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hollow revenge. The play was about a man called Colin. The title wasn’t off-kilter at all. The Some Wood and a Pie advocates would have been fine with it. If he’d really wanted to rattle their cages, he’d have called it Some Wood and a Pie.)

Unfortunately it was a pretty patchy play. It had some good bits, some good lines, some nice characterisation, but the story didn’t really cut the mustard. My main memory of it is a scene where, while the hero is talking or doing some work or somehow otherwise engaged, my character, an argumentative, tweedy man, reaches into his inside pocket and removes a large battered sausage which he then proceeds to eat. We’d hoped people would laugh at this more than they did.

But Charlie was a talented man, albeit one who combined moments of frightening drive and intensity with long periods where he lost focus. He could be very funny in an angry, analytical way, which influenced me enormously. I remember his doing a long analysis, as part of a stand-up routine, of the rhyme ‘See a penny, pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck’ which ended with him emphatically saying: ‘And a penny isn’t worth making yourself blind for, is it?’ I can’t recall how he got there but it involved dog shit.

As president of Footlights, he could be withering in the face of incompetence. Rob told me of an occasion at a production meeting for the 1994 Footlights pantomime Dick Whittington, to which Charlie arrived late to find an argument going on. He interrupted everyone, saying, ‘What is the problem? I shall solve it instantly’ – and then did.

Charlie adopted a lot of his managerial technique from his mentor Christopher Richardson, who founded and ran The Pleasance, an all-conquering Edinburgh Fringe venue where Charlie had a summer job. My favourite quotation attributed to Christopher Richardson, said in the context of a technical rehearsal in a theatre, is: ‘I find these inexplicable delays intensely depressing.’ If I were the sort of person who got phrases printed on T-shirts, that’s what I’d go for. It so perfectly encapsulates my feelings for about 60 per cent of the time I spend working in theatres, television studios or on location, where getting up early and then waiting around for hours is the order of the day. It’s also a fairly appropriate general response to life.

Charlie Hartill wrote plays and sketches, performed stand-up, acted, was a brilliant designer of posters and programmes, organised the Pleasance computer system and was a director of the Edinburgh Fringe for eight years. He was often an inspiring leader for Footlights and he was an intensely loyal friend. Sadly, that was only one side of him. The other was dominated by an unfathomable anger and unhappiness that were the root of his less impressive and dependable periods of behaviour, his heavy drinking and ultimately his suicide in 2004.

Charlie and I were both fans of John Buchan novels, both for the exciting plots and the slightly laughable boys-own adventure style. After a mixed run at Edinburgh for Colin, in which Charlie had been by turns fun, funny, supportive, irritable, busy, absent and drunk, he wasn’t my favourite person in the world. Then, soon after the end of the Fringe, he gave me a beautifully preserved copy of John Buchan’s autobiography in which he’d written, rather formally: ‘To David Mitchell, With gratitude and fond memory for Colin! Charlie Hartill’ – and I forgave him all. I treasure it and yet it’s probably the saddest object I own, reminding me not just of Charlie’s death but of the times when his behaviour led me to resent or avoid him, not realising the time limit on our friendship. The book’s title is Memory Hold the Door.

The Edinburgh run of Colin was a slightly muted end to my first year as a theatre-obsessed student. While the Festival itself was a dazzling event, the reality of trying to sell a mediocre show starring nobody anyone had heard of was even more of an uphill struggle than the sweaty walk across Edinburgh from the flat to the Pleasance. We sold a respectable number of tickets but, having spent the year playing to full ADC houses of enthusiastic students in Noises Off and What the Butler Saw, doing some patchy new writing in front of fifteen indifferent punters was an anticlimax.

But when Rob asked me to do a show with him, it more than made up for that.