Back Story Page 0,133
but, other than that, I just did the occasional incongruous acting job: the BBC Shakespeare reworking of The Taming of the Shrew; a pilot sketch show for Channel 4 called Blunder; an ITV comedy drama called All About George; and, most surprisingly of all, a straight-to-video Michelle Pfeiffer film for which I briefly had to go to LA. But Rob was busier, in particular because he played the lead in another TV sitcom, The Smoking Room.
So when the panel shows started calling, and then other people started wanting to develop new panel shows with me as a regular team captain or even host, I had time to get really stuck in and Dave viewers have been bearing the brunt ever since. As well as cropping up regularly on HIGNFY, QI and Mock the Week, I made a series called Best of the Worst for Channel 4 and a pilot called Pants on Fire for the BBC, which title was thankfully commuted to Would I Lie to You? by the time a series was commissioned.
Perhaps more excitingly, in early 2006 I received a letter, dated 14 February, from Jon Naismith, the long-serving producer of Radio 4’s ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. It wasn’t a love letter, although it was the nearest I got to such things at the time. Jon and Graeme Garden, one of the wittiest men alive, had devised a new format for a radio panel show which, like Would I Lie to You?, involved lying, albeit in a very different way. Panellists would come on and read out lectures full of humorous nonsense from which their competitors would have to spot the occasional nugget of unlikely truth. They wanted me to chair it.
Jon’s pitch to me, basically, was that while radio panel shows don’t have the same impact as their TV equivalents or pay anything like as well, when they succeed they can run for decades. This could be your retirement plan, he was saying. And you don’t even have to shave before you turn up. Well, five years after the pilot was broadcast, The Unbelievable Truth is now on its tenth series, so the plan seems to be working so far. With luck, I’ll still be doing that show long after I’ve stopped being able to hear the buzzers.
Panel shows changed the public perception of me enormously because before I did them there wasn’t really any public perception of me. People who were into comedy might have known the name of the guy who played Mark in Peep Show but wouldn’t have had any sense of what he was like. When I started doing panel shows, people began to know a bit about me – obviously only the side of my personality that I projected when appearing in public, but that’s still very different from playing a character, or it is in my case. People now seem to be slightly interested in me and want to know what I think about things. They want me to rant on subjects that annoy or concern me. They think my presence will make a programme potentially more entertaining. This is something for which I am tremendously grateful and which, to be honest, massively appeals to my vanity.
So, even though I set out with Rob to make character comedy, to be a writer-performer, to avoid stand-up at all costs, my career has taken a very different turn and, like a stand-up, I spend a lot of my time trying to be amusing as myself. I write a weekly column in the Observer, I do a series of online comedy-opinion pieces called David Mitchell’s Soapbox, I’ve hosted shows which comment on the news, initially More4’s The Last Word then The Bubble and 10 O’Clock Live. No one would have thought of me for that kind of work as I stood outside the Crown and Sceptre ranting about the pointlessness of TV try-outs and how I’d been duped into starting my own Christmas late. I wouldn’t even have deemed it possible myself.
I sometimes worry that I’ve strayed too far from comic acting and from writing sketches or sitcom scripts for TV. I don’t want to lose that side of my career and I certainly don’t want to stop working with Rob. But I now value my ‘panel show persona’, and all the opportunities for showing off on screen, in print and online that come with it, equally highly.
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Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam
It stops being Holland Park Avenue