Back Story Page 0,137
views that we’d never held or expressed. At the same time, I felt guilty, partly because we’d been well paid and partly because I always feel a bit guilty – I think feeling guiltless is somehow impolite.
And there’s no doubt there’s an anti-corporate feeling abroad, which comedy fans are particularly susceptible to. A general suspicion of the motives of companies is very healthy. I like the fact that comedy enthusiasts have a tendency towards cynicism. But it’s a shame when the cynicism becomes unquestioning and automatic. Even though companies are self-interested, amoral organisations, the world wouldn’t be better off without them. They should be better regulated and more highly taxed, but they should exist and should be encouraged to trade. If you’d buy something from a company, as I would and have from Apple, it stands to reason that you would also be willing to sell them something. I don’t think that means my soul is forfeit.
Nevertheless, the reaction has had an effect on me. When I get offered adverts nowadays, which happens fairly often, I don’t just think: ‘Would this be a reasonable gig? Can I justify it?’ I also think: ‘How much crap is going to get hurled at me for this? How long am I going to have to spend justifying it?’ If the answer to that question is ‘several years’, then the ad might not be paying such an astronomical hourly rate as it initially seemed.
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The Work–Work Balance
The Apple campaign came in the middle of 2006, a ridiculously hectic year for me and Rob. It had started with our filming a TV pilot of our radio sketch show which, with a very environmentally friendly approach to ideas, we’d called That Mitchell and Webb Look. It was immediately commissioned for a series, which we had to start writing straight away in order to shoot in June and July. We were thrilled with this commission. At last we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. That is literally what I’d most wanted to happen to me in the world as I sat watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on VHS as a teenager.
The way we landed the commission taught me something about the TV business. In the autumn of 2005 Channel 4 was dragging its feet over recommissioning Peep Show after a predictably poor ratings showing for series 3. Someone at 4 got wind of the fact that the BBC had asked us to make a TV pilot and they panicked. They felt they were ‘losing us’ to the competition. They’d been seriously considering deliberately losing us but, if it looked like the BBC had poached us, then they’d have egg on their faces, they felt. (Unpoached egg. We’d be nicely poached, they’d be covered in raw egg. They’d go golden if baked. This sounds delicious.) Consequently Channel 4 immediately offered Rob and me a full sketch show series, as well as a golden handcuffs deal (where they pay you money for doing nothing – for literally doing nothing, as in refusing to work for the competition) and two ‘one-off specials’ for Peep Show.
This put us in a dilemma. Clearly Peep Show was dead in the water – Channel 4 didn’t want another series and were just offering two longer episodes as a sop to stop us, as they saw it, defecting to the BBC. But they were offering what we wanted: a full sketch show series. All the BBC were guaranteeing at that time was a pilot. That all pointed towards taking the Channel 4 offer.
But, to set against that, we’d made two series of the radio show with the BBC; they owned the rights to the characters, some of whom we wanted to bring to TV, and would be mightily pissed off if we suddenly (as they would have seen it) defected to Channel 4. And they’d have been fairly justified in that feeling as we would have been abandoning a pilot at the eleventh hour. On top of that, we wouldn’t be able to make the Channel 4 show with Gareth Edwards because he was a BBC staff member. Channel 4 wanted to slip us into a sketch project which Phil and Objective were already developing – it wouldn’t be ‘our show’ in the way the TV version of our existing radio programme, made by Gareth our long-time sketch show collaborator, would have been (and indeed proved to be).
After much agonising, we decided to stick to plan A and take the BBC pilot,