Back Story, Page 26

  Unlike colleagues of his such as Gary Wilmot and Bobby Davro, Andrew saw which way the wind was blowing in the early ’90s and, after stints in musicals and as a theatre director, he dramatically changed career paths and went into independent television production. When Rob and I first met him, over a coffee with Sam and Jesse in the memorable surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects building on Portland Place, he was charming, energetic and obviously intelligent. But could we trust him? His company had made no more than a couple of children’s shows – certainly no comedy. I don’t think there were even any permanent staff. Could we believe him when he said that he, a former star of Copycats, a conjurer, a song-and-dance man, aspired to make the kind of comedy that we were into? Was he the right man to bring a dark show about loneliness and self-doubt in an urban environment to the screen? I don’t think any of us were sure he was – I don’t think Channel 4 were either – but somehow, as we struggled with kitchen and sun tan discontinuity, we were all going along with it.

  If we did get a series, it would be mainly thanks to Sam and Jesse for having written a terrific script. It felt like a long shot, though, and all four of us had higher hopes for the proper sitcom we were simultaneously pitching to the BBC. It was called All Day Breakfast (for reasons none of us ever quite understood) and it was also about two flatmates who didn’t get on. A feckless layabout, played by Rob, and a dutiful dolt, by me. It was going to be a proper big studio sitcom; we’d done a reading of a pilot script only a couple of weeks earlier for the controllers of BBC Two and BBC Three, which seemed to have gone down very well except for the fact that the controller of BBC Three hadn’t turned up.

  The idea for All Day Breakfast had been hatched in the early weeks of the new millennium, as a result of the original meeting with Sam and Jesse that we’d squeezed in only to be polite. They’d treated us to tea and sandwiches at a little café between Wigmore Street and Oxford Street and basically said: ‘How about the four of us try and do that team-writing thing properly? And, if the show gets off the ground, you two can star in it as far as we’re concerned.’

  Sam and Jesse are immediately engaging and entertaining people to spend time with – they’re funny and interesting but they don’t have the attention-grabbing megalomaniacal streak that compromises the personalities of most professional performers. We thought they were very talented and would be good people to work with. We were already involved in far too many other projects but we said yes to working with them mainly so as not to be rude. (You may begin to understand why we were involved in far too many other projects.) Nothing has ever made me gladder that I was brought up to be civil.

  But by 2002 we were feeling a bit less busy anyway. We’d had a few knocks. Bruiser had been broadcast in February 2000 and no one had really noticed. We’d got the odd negative review but basically been ignored. And then we heard nothing. I don’t think it was ever even axed. It was insufficiently important to warrant the meeting time for the bigwigs to decide not to order more. But it gradually became clear that it wasn’t coming back.

  Our pilot of Daydream Believers (broadcast as a Comedy Lab in 2001), in advance of which we’d written and agonised over four or five new scripts, had also been received with a rapturous silence. Though it was too painful for me to admit at the time, we hadn’t made a very good job of it in the end. It came out as somehow just muted and odd. I realise now that it should have been an audience sitcom, like it had been in the Sitcom Festival. The characters were eccentric enough and the dialogue sufficiently cheesy and gag-bearing that it could sustain the sound of audience laughter – and indeed needed it. As well as Colin and Ray, Rob and I also played two characters in a parallel universe of Ray’s creating. These were Info, a man pretending to be a robot, and an evil space villain called Baron Amstrad (this was nearly a decade before Alan Sugar’s ennoblement). We thought it was funny but it was fairly wacky stuff. Shot single camera, in a supposedly realistic style, it seemed hollow.

  Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness had also hit a brick wall. We’d written and rewritten a script of which we were really proud and the BBC had um’d and ah’d and then suggested a reading.

  This is my second mention of a ‘reading’, so I should explain what I mean. It is the habit in television comedy not to trust decision-makers, whose main job is to read scripts and decide whether they’re of sufficient quality to warrant production, to be able to do so. The received wisdom is that they need to be helped to imagine what it would be like if the words on the pages were spoken by actors in a funny way. So little half-rehearsed plays are put on for them, just in offices, with actors hired for the afternoon, holding scripts in their hands, miming the mimable stage directions (e.g. ‘he takes a sip of water’) while others are read out (e.g. ‘a fireball rips through the ice cream parlour’). It’s all an attempt to give a sense of how something might be televised.

  This is another thing that makes me want to scream (maybe I just, in general, fancy a scream; it might do me good if I occasionally had one). Obviously reading a script and seeing its potential is a skill that not everyone possesses – but highly paid commissioning jobs in television should be the preserve of those who do. I feel that making a small, under-rehearsed, un-costumed attempt to make it seem exciting and televisual is a deeply flawed strategy: the commissioner sees something clunky and amateurish which cannot possibly live up to the production values of their imagination. Better, I always think, to refuse to do a reading and just provide a script. Then, if the decision-makers want to see that dialogue or action played out, they’ll have to at least pay for a pilot to be made.

  But readings were the vogue in the early 2000s and, with Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness, it was felt that extra effort would be needed to get commissioners to see its potential. So David and Geoff decided to stage it. They hired a fringe theatre, the Latchmere in Battersea, for a couple of nights and put on a version of it, with Rob and me playing all the characters, and lots of the frenetic cross-dressing that had been the hallmark of our Edinburgh shows.

  This was all planned considerably in advance and the BBC’s comedy commissioner was due to come on the second night. Sadly, a few weeks before the show, she resigned and took a job at Channel 4, and her deputy was promoted to the job. This was bad news. When a commissioner leaves, all the projects they were developing are tainted in the eyes of their successor. ‘I won’t get any credit if that idea is a success – I need to be developing my own projects,’ they usually think. So, if the commissioner who is your advocate, or even the person who’s been giving you a sceptical hearing, changes jobs, there’s a big chance your idea will be shelved. But we decided to go ahead as, if the deputy was enthused by the show, there was still a chance he’d feel ‘ownership’ of it and would push it forwards himself.

  The show was well received on both nights. Afterwards, David, Geoff, Rob and I sat in the pub under the theatre to chat to the new commissioner. The first words said about the show were from his deputy: ‘How on earth do you learn all those lines?’

  Terrific, I thought. That’s damning with faint praise if ever I heard it – and now I have to think of an answer more polite than: ‘Because it’s my job – how on earth do you remember to go to all those meetings?’ They treated the show as an amusing entertainment they were coincidentally going to and had enjoyed – not a pitch that had been put on at their express request. They also said, and this made my already boiling blood create a weird ‘haemo-vapour’ which came out of my mouth in scarlet burps, that it seemed a bit too theatrical. Having just spent the past week converting a TV script for suitability to the stage, this was bitterly annoying. Two weeks after that show, the new commissioner left the BBC to join his former chief at Channel 4. His former deputy, the one who’d been impressed with the line learning, took the job and Heartwarming Tales of Exceptional Goodness was never heard of again.

  The only show we were able to get off the ground in the first couple of years of what was be
coming a frustrating millennium was for a cable channel, UK Play, which then rebranded to Play UK (for which change – and it is always important to remember this – someone was paid money) before closing down. One of the decisions it made on its journey towards unviability was to commission a six-part sketch show from Rob and me. This was almost as low budget as Comedy Nation but, as there were only two writers and performers involved, with occasional support from Olivia Colman, Gus Brown and Mark Evans, the money went a bit further. The Mitchell and Webb Situation (still no ‘That’) was a decent show, considering all the constraints on us, among which I include our limitations of time, experience and talent, but I think more people watched it round our various flats on video than saw it broadcast on Play UK. Still, it was a nice, if slightly tantalising, reminder of the fun we could have doing the job we aspired to do.

  Meanwhile, Matthew Holness, together with his writing and performing partner Richard Ayoade, had won the fucking Perrier Award! Matt is a very good friend of mine – the kindest and most honourable of men – and his prodigious talent and hard work had created a brilliant show which was a rightful winner of the award. And how much better, I kept telling myself, that a good friend should win the award than a stranger? It’s nice for your friend and even in cold, hard, mercenary, networking terms, better that the career leg-up should go to someone who you know than someone who you don’t.

  But no amount of that reasoning could soften the blow. As Gore Vidal apparently said: ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’ I didn’t want to be like that and I worked hard to conceal it, but I couldn’t help feeling horribly envious. Matt and I had gone into comedy at the same time, I’d got the earlier breaks, but Matt had stuck to his guns, developed a character for the stage and created a show that was both brilliant and entirely ‘him’. Meanwhile, I’d been messing around pitching compromise ideas to TV companies – and now he had an award and I’d just guzzled a lot of free tea. He was the toast of that year’s Fringe, while Rob’s and my show The Mitchell and Webb Clones (a ‘That’ wouldn’t have really worked in this case) was languishing unnoticed.

  So, as you can probably tell, the sheen had been rubbed off my early, excited experiences of television by the time we were shooting the second half of ‘POV’. Everything seemed difficult and stressful and obstructed. My back kept playing up. I felt unhealthy, as if I was missing opportunities. And my private life was a mystery to me.

  The reason I say that is, in autumn 2001, I’d briefly had a girlfriend. Within days of the relationship ending Ellis was already characterising my whole attitude to relationships as ‘tried it, didn’t like it, so I stopped’. I suppose that was a reasonable summary.

  A very nice girl, a friend of friends, had come to see The Mitchell and Webb Clones. I don’t know whether to tell you her name. It probably won’t mean anything to most readers, which isn’t to say she’s not very successful at her job because she is, but it isn’t one of the jobs that brings your name to prominence like pop star, chef or disgraced former chief constable. But obviously, for her and her friends, there it would suddenly be in a book, with me delicately implying I’ve had sex with her – which certainly isn’t something she asked for (being in the book, that is – the sex was totally consensual; I’m an absolute stickler about that).

  So I’m not going to tell you her name – I’m going to make up a name. So you can just imagine a girl, rather than anyone specific. Let’s call her Meryl Streep.

  I hope that doesn’t make it difficult for you to not think of someone specific. My logic is that, if I call her Meryl Streep, anyone flicking through this in a bookshop might randomly open it around here and assume it’s full of salacious Hollywood anecdotes. With me in them. Sleeping with film stars. A bit like The Moon’s a Balloon but with Peter Sallis instead of David Niven.

  So Meryl Streep was a bit flirty after the show and I liked it. I thought she was attractive and bright and entertaining. It didn’t occur to me to do anything about it but I noticed. A few weeks later, I bumped into her at a play which a mutual friend was in. We chatted some more and the next day she sent me an e-mail asking me on a date.

  Interesting, I thought. A date, eh? So they do happen! What should I do? Well, the first thing I noticed is that I was not in love or infatuated with her. I hadn’t suddenly developed a crush – I was not preparing for her a pedestal in my heart. But I definitely liked her a lot and fancied her. And I was 27 and all my love life had consisted of was the occasional guilt-ridden one-night stand while I pined passively for someone else. At the time of meeting Meryl Streep, I was in one of the widening gaps between obsessive crushes. ‘Isn’t this exactly the sort of person I should be going out with?’ I thought. ‘People go out with people they’re not in love with all the time – they like each other, fancy each other, enjoy each other’s company and have a good time. Sometimes their feelings grow stronger, sometimes not. But either way, relationships like that are worth having when you’re in your twenties, aren’t they? Surely it’s ridiculous of me to bloody-mindedly wait for the woman of my dreams to ask me out? Meryl Streep is lovely and seems to like me. I should give this a go,’ I reasoned.

  I know this is a fairly unromantic train of thought – but also probably a common one, although I suspect that earlier developers than me go through it in their teens rather than their late twenties.

  So we went out for a while, Meryl Streep and I. But, while there were many aspects of the experience that I liked (I am now definitely sounding like a robot), I basically didn’t take to it. We had fun, we had lots to talk about, it was brilliant having regular sex but, ultimately, being in a couple with someone I didn’t have overwhelming feelings of love for felt wrong. Like a lie, even though I hadn’t lied. I hadn’t implied I was in love and neither had Meryl. But I wasn’t comfortable with the physical closeness to someone I didn’t feel sufficiently emotionally close to. I suppose that’s a bit weird and repressed, and I felt terribly guilty when I had to say to her, apparently out of the blue, that the relationship wasn’t working for me. And I had no satisfactory explanation of the situation other than Ellis’s summary, which I felt wouldn’t go down too well. But there it was.

  So, in early 2002, my private life was a mystery to me. I was single and it was definitely my fault. I’d had the chance of a nice relationship and all I’d used it for was to hurt someone lovely. I really didn’t know what I wanted.

  - 29 -

  Are You Sitting Down?

  The landline rang in my living room. This wasn’t as unusual in 2002 as it is now. Nowadays I’d assume it was a survey or someone trying to sell me something. If I answered it, I’d expect that suspicious pause after I said hello which tells you that it’s from some poor sod in a call centre – a cold-call centre, in fact. Possibly a cold cold-call centre if it’s in the North-East, or a humid cold-call centre if it’s the subcontinent. The pause, I reckon, is because they’ve dialled a dozen, or a hundred, or maybe a thousand numbers at once, and it takes a beat for them to notice which ones have been answered. And of course it’s an infuriating pause because, not only is someone about to waste your time, you’re also expected to wait a few seconds until it’s convenient for them to start wasting it. They require you to waste a bit of your own time for them first.

  And then the battle begins. The battle, in my case, is to get off the phone politely and without having hung up on anyone. I feel that an element of my humanity will have been lost if I actually hang up while they’re still speaking. I try, by adopting a firm and patronising voice, to put an end to the call in good order. Of course it never works. The techniques drilled into the staff of a cold-call centre presumably include never stopping talking and never saying, ‘Okay, thanks, goodbye.’ I’m a slightly obsessive ‘goodbye’ sayer – I come away from parties with an unsettled feeling because I haven’t formally taken my leave of all the people I chatted to. I know that’s fine and people don’t expect it, but it feels like I’ve left lots of loose ends
hanging.

  All of which makes me easy prey for the cold-caller. My I’m-so-sorry-I’m-not-interesteds and thank-you-I-already-have-a-mobile-phones have no power over them and they can get through their full script. So they’ve won. Assuming that’s their aim rather than selling anything. Because I certainly never buy anything and I can’t imagine anyone would. If you’re reading this and, when someone cold calls you, you actually consider buying what they’re offering then please stop for all of our sakes. It’s only the one in a million like you who actually pays attention to the unsolicited telephone bullshit that fuels this industry of time-wasting that’s the scourge of us all – and would have led millions to abandon landlines altogether if the likes of Sky didn’t perversely insist you have to have one. That’s how far we’ve come in the last ten years: televisions used to work without telephone lines and now they don’t. Well done everyone.

  The other thing that was different ten years ago is that a lot of people still used landlines as their first way of getting hold of someone. Mobiles were a luxury for use in emergencies, like a mink life-ring or a fire extinguisher full of champagne. It was like my father’s approach to the immersion heater at home.

  Nowadays, of course, we’ve become too impatient not to use them all the time. The idea of calling a place not a person is insufficiently immediate for our increasingly self-important techno-civilisation. And you tell yourself that you’ve got lots of free calls to and from mobiles so it’s all fine. No need to cross the room to either pick up or answer the phone – just use the one in your pocket that’s slowly microwaving your upper femur.