Back Story

  Certainly, if you read men’s magazines, it’s made very clear that men are supposed to be massively into watches and gadgets and yachts and possibly golf clubs. It’s odd that the magazines push traditional masculine traits so hard – you’d think that would be counter-productive to their aims. One thing I’d have thought was definitely part of an old-school golf-watches-guns-and-cars view of men is that they shouldn’t buy magazines. Magazines, under that system, are surely for women. As are novels. Men should read the Financial Times or pornography. Of course many men’s magazines are fairly close to pornography but are trying to present themselves as something else. Or maybe it’s the other way round? Maybe it’s the pornographical element that makes men feel it’s okay for them to buy a magazine. The veneer of tits allows them to indulge their secret effeminate interests in jewellery and scent.

  It annoys me to be living in an era where one of the few traditional male attributes that I naturally possess – an aversion to grooming, pampering and perfume – is no longer valued. Indeed, for transparent marketing reasons, it’s positively discouraged. My attitude that hair should be neatly cut, washed in shampoo but not conditioned or gunked up with ‘product’ is almost frowned upon now, as if displaying a want of personal hygiene. Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too – it’s seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations – millennia – to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

  I only feel like this because I have a slightly perverse approach to my own appearance. I’m desperate never to be accused of vanity – which is a vanity in itself. I hate the thought that anyone could point to any aspect of my appearance and say, ‘You think that looks nice. You’ve chosen that in an attempt to stand out in a good way.’ That’s why, although I was pleased to become fitter from all this walking, and secretly a bit pleased to look it, the down side is feeling self-conscious about how often it’s triggered the question, ‘Have you been dieting?’ All I ever want is for my clothing, weight, haircut and smell to go unremarked on. I don’t think I’m particularly handsome or particularly ugly – if I’m to be deemed acceptable, or even likeable, it won’t be because of my appearance. So my aim is that my appearance should in no way be noteworthy. But then again, not so un-noteworthy as to be in itself noteworthy.

  That’s how I ended up with this haircut. I was issued with it as a child. I used to have a standard kid’s ‘bowl cut’ and then, at some point, it was combed into a parting – and I’ve stuck with it. Not because I like it, or hate it, but because to change it at any point would have provoked comment and, even if it was kindly meant, that would have made me cringe.

  But now the fact that I’ve never changed it and it looks so old-fashioned (or indeed Hitlerian, as some people say) itself provokes comment. So I’d probably have evaded more total comment in my life if I’d bitten the bullet ten years ago and changed to something less self-consciously unstylish. And all of this means that I’ve spent more time thinking about my hair than I either want to or consider consonant with being a man.

  This is no good. I’m going to have to stop again and see who those e-mails are from. I pause in a slightly stressful bustling bit of pavement outside the West 12 shopping centre, which now looks across nervously with its ’80s shabbiness at the gleaming modernity of the new Westfield. Or maybe with pride: perhaps West 12 was the vanguard, and now here comes Westfield, the mother ship.

  Hooray! They’re spam! Too much spam can be annoying but a little bit, every so often, can give such a welcome reprieve. You think you’re going to have to reply or in some way leap into action but you can just ignore them – lovely. I mainly get spam from malt whisky websites as a result of my habit of buying my grandfather a bottle every Christmas for most of his nineties. I also get regular correspondence from the Islington Folk Club where I once went to a ‘Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’ concert. Yes, I’d got the hang of dating at last. No, Robert Thorogood had organised a trip as research for a screenplay he was writing about a Hawaiian guitarist. (I think this is a guitarist with a ham and pineapple topping.) It was one of those places where, for reasons of their licence, you have nominally to join the club in order to be admitted once. They must have asked for an e-mail address. I hope the updates I’m ignoring aren’t draining their resources too much. I pocket my phone and continue towards Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  Magic though the iPhone patently is (albeit a dark magic performed by thousands of exhausted Chinese fingers), Rob and I have reason to resent it. I’m pretty sure it’s what put paid to our Apple advertising contract. We were hired to make the British version of their ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ online campaign to raise awareness of their computers’ merits. But, when the iPhone came out, all focus swivelled to that. Computers and differentiation from PCs became a sideshow. They didn’t seem to want us to do an ‘I’m an Apple, I’m a Blackberry’ series of ads, which is a shame as the costumes might have been funny.

  Rob and I got quite a lot of shit for doing that campaign, which genuinely surprised us. We thought adverts were just something that actors and comedians did to subsidise their income. You shouldn’t advertise something immoral, we thought, but everything else, whether you used the product or not, was fair game. And actually we did use Apple products – we’d both always had Macs, although I was nervous saying that in our defence because I wanted to make clear that I would have equally happily advertised Microsoft; it’s an honest company and I’m an actor for hire.

  I was annoyed when people accused us of ‘selling out’ because I felt they were projecting onto us anti-capitalist views that we’d never held or expressed. At the same time, I felt guilty, partly because we’d been well paid and partly because I always feel a bit guilty – I think feeling guiltless is somehow impolite.

  And there’s no doubt there’s an anti-corporate feeling abroad, which comedy fans are particularly susceptible to. A general suspicion of the motives of companies is very healthy. I like the fact that comedy enthusiasts have a tendency towards cynicism. But it’s a shame when the cynicism becomes unquestioning and automatic. Even though companies are self-interested, amoral organisations, the world wouldn’t be better off without them. They should be better regulated and more highly taxed, but they should exist and should be encouraged to trade. If you’d buy something from a company, as I would and have from Apple, it stands to reason that you would also be willing to sell them something. I don’t think that means my soul is forfeit.

  Nevertheless, the reaction has had an effect on me. When I get offered adverts nowadays, which happens fairly often, I don’t just think: ‘Would this be a reasonable gig? Can I justify it?’ I also think: ‘How much crap is going to get hurled at me for this? How long am I going to have to spend justifying it?’ If the answer to that question is ‘several years’, then the ad might not be paying such an astronomical hourly rate as it initially seemed.

  - 33 -

  The Work–Work Balance

  The Apple campaign came in the middle of 2006, a ridiculously hectic year for me and Rob. It had started with our filming a TV pilot of our radio sketch show which, with a very environmentally friendly approach to ideas, we’d called That Mitchell and Webb Look. It was immediately commissioned for a series, which we had to start writing straight away in order to shoot in June and July. We were thrilled with this commission. At last we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. That is literally what I’d most wanted to happen to me in the world as I sat watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on VHS as a teenager.

 
The way we landed the commission taught me something about the TV business. In the autumn of 2005 Channel 4 was dragging its feet over recommissioning Peep Show after a predictably poor ratings showing for series 3. Someone at 4 got wind of the fact that the BBC had asked us to make a TV pilot and they panicked. They felt they were ‘losing us’ to the competition. They’d been seriously considering deliberately losing us but, if it looked like the BBC had poached us, then they’d have egg on their faces, they felt. (Unpoached egg. We’d be nicely poached, they’d be covered in raw egg. They’d go golden if baked. This sounds delicious.) Consequently Channel 4 immediately offered Rob and me a full sketch show series, as well as a golden handcuffs deal (where they pay you money for doing nothing – for literally doing nothing, as in refusing to work for the competition) and two ‘one-off specials’ for Peep Show.

  This put us in a dilemma. Clearly Peep Show was dead in the water – Channel 4 didn’t want another series and were just offering two longer episodes as a sop to stop us, as they saw it, defecting to the BBC. But they were offering what we wanted: a full sketch show series. All the BBC were guaranteeing at that time was a pilot. That all pointed towards taking the Channel 4 offer.

  But, to set against that, we’d made two series of the radio show with the BBC; they owned the rights to the characters, some of whom we wanted to bring to TV, and would be mightily pissed off if we suddenly (as they would have seen it) defected to Channel 4. And they’d have been fairly justified in that feeling as we would have been abandoning a pilot at the eleventh hour. On top of that, we wouldn’t be able to make the Channel 4 show with Gareth Edwards because he was a BBC staff member. Channel 4 wanted to slip us into a sketch project which Phil and Objective were already developing – it wouldn’t be ‘our show’ in the way the TV version of our existing radio programme, made by Gareth our long-time sketch show collaborator, would have been (and indeed proved to be).

  After much agonising, we decided to stick to plan A and take the BBC pilot, hoping against hope that it would get a series – and resigned ourselves to the axing of Peep Show and Channel 4 being a bit pissed off with us for a couple of years. We felt this was the only honest course of action.

  Well, it worked out so much better than we could have hoped. The BBC pilot did go on to be a series, and Channel 4, in order not to look like we’d jumped ship, promptly recommissioned Peep Show for a fourth time – a proper six-parter with no talk of ‘one-off specials’. It was the last sticky recommission that show had and this year we’re making series 8. Rob and I had only meant to be honest but somehow we’d also pulled off a Machiavellian coup.

  That sketch show was the first of three big projects that we squeezed into 2006, as well as the Apple campaign. Next we shot a film, Magicians, in which we played childhood friends who fall out when their magic act is compromised by some shagging and beheading, written by Sam and Jesse. It was directed by Andrew O’Connor who, having been the man who had unconvincingly told me he was going to get a sitcom starring me onto television, had equally unbelievably gone on to say ‘I’m going to direct a film with you in the lead’ and been proved right again – he truly can pull rabbits out of hats. And lastly we were going on a national tour with a show, which we had to write (or at least compile from things we had already written) and rehearse.

  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 t
elevised 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.