Back Story, Page 21

  That’s a point of similarity, I’m afraid. And I don’t have as good an excuse as Mark – I’m not starved of any other outlet. The only thing that’ll make me shut up when I’m busy explaining that the Treaty of Versailles was an inadequate fudge born out of weird and unsatisfactory circumstances, is fear of comparison with him. It raises the spectre that the piece of comic work for which I’m best known is not something that I’ve co-created, in which I’m deliberately funny, but just a context in which my risibility has been skilfully harnessed for the entertainment of others. Still, there are worse ways to make a living. Working as a loans manager, for example.

  In order to convince Dr Lovatt that I shouldn’t be dumped to Classics or Land Economy, I’d made a lot of promises about the third year. I didn’t even believe them as I made them. I’d got a 2:2 after all. To work any harder would steal valuable time from my new dream job running Footlights.

  When I took charge of the club in the autumn of 1995, there was a crisis. The money had run out. For many years Footlights had been generously sponsored by Holsten Pils: £15,000 a year and as much free beer as the students could be bothered to pick up from the factory. Student motivation can be inspiring in this sort of area, and so vans were hired and vast numbers of crates fetched. Sadly, the money of the good years had been wasted – the club operated at a loss which was exactly balanced out by the sponsorship, but not a penny had been saved. When the deal ended, the operating loss did not and the two intervening years had cleared out the club’s reserves. That was the hidden significance to the phrase ‘The lager’s just run out’ which had greeted my arrival at the Footlights squash back in October 1993. It was the last of the Holsten Pils. I arrived just as the booze and money tap had been turned off. That was now a problem which Matthew Holness and I had to solve.

  We also had to write the pantomime, appoint a new committee and a director and production team for the panto, and organise a smoker, a stall for the freshers’ fair, a squash, a membership recruitment drive and a ‘virgin smoker’ which was a special unthreatening beginners’ show for which unthreatened beginners had to be found. The two of us were also appearing in the final run of the previous year’s tour show, Fall from Grace (the tour always returned to the ADC for a sort of ‘victory lap’ in the Michaelmas Term). On top of all this, I was writing another musical with Ellis and Adam Cork called Emergency Exit, which I was also directing, and a weekly column for Varsity. In the previous two years I’d told myself I had no time for history. Now I really didn’t.

  I loved all this and clung to it all the more because of those two shadows: the real world and finals. When it came to problems that, in the overall scheme of things, didn’t really matter – putting on a show for students, writing for the university newspaper, saving an undergraduate comedy club from penury – I had tremendous drive and application. I set about solving Footlights’ money problems, cutting budgets and ramping up publicity with so much energy that you’d think my own financial future was secure. In fact I had no idea how I was going to set about earning a living when released back into the wild – no idea whether I’d even have a degree to ‘fall back on’ when my future of constant backwards pratfalls began. I was frightened of graduation and even more frightened of not being allowed to graduate at all, leaving university unqualified and disgraced.

  I was helped with the latter problem by Dr Harry Porter. He was the longest-serving member of the Footlights committee, a Selwyn College don who’d been Senior Treasurer since the early 1960s, swapping to become Senior Archivist in the 1970s when the club’s income was such that it was being investigated for Corporation Tax evasion and two Customs and Excise men turned up at Harry’s house. He considered this beyond the call of duty and created the archivist job for himself, leaving the accountancy to others.

  He’d retired from teaching by the time I knew him but remained an active link with Footlights’ famous past. As president, I found him a tremendous support and a good friend. And he did me a very good turn by inviting my director of studies, no longer Dr Lovatt but a friend of Harry’s and a very nice man called Dr Shepard, to come and see me play Jeffrey Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the ADC.

  Playing this part was an act of arrogant bravado similar to that of Ellis in accepting the role of Willy Loman two and a half years earlier. It’s a very funny play but all it really consists of is the central character, Jeff, talking to the audience about his exciting, glamorous, romantic and pitiful life. A few other people wander in and out but it’s very nearly a monologue. In deciding to play that part, I was conscious that it was the sort of ridiculous opportunity that would probably never be repeated, certainly not for decades.

  I think I did a better job than most 21-year-olds would, which is not to say that I was any good, but it was the right sort of bittersweet show for Dr Shepard to come to – much better that than a revue full of Day Today rip-offs and swearing. Better still, after the show when I was having a drink with him and Harry, and he was saying he’d enjoyed it, a panic went round the bar because Dylan Moran, who had been booked to do an hour’s stand-up as that evening’s late show, failed to turn up. These late shows starring established comedians were organised by Footlights – they were part of the new money-making drive – so when Moran failed to arrive, with the auditorium full, it was the club’s responsibility. We had to put on a smoker at ten minutes’ notice and, as president, I was expected to compere it.

  In truth, this was quite easy. There were plenty of performers around that evening, we all knew a few sketches and we could fill an hour’s show without breaking sweat. But, to Dr Shepard, I think this looked quite impressive. It was like there’d been a fire and I’d put on a helmet and walked into the inferno. Thanks to Harry and Dylan Moran, he left feeling that, even if I ended up getting a poor class of degree, I hadn’t entirely wasted my time at university. My last few months were spent largely unharassed by the college’s academic authorities.

  This felt more and more like an eerie silence as finals approached. The fact that I’d managed a 2:2 the previous year was ever scanter consolation as I reflected on how much less work I’d done this year, now that it mattered even more. So I tried not to think about it and to keep myself busy at the ADC and with Footlights. But gradually, distractions from study fell away. In the weeks leading up to university exams, no plays are put on and Footlights takes a break in the writing and rehearsing of the tour show. As even the most feckless of my fellow finalists started to buckle down, it became harder and harder for me to ignore reality and avoid getting started on what I was still calling ‘revision’. But it wasn’t revision because I’d hardly done any work all year so there was nothing for me to revise – no notes or essays for me to read through. The task ahead of me was to fake a year’s worth of study in about four weeks. And I wasted most of the first week in the pub.

  On the day of my last exam, I sat desperately reading in the rooms I shared at Peterhouse with my friend Paul Keane (who’s now a Catholic priest, like Daniel Seward from my group at Abingdon – but I tell myself that’s not a statistically significant enough sample from which to infer anything about me). I was urgently trying to cram information into my head in exactly the way that people who have properly prepared for an exam – and I knew this because I had once been such a person – pretend is useless.

  ‘If you don’t know it by now, you’ll never know it’ is what they say.

  But no, I could still learn it. If I don’t know it by now, I could learn it now! Shut up, leave me alone and let me learn it now!

  The phone rang and I answered. It was Rob. Singing.

  ‘Congratulations! And jubilations!’

  This went on for what felt like a long time. I’d never taken him for a Cliff Richard fan but he seemed to know quite a few of the lyrics. I waited patiently, too stressed to be either annoyed or amused. Just terse. Super-terse. Densely terse, as he finally reached the end and I said: ‘It’s this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m sorr
y. That was misjudged.’

  My last memory of Cambridge is of walking through Jesus College in the June sunshine, with a huge hangover, swinging a tennis racket, deeply aware of looking like a stereotype of something that no longer really existed. It was the morning after the last night of the Cambridge run of the 1996 Footlights Revue, The Rainbow Stranglers, and I’d stayed on a friend’s floor in Jesus because Peterhouse had chucked me out. Not because I’d failed – I’d got my 2:2 – but because I’d had my graduation ceremony the previous day and, after that, you had to vacate your room.

  I was leaving. Jon Taylor, whose mother was giving us a lift to a party in Norfolk, was carrying my overnight bag because he said I looked too fragile. My parents had taken the rest of my stuff back to Oxford. I was left carrying only a tennis racket, meandering along, realising that I had to leave.

  There was a garden party in full swing in the Fellows’ Garden as I walked out of the college and I could hear a band playing ‘Life is a Cabaret’. I hoped so.

  - 24 -

  The Lager’s Just Run Out

  I spent the next two years in miserable poverty. And it wasn’t even the sort of poverty where you lose weight – quite the reverse. The main thing I spent my meagre resources on, other than rent and the Tube, was beer and snacks.

  I’m walking west along the Bayswater Road, past the Royal Lancaster Hotel. My dad always points out this hotel when we pass it in the car. He says that when it opened in the 1960s it was the first new hotel to be built since the war – the first time since then that the poor exhausted old country had summoned up enough spare energy for anything as frivolous as a hotel. In its flamboyant ugliness, I can imagine how it could have been inspiring – a gleaming modern block of lights, full of cocktails and miniskirts – to a city tired of a penurious existence eked out in mouldering, smoke-stained Victorian brick.

  Under the hotel is a Tube station. When I first lived in London, I couldn’t believe how expensive the Tube was. It’s even more expensive now, and not a day goes by that I don’t thank my lucky stars that I no longer care. Whether it’s three, five, seven or ten pounds a day to use the Tube no longer matters to me and, having no aspirations to be a politician, I can relish that fact. I can forget the price of a loaf of bread and a pint of milk because I have no fondness for the memory of what it felt like to have to worry about them – and to get an extra two cans of Skol instead.

  But in my days of being broke, at least it was possible to skip fares. I’d hate to be broke now, in the era of ubiquitous automatic gates and no one accepting cheques. I mean, I hated being broke then. But at least, while I had my chequebook and guarantee card, I could continue to borrow money from the bank without having to get their permission – or put my precious card into a lethal, balance-knowing machine.

  I lived in Swiss Cottage, which wasn’t as nice an area in 1996 as it is now. But my only paid work was in Hammersmith, where Robert Webb, Jon Taylor and I were ushers at the Lyric Theatre, so I spent a lot of time on the Tube. Rob and Jon, who’d been living in London for a year longer than I had, showed me the ropes.

  Rob hadn’t yet got his own series on BBC Two but, on the plus side, he had learned from Jon how to fare-dodge by walking past the ticket inspector holding up an old ticket with a finger strategically placed over the date. I tried this a couple of times and it worked perfectly. And it was hugely worth doing. Our fee for a night of ushering was £10 plus a percentage of the commission on programme and ice cream sales. Around Christmas, this could be as much as £2 a night but for most of the year it was about 50p. The Tube fare was £1.50 each way. So, if you paid the fare, you lost nearly 30 per cent of your wage in travel costs.

  But, other than on a handful of occasions, I always bought a ticket. Not because I felt it would be terribly wrong not to, but because I couldn’t take the stress of worrying that I’d be caught. I was willing to pay nearly a third of my income for peace of mind. I’m amazed I’ve never been scammed by an insurance company.

  Ushering at the Lyric was a nice respectable holiday job for a teenager, which is what it had been for Jon when he’d started there, six or seven years earlier, when he was a schoolboy growing up in Chiswick. He’d returned to it because he wasn’t getting any acting work, it was the only job he’d ever had and he felt, quite rightly, that if he got a ‘proper job’ that paid good money and actually had prospects, he might be lured into a career he didn’t want. There’s no risk, with ushering, that you get so used to all the money and perks that you forget to follow your dream.

  Rob and I asked him to get us jobs there as well, because we didn’t have any better ideas and because it was related to our chosen profession. But that fact only made it more soul-destroying. Not only were we doing teenagers’ part-time jobs despite having Cambridge degrees, we also had to witness other people being properly employed as actors on a daily basis. We’d have been so much happier doing data-entry.

  As ushers you got to watch, or as it felt at the time ‘had to watch’, the theatre’s shows again and again. I don’t remember thinking the standard was very high – but then I wasn’t seeing these productions in their best light. I was usually watching for the umpteenth time, eyes watering from sour grapes: other people were on stage instead of me.

  No one can spot an actor’s flaws as quickly and as mercilessly as an out-of-work actor. ‘I could do this!’ Rob and I thought and said to each other. Having so recently left an environment where you could just roll your sleeves up and get involved, this was a very frustrating feeling.

  But I used to enjoy watching the productions decline. The one I saw most often, because it was on at a time when I had absolutely nothing else to do with my life so I was ushering every shift I could get, was Mrs Warren’s Profession. All I can now remember about that show, which at one point I could practically recite, is a moment when one character, a personable old duffer, meets a younger, more serious character. They shake hands. Early in the run, the old chap had done a very subtle movement or gesture to indicate that the younger man’s handshake had been rather too firm. It was beautifully done and got a big laugh. I then had the pleasure of watching that moment deteriorate.

  The actor’s reaction got larger as the audience response got smaller. You could tell he was worrying about it between shows, fretting over how to recapture that comic moment from earlier in the run. Sadly for him he only ever came up with the same answer: he needed to do it more. He started to wince and exhale visibly. The laughs got quieter. He cheated his body round to project his apparent discomfort across the stalls. They got quieter still. ‘Why aren’t they noticing?’ he must have wondered. By the end of the run he was desperately wrenching the tiniest titter from the crowd with a shameless piece of tremendous ham.

  But such moments of schadenfreude were few and far between. Mainly I was wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and bitterly reflecting how I had left everything too late. Why didn’t I have an agent? Because I hadn’t really tried to get one – I hadn’t written to any agents and then I hadn’t rung them up and persuaded them to come and see shows at Cambridge or in Edinburgh. And now there wasn’t anything for them to come and see. Maybe I was too shit to be an actor or comedian, I bitterly reflected to myself in bed every lunchtime, but I hadn’t even checked.

  I now know that persuading agents to attend student shows is like drawing teeth, so a concerted letter-writing and phone-call-making campaign might well have led to nothing. But still, as things were, I could hardly say I’d tried everything.

  And actually, one agent did approach me early on. A good agent, Christian Hodell, who’d seen the Footlights show in Edinburgh, wrote and asked me to come and meet him. I knew very little about agents, having been too useless an idiot to find anything out, but Robert Thorogood told me that this guy was proper. The agency he worked for represented Fry and Laurie, Robert told me.

  I thought that sounded bloody promising. Unfortunately our meeting was at 11 in the morning, and getting myself into
the centre of London at that early hour was pretty much beyond me during this period. I’m serious, it felt impossible. It meant getting up in single figures – the wrong sort of single figures. As a student, I had had no early mornings. My mean time of rising was 1pm. My whole constitution was used to a ten- or eleven-hour sleep from about 3am onwards. Breaking that cycle for a day took a tremendous act of will.

  I nearly managed it and arrived at Christian Hodell’s office, hair wet from the shower and armpits wet from the brisk hungover walk from the Tube, at about 11.13am, which I considered fairly respectable for an 11 o’clock meeting.

  ‘Hello, how are you?’ said Christian Hodell.

  ‘Nice to meet you. Very well, thanks.’

  ‘Well, I have a stye, so I’ve been better.’

  Do you know what a stye is? It’s like a spot on your eyelid.

  They can look a bit gruesome but they just go away – a bit like an aspirant comedian before lunchtime. This struck me as a very specific ailment for him to refer to. Not quite like saying piles but not like saying you’ve got a cold either. Like referring to a bad case of water on the knee. It made me slightly miss my conversational stride as I was checking in my head that a stye was what I thought it was, and that he hadn’t made a more serious revelation to which my reaction may have been deemed inadequate. He was also American and quite camp, which further rocked my little provincial soul, trembling in the face of London’s West End. But he was very nice about the show I’d been in and said he wasn’t saying he’d represent me yet but that we should keep in touch.

  ‘Great. Nice to meet you,’ I said as I left.

  He never heard from me again. Good move, eh, Mitchell? It’s slightly embarrassing, having to ring people up and tell them what you’re doing. So I didn’t. Rob and I wrote and starred in a pantomime on the London Fringe over Christmas 1996, called Oedipus the Pantomime, in which I played Jocasta as a dame. It’s difficult to get agents to fringe venues, but one who specifically asked me to keep him up to speed with what I was doing might have been prevailed upon to come. But I never mentioned it. Neither did I mention the production of The Miser that Rob and I were also both in at a pub theatre in Camden in the spring, nor the production of Latin!, a play written by his own client Stephen Fry, that we did in Edinburgh that year, or our own two-man show that was on in the same venue. I told him nothing. I maintained a dignified silence. At some point, he rang up and said he sadly wasn’t able to represent me and suggested another couple of agents. I said that I understood. Looking back, he was lucky that I even took the bloody call.