Two’s company

Downing tools and going off for a working lunch is still the time-honoured way for writing and showbiz partners to chew over work – or, of course, to avoid it.

Sunday June 24, 2007 The Observer Interview by Eva Wiseman.

Comedy double-act David Mitchell, 33, and Robert Webb, 35, stars of Peep Show and Magicians, at the North London Tavern.
David: This is my local pub. I like it because it feels like a gentlemen’s club, except when they play the music too loudly, which I’m not too keen on. When I first moved to Kilburn, four or five years ago, this pub was hilariously scary. Very brightly lit, patterned carpet, banquette seating and about six old men sitting on their own drinking half pints of Guinness. On Saturday nights they used to show Casualty on the big screen. Two weeks after it closed they stripped out the carpets and did it up, and now it’s always packed, which means that, effectively, the way it was run before was equivalent to a massive sign saying Fuck Off.

We’re all for gastropubs. We don’t fear for our lives when we go in here any more. I don’t know where the old regulars are these days. Maybe in Cricklewood? Kilburn is fantastically characterful, in a slightly grim way, but it’s nice to be able to get a kebab at any time of day or night. And if you want a bit of posh you can walk to West Hampstead. Kilburn feels like London should be though. This pub is equidistant to where we live so we meet here to get drunk and try and think of ideas. You can’t write when you’re drunk though. Not just because it’s hard to decipher. If you try and write dialogue it comes out like all the characters are drunk too. The key to sketch-writing is what you chuck out. You’ve got to have more ideas than sketches, and write more sketches than you film, and film more sketches than you can transmit. Sometimes it feels like the easiest way to earn a living anyone’s ever thought of, and sometimes it’s incredibly depressing. Especially when you look back at your old stuff and see how funny we were then. You look back and say, ‘We should get those guys to write this’.

I get quite depressed if I don’t enjoy a meal. I feel as though I’ve wasted a hunger. And I plan my day around what I’m going to eat . In a pathetically small way sometimes. Like I’ll plan my trip to the shop to buy bacon for a sandwich, and that gets me through the morning. Similarly, those days when you can justify having a curry to yourself. It’s a treat. Though filming Magicians we had curry every day. And chips. Very good chips. The kind that kill you twice as much. We filmed in Skegness, where there are a lot of chips swimming around, mainly in the bodies of the people who live there. Today I’m eating duck on a bed of lentils, which to me is very modern, and makes me feel that I’m going some way to shake off my 19th-century image. People think that, because I dress like Ian Hislop, I must be from the 19th century, but I’m not really. I love television, for instance, and the healthcare back then was appalling. Rob is having cabbage, which he likes because it adds texture to a dish. Which is vital. We’d tell that to any chef. If we knew what we were talking about we could draw a tenuous link between food and comedy by mentioning timing, but we don’t.

When we’re together we do get recognised sometimes. In a restaurant though, someone will spot you, and either come over or forget about it. Sometimes if we’re walking around, people do recognise us and get a bit confused. They don’t know where they know you from, or they don’t quite believe that someone off the TV can exist in this reality. It’s a bit frightening if they get excited. Especially because we don’t know who they are – they have all the power.

We ate here once with Matt Lucas and his charming young man Kevin, which was nice. He emailed us to say he liked our work, so we met up. It was a mutual-wanking society really. We mean that in the metaphorical sense of course. We talked about comedy mostly. And he told us a bit about merchandising, but we couldn’t really keep up with that bit. We did talk about working together at some point, but haven’t planned anything concrete. It would be nice though.
We’ve had a few working lunches when we’ve been taken out by people. At the very first one, with our producer, Rob was tremendously nervous, and sprinkled sparkling water over his chips thinking it was white vinegar. I remember thinking: ‘What a horrible waste of chips.’ They fizzed!

I was best man at Rob’s wedding recently. We ate duck there too. How did we have it? I had mine nervous and soberer than I’d have preferred. Because we’re comedians people were expecting the speeches to be really good, so there was a lot of pressure, especially as I had to follow him, and he was crying. It’s very difficult to follow tears with tawdry humour, like putting Only Fools and Horses on after Schindler’s List. Still, Comic Relief – that works.

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