David Mitchell - David Mitchell - Back Story

I plead guilty to being a snob when I was a child. I definitely valued poshness, jealously guarded it to the extent that I felt I possessed it, and wanted more. My instinct was not to despise the social hierarchy but to want to climb it. So maybe it serves me right that I now get called posh all the time, when I’m not really and I’ve long since realised that it’s a worthless commodity. In fact, career-wise, it would have been more fashionable to aspire in the other direction. But I didn’t have the nous to realise that there would be any advantage in playing the ‘ordinary background’ card – or that, as a child of underpaid polytechnic lecturers, albeit one sent to minor independent schools thanks to massive financial sacrifices on those parents’ part, I completely qualified for playing it.

Had I guarded my t’s less jealously and embraced the glottal stop, I could have styled myself a person ‘with an ordinary background who nevertheless got to Cambridge and became a comedian’ rather than ‘an ex-Cambridge ex-public schoolboy doing well in comedy like you’d expect’. Both descriptions are sort of true, but people like to polarise and these days I might have been better off touting the former.

Still, I’d have been giving a hostage to fortune. The estuary-accent-affecting middle classters always get hoist by their own petard in the end, when it turns out that Ben Elton is the nephew of a knight or Guy Ritchie was brought up in the ancestral home of his baronet stepfather.

The thing is, I find the idea that my life has followed an unremarkable path of privilege rather comforting. I wanted to think I was posh because I felt, not entirely without justification, that bad things didn’t happen to posh people. If other people thought I’d be all right – even in a resentful way – I could believe it too.

So, in the binary world of popular opinion, I got dumped on the posh side of the fence – which is sometimes annoying as it denies me the credit for any dragging myself up by my bootstraps that I might have done (it’s not much but, you know, we never had a Sodastream). It also leaves me worrying that people will think I’m claiming to be properly posh – when proper posh people know I’m not. My blood is red and unremarkable. (Although I always remark when I see it, as my scant knowledge of medicine leads me to believe that it’s not really supposed to come out.)

This is a roundabout way of saying that my background was neither that of a Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the people who write the links for Would I Lie to You? would have it; nor was it the opposite.

But who, in the public eye, is really the opposite? Very few people who come to prominence, other than through lucrative and talent-hungry sports, genuinely come from the most disadvantaged sections of society – we just don’t live in a country with that amount of social mobility. Which is why famous people who went to a comprehensive and can sustain a regional accent do themselves a lot of favours by letting those facts come to the fore, so that journalists can infer a tin bath in front of the fire and an outside loo rather than civil servant parents who were enthusiastic theatre-goers.

Perhaps you think I’m thinking of Lee Mack. Well, I am now, obviously. But I don’t think his parents were civil servants and I wouldn’t say Lee has ever seriously pretended to be anything he’s not, any more than I have (which is quite an indictment of both our acting powers). That said, on Would I Lie to You? we’re very happy to milk comedy from people’s assumptions that he keeps whippets and I’ve got a beagle pack. And we’re both amused by the underlying truth that, in terms of our values and attitude, we’re incredibly similar. We’re middle class. We’re property owners who would gravitate towards a Carluccio’s over a Pizza Hut. I bet he’s got a pension. I know he’s got a conservatory. He used to have a boat on the bloody Thames! I live in an ex-council flat, for fuck’s sake!

But he’s got a regional accent, so the audience makes certain assumptions and I’ll happily play to them. If he doesn’t claim to be working class, I’ll do it for him. So – in spite of everything I’ve said about people’s instinct to polarise, and worrying about appearing to be something I’m really not – I’m also quite happy to accept a cheque for telling Lee not to get coal dust all over the studio while he wonders whether I shouldn’t offer a glass of water to the footman he claims I’m sitting on.

It’s a lot easier than going on TV with the premise that you’re basically normal.

- 2 - Contents Cover Title Page Dedication For VC (M) Introduction 1 The Fawlty Towers Years 2 Inventing Fleet Street 3 Light-houses, My Boy! 4 Summoning Servants 5 The Pianist and the Fisherman 6 Death of a Monster 7 Civis Britannicus Sum 8 The Mystery of the Unexplained Pole 9 Beatings and Crisps 10 The Smell of the Crowd 11 Cross-Dressing, Cards and Cocaine 12 Presidents of the Galaxy 13 Badges 14 Play It Nice and Cool, Son 15 Teenage Thrills: First Love, and the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition 16 Where Did You Get That Hat? 17 I Am Not a Cider Drinker 18 Enthusiasm in Basements 19 God Is Love 20 The Cause of and Answer to All of Life’s Problems 21 Attention 22 Mitchell and Webb 23 We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back 24 The Lager’s Just Run Out 25 Real Comic Talent 26 Going Fishing 27 Causes of Celebration 28 The Magician 29 Are You Sitting Down? 30 Peep Show 31 Being Myself 32 Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam 33 The Work–Work Balance 34 The End of the Beginning 35 Centred Picture Section Copyright About the Publisher

Inventing Fleet Street Contents Cover Title Page Dedication For VC (M) Introduction 1 The Fawlty Towers Years 2 Inventing Fleet Street 3 Light-houses, My Boy! 4 Summoning Servants 5 The Pianist and the Fisherman 6 Death of a Monster 7 Civis Britannicus Sum 8 The Mystery of the Unexplained Pole 9 Beatings and Crisps 10 The Smell of the Crowd 11 Cross-Dressing, Cards and Cocaine 12 Presidents of the Galaxy 13 Badges 14 Play It Nice and Cool, Son 15 Teenage Thrills: First Love, and the Rotary Club Public Speaking Competition 16 Where Did You Get That Hat? 17 I Am Not a Cider Drinker 18 Enthusiasm in Basements 19 God Is Love 20 The Cause of and Answer to All of Life’s Problems 21 Attention 22 Mitchell and Webb 23 We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back 24 The Lager’s Just Run Out 25 Real Comic Talent 26 Going Fishing 27 Causes of Celebration 28 The Magician 29 Are You Sitting Down? 30 Peep Show 31 Being Myself 32 Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam 33 The Work–Work Balance 34 The End of the Beginning 35 Centred Picture Section Copyright About the Publisher

I’m not taking a direct route because I want the walk to last over an hour. It’s the brisk continuous walking that seems to be the best back medicine. So I turn left down Quex Road. Some of the road names round here are brilliant: just off Quex are Mutrix Road and Mazenod Avenue. Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod! They sound like robots. I wish I’d ever written anything that needed three names for robots so I could have used those. In fact, what am I doing writing this? It should be a sci-fi epic about Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod, three evil cyborgs blasting their way around the galaxy and seeing who can destroy the most planets.

I think the main reason I associate those names with robots is that I’ve always had a feeling that ‘x’ and ‘z’ are the most futuristic letters. I don’t really think they are. In fact I’m pretty sure ‘x’ in particular is about as ancient as a letter can be – it’s just two lines, after all. Anything less than that and it’s not really writing. It’s just a mark. But, because they’re not very useful letters, they somehow feel like the alphabetical equivalent of shiny silver jumpsuits.