I spent the next two years in miserable poverty. And it wasn’t even the sort of poverty where you lose weight – quite the reverse. The main thing I spent my meagre resources on, other than rent and the Tube, was beer and snacks.
I’m walking west along the Bayswater Road, past the Royal Lancaster Hotel. My dad always points out this hotel when we pass it in the car. He says that when it opened in the 1960s it was the first new hotel to be built since the war – the first time since then that the poor exhausted old country had summoned up enough spare energy for anything as frivolous as a hotel. In its flamboyant ugliness, I can imagine how it could have been inspiring – a gleaming modern block of lights, full of cocktails and miniskirts – to a city tired of a penurious existence eked out in mouldering, smoke-stained Victorian brick.
Under the hotel is a Tube station. When I first lived in London, I couldn’t believe how expensive the Tube was. It’s even more expensive now, and not a day goes by that I don’t thank my lucky stars that I no longer care. Whether it’s three, five, seven or ten pounds a day to use the Tube no longer matters to me and, having no aspirations to be a politician, I can relish that fact. I can forget the price of a loaf of bread and a pint of milk because I have no fondness for the memory of what it felt like to have to worry about them – and to get an extra two cans of Skol instead.
But in my days of being broke, at least it was possible to skip fares. I’d hate to be broke now, in the era of ubiquitous automatic gates and no one accepting cheques. I mean, I hated being broke then. But at least, while I had my chequebook and guarantee card, I could continue to borrow money from the bank without having to get their permission – or put my precious card into a lethal, balance-knowing machine.
I lived in Swiss Cottage, which wasn’t as nice an area in 1996 as it is now. But my only paid work was in Hammersmith, where Robert Webb, Jon Taylor and I were ushers at the Lyric Theatre, so I spent a lot of time on the Tube. Rob and Jon, who’d been living in London for a year longer than I had, showed me the ropes.
Rob hadn’t yet got his own series on BBC Two but, on the plus side, he had learned from Jon how to fare-dodge by walking past the ticket inspector holding up an old ticket with a finger strategically placed over the date. I tried this a couple of times and it worked perfectly. And it was hugely worth doing. Our fee for a night of ushering was £10 plus a percentage of the commission on programme and ice cream sales. Around Christmas, this could be as much as £2 a night but for most of the year it was about 50p. The Tube fare was £1.50 each way. So, if you paid the fare, you lost nearly 30 per cent of your wage in travel costs.
But, other than on a handful of occasions, I always bought a ticket. Not because I felt it would be terribly wrong not to, but because I couldn’t take the stress of worrying that I’d be caught. I was willing to pay nearly a third of my income for peace of mind. I’m amazed I’ve never been scammed by an insurance company.
Ushering at the Lyric was a nice respectable holiday job for a teenager, which is what it had been for Jon when he’d started there, six or seven years earlier, when he was a schoolboy growing up in Chiswick. He’d returned to it because he wasn’t getting any acting work, it was the only job he’d ever had and he felt, quite rightly, that if he got a ‘proper job’ that paid good money and actually had prospects, he might be lured into a career he didn’t want. There’s no risk, with ushering, that you get so used to all the money and perks that you forget to follow your dream.
Rob and I asked him to get us jobs there as well, because we didn’t have any better ideas and because it was related to our chosen profession. But that fact only made it more soul-destroying. Not only were we doing teenagers’ part-time jobs despite having Cambridge degrees, we also had to witness other people being properly employed as actors on a daily basis. We’d have been so much happier doing data-entry.
As ushers you got to watch, or as it felt at the time ‘had to watch’, the theatre’s shows again and again. I don’t remember thinking the standard was very high – but then I wasn’t seeing these productions in their best light. I was usually watching for the umpteenth time, eyes watering from sour grapes: other people were on stage instead of me.
No one can spot an actor’s flaws as quickly and as mercilessly as an out-of-work actor. ‘I could do this!’ Rob and I thought and said to each other. Having so recently left an environment where you could just roll your sleeves up and get involved, this was a very frustrating feeling.
But I used to enjoy watching the productions decline. The one I saw most often, because it was on at a time when I had absolutely nothing else to do with my life so I was ushering every shift I could get, was Mrs Warren’s Profession. All I can now remember about that show, which at one point I could practically recite, is a moment when one character, a personable old duffer, meets a younger, more serious character. They shake hands. Early in the run, the old chap had done a very subtle movement or gesture to indicate that the younger man’s handshake had been rather too firm. It was beautifully done and got a big laugh. I then had the pleasure of watching that moment deteriorate.
The actor’s reaction got larger as the audience response got smaller. You could tell he was worrying about it between shows, fretting over how to recapture that comic moment from earlier in the run. Sadly for him he only ever came up with the same answer: he needed to do it more. He started to wince and exhale visibly. The laughs got quieter. He cheated his body round to project his apparent discomfort across the stalls. They got quieter still. ‘Why aren’t they noticing?’ he must have wondered. By the end of the run he was desperately wrenching the tiniest titter from the crowd with a shameless piece of tremendous ham.
But such moments of schadenfreude were few and far between. Mainly I was wondering what the hell I was doing with my life and bitterly reflecting how I had left everything too late. Why didn’t I have an agent? Because I hadn’t really tried to get one – I hadn’t written to any agents and then I hadn’t rung them up and persuaded them to come and see shows at Cambridge or in Edinburgh. And now there wasn’t anything for them to come and see. Maybe I was too shit to be an actor or comedian, I bitterly reflected to myself in bed every lunchtime, but I hadn’t even checked.
I now know that persuading agents to attend student shows is like drawing teeth, so a concerted letter-writing and phone-call-making campaign might well have led to nothing. But still, as things were, I could hardly say I’d tried everything.
And actually, one agent did approach me early on. A good agent, Christian Hodell, who’d seen the Footlights show in Edinburgh, wrote and asked me to come and meet him. I knew very little about agents, having been too useless an idiot to find anything out, but Robert Thorogood told me that this guy was proper. The agency he worked for represented Fry and Laurie, Robert told me.
I thought that sounded bloody promising. Unfortunately our meeting was at 11 in the morning, and getting myself into the centre of London at that early hour was pretty much beyond me during this period. I’m serious, it felt impossible. It meant getting up in single figures – the wrong sort of single figures. As a student, I had had no early mornings. My mean time of rising was 1pm. My whole constitution was used to a ten- or eleven-hour sleep from about 3am onwards. Breaking that cycle for a day took a tremendous act of will.
I nearly managed it and arrived at Christian Hodell’s office, hair wet from the shower and armpits wet from the brisk hungover walk from the Tube, at about 11.13am, which I considered fairly respectable for an 11 o’clock meeting.
‘Hello, how are you?’ said Christian Hodell.
‘Nice to meet you. Very well, thanks.’
‘Well, I have a stye, so I’ve been better.’
Do you know what a stye is? It’s like a spot on your eyelid.
They can look a bit gruesome but they just go away – a bit like an aspirant comedian before lunchtime. This struck me as a very specific ailment for him to refer to. Not quite like saying piles but not like saying you’ve got a cold either. Like referring to a bad case of water on the knee. It made me slightly miss my conversational stride as I was checking in my head that a stye was what I thought it was, and that he hadn’t made a more serious revelation to which my reaction may have been deemed inadequate. He was also American and quite camp, which further rocked my little provincial soul, trembling in the face of London’s West End. But he was very nice about the show I’d been in and said he wasn’t saying he’d represent me yet but that we should keep in touch.
‘Great. Nice to meet you,’ I said as I left.
He never heard from me again. Good move, eh, Mitchell? It’s slightly embarrassing, having to ring people up and tell them what you’re doing. So I didn’t. Rob and I wrote and starred in a pantomime on the London Fringe over Christmas 1996, called Oedipus the Pantomime, in which I played Jocasta as a dame. It’s difficult to get agents to fringe venues, but one who specifically asked me to keep him up to speed with what I was doing might have been prevailed upon to come. But I never mentioned it. Neither did I mention the production of The Miser that Rob and I were also both in at a pub theatre in Camden in the spring, nor the production of Latin!, a play written by his own client Stephen Fry, that we did in Edinburgh that year, or our own two-man show that was on in the same venue. I told him nothing. I maintained a dignified silence. At some point, he rang up and said he sadly wasn’t able to represent me and suggested another couple of agents. I said that I understood. Looking back, he was lucky that I even took the bloody call.
Christian Hodell made one final attempt to help me. Later that year, after he’d let me down gently, I did send a photo and CV round to agents, including him. I got some serious-looking photographs taken by a friend and chose one to be blown up to 10x8 format and reproduced dozens of times. But the shop blew up the wrong photo. I didn’t notice until I’d got it home. It was quite a bad photo with my mouth sort of half open, looking weird. It was more appropriate to a charity’s website than the CV of an aspiring TV star. But the photos had cost me £70 and I didn’t have another £70 spare. I suppose I could have gone back to the shop and complained but this was not a good patch for me, competence-wise. So I sent them round anyway and heard nothing back except standard rejections. Except from Christian. He sent a note, which read something like this:
‘I hope you won’t think it’s not my place to say this but that is a TERRIBLE photo. Seriously. Don’t send any more out. Burn all copies.’
He was right. It was good and kind advice. But it was too late. ‘Well, looks like I’ve pretty much fucked up my whole life,’ I thought. I went next door: ‘Pub, anyone?’
Throughout that difficult time, what sustained me and distracted me, what helped me stick to my guns but also, for hours on end, leave my guns unattended, was the community of people I lived with in Swiss Cottage. Don’t be put off by the word ‘community’ – this wasn’t anything hippyish or communistic. It was three flats above the shops on Winchester Road (with entrances on Fellows Road), in a building that’s since been demolished, full of friends from Cambridge.
The first flat, 169 Fellows Road, had initially been rented by Katie Breathwick and passed on to Rob, Jon and Ellis a year later. Jon then noticed, in the summer of 1996, that two more flats were up for rent and suggested that some of his friends who were graduating that summer might want to take them as they were quite cheap and spacious. We jumped at the chance and so 161 and 163 Fellows Road were added to the roster.
I lived in 163 with Leila Hackett, Rob’s then girlfriend and a fellow Footlighter, and Sally Watson, Tom Hilton’s partner these days. Back then, Tom and Sally were entering the second year of an incredibly slow-moving Beatrice and Benedick mutual spikiness scenario. They’d gone out for about 25 minutes in 1994, then fallen out, then become friends who were ‘completely over each other’, then fallen out in a way that friends who are ‘completely over each other’ never do, then become friends again – and by friends I mean two people who constantly bickered. This remained the situation for about another eight years before they finally got together, a few months after the last person who always said to them ‘You two should get back together’ had stopped bothering to do so.
Tom lived in 161 with Charles Dean, who’d handled the technical side of Footlights for many years, and an ever-changing third occupant. Matthew Holness was there for a while, as were Robert Thorogood, James Bachman, Mark Evans and my friend Ed Paleit from school.
Because there were so many of us, we became a sort of centre of gravity for people who’d recently left Cambridge and wanted to act, write or tell jokes. We had quite a few parties, since all that involved was announcing the intention and buying a bottle each. Even such niceties as crisps and dips we considered to be the preserve of a royal garden party. In a way that was basically awful, friends started to refer to us as ‘Swiss College, Cambridge’.
It was like a sitcom. It really was. We were a bunch of fairly charismatic losers with lots of time on our hands. And funny things happened. Ellis came back from a long IT contract in France with case after case of cheap wine which turned out to be undrinkable, but we were so desperate to mobilise that alcohol resource that we spent more than the wine was worth on gallons of orange juice to mix it with, calling the resultant concoction Sangria. We invented a game called hand tennis, played on the roofs of the shop storerooms below, which had special rules for when the ball went into the fetid piles of bin bags or the area of discarded pot plants outside the doors of 161 and 163. One night, Rob and Jon, after several bottles of wine, decided to put some posters in frames up on the walls of 169. They literally smashed 60 per cent of them. That all sounds funny, doesn’t it? It felt it at the time. Maybe you had to be there.
I think we were a bit obsessed with its being like a sitcom, particularly those of us who aspired to write and/or be in a sitcom. The dream was to live glamorous and successful lives by being in funny shows about lovable failures. Instead we were broke, stuck in our flats watching This Life, a programme about glamorous, successful people our age. Everything seemed to be the wrong way round.