting laughs, thinking, ‘I haven’t said anything for ages! Why aren’t I saying anything?!’ Then you think, ‘Whatever I say next had better get a big laugh!’ That’s not much of an incentive to open your mouth. I snapped out of it, and did okay, but it was a nasty few moments. I’ve never felt like that on QI again. I’m comfortable enough to babble on about anything nowadays, reasoning that enough usable stuff will tumble out of my mouth in a 90-minute recording.
I don’t worry about that vertigo moment recurring because I know it will if I do. I’ve enjoyed every panel show I’ve done since then. As a physical coward, I’m heartened by the fact that I regularly do something that would make some mountain climbers, bear wrestlers or fire-breathing snowboarders quake in their appropriate footwear. I don’t really think that makes me brave, though – they’re just getting things out of proportion.
A recurrent interview question for me is: ‘Why do you do so many panel shows?’ It implies, probably fairly, that I do too many – that I’ve become over-exposed, that I’ve become a serial invader of people’s living rooms with my nasal whining on subjects that don’t really concern me. The answer to the question is that it’s because I love doing them. The money is nice and the exposure has helped my career, but I’ve also done them when the money’s shit and I don’t need it, and when my level of exposure is too high – when the canny career choice would have been to try and create some scarcity in the market for my services. Recently I’ve started saying no a bit more often. But, ultimately, when I’m asked on a panel show my first reaction is that I want to do it because it’s fun.
There’s no doubt that this was all a bit of a career breakthrough for me. At the time of FAQ U and my first panel shows, I wasn’t that busy. Peep Show kept coming around again, although it was always a marginal recommission because audience numbers remained stubbornly unimpressive, and we had our radio show but, other than that, I just did the occasional incongruous acting job: the BBC Shakespeare reworking of The Taming of the Shrew; a pilot sketch show for Channel 4 called Blunder; an ITV comedy drama called All About George; and, most surprisingly of all, a straight-to-video Michelle Pfeiffer film for which I briefly had to go to LA. But Rob was busier, in particular because he played the lead in another TV sitcom, The Smoking Room.
So when the panel shows started calling, and then other people started wanting to develop new panel shows with me as a regular team captain or even host, I had time to get really stuck in and Dave viewers have been bearing the brunt ever since. As well as cropping up regularly on HIGNFY, QI and Mock the Week, I made a series called Best of the Worst for Channel 4 and a pilot called Pants on Fire for the BBC, which title was thankfully commuted to Would I Lie to You? by the time a series was commissioned.
Perhaps more excitingly, in early 2006 I received a letter, dated 14 February, from Jon Naismith, the long-serving producer of Radio 4’s ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. It wasn’t a love letter, although it was the nearest I got to such things at the time. Jon and Graeme Garden, one of the wittiest men alive, had devised a new format for a radio panel show which, like Would I Lie to You?, involved lying, albeit in a very different way. Panellists would come on and read out lectures full of humorous nonsense from which their competitors would have to spot the occasional nugget of unlikely truth. They wanted me to chair it.
Jon’s pitch to me, basically, was that while radio panel shows don’t have the same impact as their TV equivalents or pay anything like as well, when they succeed they can run for decades. This could be your retirement plan, he was saying. And you don’t even have to shave before you turn up. Well, five years after the pilot was broadcast, The Unbelievable Truth is now on its tenth series, so the plan seems to be working so far. With luck, I’ll still be doing that show long after I’ve stopped being able to hear the buzzers.
Panel shows changed the public perception of me enormously because before I did them there wasn’t really any public perception of me. People who were into comedy might have known the name of the guy who played Mark in Peep Show but wouldn’t have had any sense of what he was like. When I started doing panel shows, people began to know a bit about me – obviously only the side of my personality that I projected when appearing in public, but that’s still very different from playing a character, or it is in my case. People now seem to be slightly interested in me and want to know what I think about things. They want me to rant on subjects that annoy or concern me. They think my presence will make a programme potentially more entertaining. This is something for which I am tremendously grateful and which, to be honest, massively appeals to my vanity.
So, even though I set out with Rob to make character comedy, to be a writer-performer, to avoid stand-up at all costs, my career has taken a very different turn and, like a stand-up, I spend a lot of my time trying to be amusing as myself. I write a weekly column in the Observer, I do a series of online comedy-opinion pieces called David Mitchell’s Soapbox, I’ve hosted shows which comment on the news, initially More4’s The Last Word then The Bubble and 10 O’Clock Live. No one would have thought of me for that kind of work as I stood outside the Crown and Sceptre ranting about the pointlessness of TV try-outs and how I’d been duped into starting my own Christmas late. I wouldn’t even have deemed it possible myself.
I sometimes worry that I’ve strayed too far from comic acting and from writing sketches or sitcom scripts for TV. I don’t want to lose that side of my career and I certainly don’t want to stop working with Rob. But I now value my ‘panel show persona’, and all the opportunities for showing off on screen, in print and online that come with it, equally highly.