'Peep Show' star David Mitchell's life is a mirror image of his on-screen character, right down to the untidy flat he shares with a lodger and his ultra-cautious personality, writes DECCA AITKENHEAD
WE CAN DO THE interview at his flat, David Mitchell e-mails me to say. "But be warned, it's a dump!" Yeah right, I smile. It's hardly going to be the ex-council flat he used to share with a lodger before he was famous. The grotty domestic claustrophobia of his hit sitcom Peep Showmust owe a lot to the years he and co-star Robert Webb spent writing sketches in Mitchell's bedroom, drinking tea, watching crap TV and dreaming of Baftas.
I wonder where he lives now. Then I find myself at the door of an ex-council flat, off a dowdy strip of Irish pubs and bingo halls in unlovely Kilburn, London. “David’s just popped to the shops for biscuits,” the lodger says. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Inside, the living room is a muddle of books and newspapers and old VHS tapes, with curtains sagging off the rail. In the corner stands a pea-green table lamp so ugly it could almost be retro chic, but is in fact – like many of the furnishings, I'd guess – a cast-off from Mitchell's parents, postcards from whom are propped up amid the mess, relaying the weather and sending love from Auntie Edna. When Mitchell arrives, clutching biscuits and smiling awkwardly, the impression of having walked on to the set of Peep Showis almost overwhelming.
The Channel 4 sitcom first appeared in 2003, casting Mitchell and Webb as two old university friends – Mark, a neurotically uptight, rather pedantic loan manager, and Jez, a cocky, casually irresponsible aspiring musician – who wind up living together, locked in mutual resentment. It drew a modest audience of just over one million viewers, and ratings have only inched upwards since, but by series three the show was described by Ricky Gervais as “the best British comedy on TV”. Now on to its seventh series, last year it won a Bafta, and earlier this year Mitchell won another for best comedy performance.
I’d be very surprised if there can be another livingroom that features two Baftas beside a television set most people’s grandparents would have discarded as obsolete at least a decade ago. It even has one of those portable aerials on top of it – a sort of glorified coat hanger. The photographer can’t contain himself. “But mate,” he exclaims, “you can get a 36in flatscreen at the moment for £300!” – a piece of consumer news that leaves Mitchell unmoved. “So what a mug I’d have been then,” he points out equably, “if I’d just bought it for £500 six months ago.
“That telly is old, but it basically completely works, and I feel immensely smug about that fact. I mean, it’s colour and everything. And it does have a remote, yes. The only feature it doesn’t have – apart from widescreen and HD and everything else – is it’s pre-Teletext. But Teletext has come and gone, so you see it doesn’t matter! Slightly to my shame, he adds, smiling, “I do have a fax - and that’s something I could have bypassed altogether as well. Who’s buying faxes now? Fools!”
As Mitchell and Webb didn't even write Peep Showthemselves, you would expect there to be quite a distance between Mitchell and his character Mark. But Mitchell appears to share the same cautious logic, formulating cost- benefit analysis equations on everything from his TV to his lack of a love life. Whenever he says something Mark might say – "People should stop replacing things before they break!" – he offers it with a self-mocking smile, but also a certain satisfaction in its self-evident truth, and the combination of ordinariness and brilliance, vulnerability and defiance, is completely disarming. He stares rather gauchely into the camera, and the photographer keeps suggesting different poses in which he might feel more relaxed, until Mitchell has to explain, "But this is just how I look".
PEEP SHOWHAStransported him from obscurity to mass-media ubiquity – the sort of success his character Mark would barely dare dream of. A BBC Radio 4 sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound,has become a Bafta-winning TV hit, That Mitchell and Webb Look, and two years ago the pair co-starred in their first feature film, Magicians. Mitchell's columns in the Guardianand the Observerare cleverer and funnier than not just most celebrity efforts, but most professional columnists' work, and it is practically impossible to turn on a radio or TV panel show without finding Mitchell dispensing dry wit like a one-man joke factory. His shy nerdiness seems entirely authentic – yet at the same time more sophisticated than the most fashionable comedy of his generation; if he and Webb are the Fry and Laurie of their day, Mitchell is definitely the Stephen Fry half. He may look like an accountant, but he is plainly a star. So why is he still living like a student?
“Well, my policy at some point is to sort of upgrade but I know it’ll be a long process,” he offers bashfully. “And also,” he explains, beginning to laugh, “the later I wait, the nicer the next place I get will be. And that’s doubly happening now,” he grins triumphantly. “Im stockpiling cash, and prices are going down. So I might as well hang on for the stately home.”
I wonder if his reluctance to upgrade the fabric of his life stems from fear of losing his creativity, but apparently not. “I don’t think I’m being in any way wise. I’m just very nervous of change. And I’m also very lazy, and busy. So fear of change, laziness and busyness means that there’s never going to be a Saturday morning when I go, ‘Right, today I’m going to look at flats’. People who welcome that kind of change and feel like they’re on some upward property trajectory towards a castle probably feel happy to spend their Saturday on that. Whereas I go, ‘What? I’ve been working all week, and now I spend the Saturday doing something horrible? Meeting estate agents?’ Also, I’m not thrilled by the idea of increasing my monthly outgoings.”
But his monthly incomings must have swelled beyond recognition. “Well, yes,” he says, looking embarrassed, “they sort of have. But I mean, I’m still freelance. I don’t have a job. I think it’s the classic fear of the freelancer, that the work might dry up. I’ve got plenty of money at the moment, but I don’t know how long it’s got to last.”
In truth, it's easy to imagine him still hosting Have I Got News for Youin 30 years' time. Now 34, he has been obsessed with comedy since he was a child, he says, when he would memorise Monty Pythonscripts and write sketches at school. The son of hotel managers, he enjoyed a "pretty conventional background – I went to a minor public school, I lived in a nice suburban house, I had a very nice, normal upbringing". When he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights, did he know he was funny? "No, I thought I might be funny. I hoped I was funny."
He found out he was, but following Cambridge he and Webb had no idea how to become professional comedians. They put on a pantomime, did a tour of schools with a play, and played at the Edinburgh festival. Within a few years they were making a modest living as comedy writers on shows such as Armstrong and Miller, and "I was aware that I was already one of the lucky ones". But then Peep Showcame along, Mitchell became famous, and everything began to change. Or rather, it didn't.
“There’s lots of famous comedians I get on with very well,” he says, “but I’m slightly embarrassed about broaching the ‘So, shall we be friends now?’ bit. And I worry that I’ve been both overfamiliar, and that I’ve been unfriendly. There are lots of comedians who I’d happily go for a pint with, but I feel a bit weird. It’s nonsensical really, because so many of my friends are people I know from doing comedy with at university. But now I feel befriending people I do comedy with is shallow, because it’s people Off The Telly talking to other people Off The Telly, as if you don’t want to talk to anyone who isn’t Off The Telly. But then,” he reasons, looking bemused, “the people I’ve always befriended are the people I’ve done comedy with.”
He and Webb are still close friends, but while Webb recently married, Mitchell still lives in the same flat, with the same lodger, drinking in the same local pubs with the same friends he had at university. Pilots of Peep Showhave been made in the US, and one obvious route would be to move there, but Mitchell shudders at the very suggestion.
"I've been to LA and it's horrible. I don't want to live there. I think, fundamentally, the people I want to make laugh are British. I love all elements of how British society lends itself to comedy – you know, it's own sort of pompousness and self-loathing and class system and cynicism and irony: all these sorts of things are strongest here. Something like Curb Your Enthusiasm, great though it is, it's like their first faltering steps into that world of self-loathing that we, as a post-imperial power, have been in for the best part of a century. I think the Americans will be doing some amazing comedy in 60 to 70 years' time. But for the moment I'd say we're in the right part of the curve of the decline of our civilisation in order to be funniest."
ONE MAJOR CHANGEeven Mitchell can't have avoided must have been his new attractiveness to the opposite sex. For one thing, he has undergone a quite dramatic, A-list-style weight loss – but this turns out to have been quite by accident. "Someone told me that walking was the best way to fix my bad back – and it did work, it completely sorted my back out. Also, over a period of about 18 months I gradually lost weight. I didn't set out to lose weight – but now I'm, slightly to my shame, pleased I have."
But fame alone would have done the trick. “Um, I suppose . . . I don’t know whether I’ve noticed it really,” he says at first, before admitting that’s not entirely true. “I suppose, yes, probably, yeah, probably I’m more attractive to women as a result. Also, obviously, I know that’s not a very good reason to be attractive. But then I know it’s more complicated than that, it’s not that people want to get off with me just because I’m famous. But then, I certainly don’t feel, ‘Oh, they should like me for me’. Because I don’t know where the dividing line is between me and what I do. I’ve never sort of got chatting to a fan, and then sort of tried to go on a date with her, so I don’t know, maybe that makes me a mug.” He pauses to laugh and think.
“Basically, the times when I’ve sort of had one-night stands with people – which has occasionally happened in my life, usually at the end of a party when I’m very drunk – I really hate myself. So, just on the maths of what is fun, it just isn’t worth it.”
It is seven years since he was in a relationship, he says. “And I think I would like to, really. But I don’t know how to go about that. The problem is I hate the sort of dating thing. I just . . . I just find it incredibly awkward. So what I’ve ended up doing is a bit of a disaster, not really embracing that in the normal way but very occasionally, very pissedly getting off with someone. And the next day it’s, ‘Oh no! What have I done?’”
But surely he must occasionally meet someone who he thinks it might be nice to have lunch with, perhaps. “I suppose the times when I have done, I’ve had a couple of examples of that not working out. And that’s been horrible. And I’ve effectively, usually over an agonising period of time, crashed and burned. Gone on a few dates and thought, ‘I really hope this works out’ – and then it doesn’t.”
And that’s difficult to deal with? “Yes,” he agrees emphatically. “Yes. That is the key thing. That’s it. I don’t dislike being single enough to put myself through the pain.”
For a moment I think he is going to change the subject. His arms are folded, and he looks excruciatingly uncomfortable. But instead, he launches on.
“I could be trying much harder, and people are up for introducing me to people, and I don’t know. I’m aware the downsides are short term and the upsides are hopefully long term. But I suppose I’ve not been very sensible about that. It’s sort of, in a way, kind of linked with not having really addressed any area of my life properly apart from my career. All I’ve really done is focus on getting my career going – and now,” he starts to laugh, “I might be approaching a crisis point on the basis that my career has got going, and obviously that is busy, but it’s not actually the same focus for my emotional energy as it once was, and now I should probably be thinking seriously about not living in a shit flat on my own.”
I ask if he is happy, and he smiles doubtfully. "Yes, broadly. I'm very stressed about a lot of things, and I'm worried and jumpy about a lot of things, but in quite an excited way." – ( GuardianService)
The new series of
That Mitchell and Webb Look
is on Thursdays on BBC2.