The Rising Star of David

I love Peep Show. I think it’s the best thing since Fawlty Towers. In fact, (and I don’t say this lightly), I would argue that on a scale of belly-aching laughter Mark Corrigan beats Basil Fawlty. It hardly needs to be said that as star of Peep Show, David Mitchell is my fantasy hero; I therefore had serious concerns about meeting him in the flesh. His character, Mark, is so gut-wrenchingly funny that I feared the actor behind the creation was bound to be a let-down.

 The story of Mitchell’s rise from nerdy undergraduate obscurity to household fame reads like a fairy tale. With his partner in comedy, Robert Webb, he cut his teeth in Cambridge University’s Footlights following in the shimmering wake of some of Britain’s finest comedians: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.  Meeting in a pantomime production of Cinderella, Mitchell and Robert Webb became close friends and after graduating went on to live and work together. They did their time as impoverished writers working on various comedy shows; Mitchell recalls his parents’ loaded reminder that ‘the civil service has a tremendous history of recruiting amateur dramatics’. There followed the inevitable series of pilot shows that never got developed, before they finally won their lucky break, starring as (you guessed it) a couple of juvenile best friends living together in the post-university world as depicted in Peep Show. 

With such a superb background story and with my own towering expectations, I approached the interview with some trepidation. Fortunately, Mitchell is exactly as you would wish him: smart, a little old fashioned, deeply likeable and very, very funny,  from the self-deprecating jokes about his newly-grown beard to the tortured metaphors he employs to describe just about everything. David Mitchell is, in short, only slightly less bumbling and even more amusing than his character Mark Corrigan. So how much of the character is the actor? Mitchell considers: ‘Unfortunately on a physical level he is 100% me. And in small-minded conservatism and anal-ness he is me; it was definitely a part written with me in mind. As Rob [Robert Webb] always says, they wouldn’t have cast us the other way around. But I console myself with the fact that Mark Corrigan has a very different life from me; he is an unemployed loan manager and I am a comedian. And now I have a beard.’

Part of what makes the series so delicious is that Peep Show explores the deepest taboos and anxieties of British society. Following great comic traditions, it seems to specialise particularly in discomfort about sex (Fawlty Towers) and an obsession with class (remember the Monty Python sketch ‘The Upper Class Twit of the Year’ where Vivian Smith-Symthe-Smith, with an O-level in kennel hygiene, competes for the title with Gervaise Brook-Hamster, who is used as a waste-paper basket by his father). Mitchell maintains that class is as relevant today as it ever was. ‘My character is obsessed with class; his self-esteem is very much rooted in being a manager, a respectable member of the middle class. Jeremy [Webb’s character] would probably count himself as outside the class system, but he too is actually very aware of it.’ Mitchell notes that in British society it is only the middle class who care about class: ‘People who are very posh just aren’t so interested in it – and neither are people at the other end of the scale’. The irony of his own discomfort – his inability to say ‘working class’ – is not lost on either of us.

Another characteristic of British humour perfected by Peep Show is that ever-present sense of tragedy lurking in the shadows (think The Office). The episode where Jeremy and the love of his life Nancy have a threesome epitomises the sadness that pervades the series. Jeremy tries to see the situation as sophisticated: ‘This is good, this is like watching a porno,’ before admitting, ‘But I can’t see anything, I haven’t got a hard-on, and I want to cry.’ As Mark observes, ‘Sure an orgy sounds great, but you’re basically just multiplying the number of people you’re not going to be able to look in the eye afterwards.’ Mitchell maintains that all comedy is essentially tragic. ‘Anything comic is necessarily infused with the fearful human condition. The brilliant thing about The Simpsons is that it so glancingly touches on the futility of people’s lives. Comedy at its best can say more about sadness than tragedy can.

’At school Mitchell had always been ‘funny’ but it was not until university that he began to consider comedy as a career. Even then it seemed unlikely: ‘Footlights was incredibly unfashionable when I was in it … and not just because I was in it. It was exactly the wrong time; after Fry and Laurie left people thought no one funny would ever come from there again. When I graduated I felt that I should keep quiet about Footlights. And I had a 2.2 from Cambridge, which was worse than nothing’. He got a job as an usher at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, under the misapprehension that it would lead to a job as a playwright. He and Webb then began writing various shows that never got made, supporting themselves by writing jokes for TV comedians. So, was the civil service never a temptation? ‘Not really. After a few years Rob and I realised we were treading water with proposals that never got made. We both wrote a bit and eventually I realised that I was making a decent living from the writing – but I wasn’t “making it”.’ 

Just as they’d resigned themselves to no more than a ‘decent living’, Mitchell and Webb were asked to do the pilot for Peep Show. Seven series and eight years later Mitchell still has trouble defining his profession. ‘I’m not quite a proper comedian and I’m not quite a proper actor’ he says, and he has mixed views about each role. ‘I find an actor’s need to pretend weirder than a comedian’s need to show off.’ He doesn’t get much pleasure from watching other comedians: ‘it feels like work. What I look for in a comedian is diverting mediocrity: if they’re dreadful, I’m furious they’ve got this far, and if they’re brilliant I wish they didn’t exist’. 

Whatever his own misgivings, Mitchell certainly appears to be living the dream; as well as Peep Show and his brilliant BBC sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look (check out ‘Brain Surgery’, ‘Diana Assassination’ or ‘Posh Dancing’ on YouTube) Mitchell writes a column for The Observer, hosts his own Radio 4 comedy show, The Unbelievable Truth, and also makes regular appearances on Stephen Fry’s QI, Have I Got News For You, and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Still, even with the fairy-tale career, it must be exhausting to be David Mitchell. After our interview he gives a talk to the undergrads of St Peter’s College. As he stands in front of a packed JCR every sentence he utters provokes uproarious laughter – even when he’s being serious. This blind adulation must be irksome for a man who so subtly observes and finely hones his jokes. But perhaps that’s the price of ‘happily ever after’.