David Mitchell
Thank-you letters are such a faff
The very first word David Mitchell spoke as a baby was “Hoover”. I feel that as someone who has carved out a comedy persona founded on punctiliousness, it should probably have been “vacuum cleaner”, but he was barely two years old, so I think we can forgive him this slip.
The reason was that he spent his first couple of years growing up in a hotel in Salisbury, run by his parents. “I used to be kept, as a baby, in a large cupboard where the hotel cleaning equipment was stored. And it had a phone in it, which my parents could put on baby monitor mode, so that someone in reception could hear if I woke up.” Well, at least his first word wasn’t Brasso or Ajax.
His early hotel years might explain why the 41-year-old comic is so well attuned to the awkwardness of the British class system, which he has mined to great effect as Mark, the endlessly repressed middle-class protagonist of Peep Show.
“Hotels are fascinating places where people interact. They are both public and domestic places. And certainly the hotels of the Seventies – and this comes through strongly in Fawlty Towers – were very snobbish places. A hotel would think of itself as a hotel for a certain sort of person. There was no sense that one person’s money was as good as someone else’s. ‘We want to attract nice people here, people who hold their knives and forks in a nice way.’ ”
Aaah, knives and forks. But certainly not fish knives. Dear me, no. That would be below the salt. Mitchell and I are chatting about cutlery for good reason. He is presenting a four-part Radio 4 series about manners. It tackles the difference between etiquette and manners, why manners still matter, and how one deals with the incredibly impolite internet. He visits Chipping Sodbury golf club and takes tea with the vicar.
One could argue that it is a little bit ill-mannered of Mitchell to be stealing work off another radio presenter – there seems to be a rule that he must feature in every third BBC panel show or radio comedy. But that would be rude. So I don’t. In any case, he does seem perfectly suited to the task. He is a walking embodiment of the anxiety that comes with wanting to do the right thing, but not being sure what it is – and so says “sorry”, hoping that will cover all bases.
“When I go to a social occasion where there are people I have met a few times, but don’t know well, I do think: is there going to be hugging? Is there going to be cheek-kissing? And am I going to be seen as weirdly overtactile or weirdly repressed and hating of other humans?”
He wishes, for instance, in this first week of January, that you didn’t have to write thank-you letters for Christmas presents, but admits he sat down diligently to write to everyone who gave him a wedding gift, when, in 2012, he married Victoria Coren, who presents the clever-cloggs television quiz show Only Connect.
“You do genuinely feel warm when you receive a nice thank-you letter or card – unfortunately, it does matter – but there is no doubt it is just an incredible faff to have to write them.” They now have a baby, Barbara, who is eight months old. “Her manners are absolutely abysmal. She screams and pukes and won’t give you the time of day,” he says, chuckling. It won’t be long before he will have to sit her down and teach her the basics. “I inevitably will not want her to have her elbows on the table, I will want her to hold a knife and fork properly. I will go straight into the grooves that my parents have made in my soul.”
He jokes about how his parents would endlessly bang on about manners, but then turns serious: “The main thing I hope I will be able to instil in her is an ability to listen to other people and think about how they feel in a social setting. That is the side of manners which is worthwhile, and contributes to the common good.”
In the series, he interviews the social scientist Steven Pinker, who is responsible for the theory that we are living in the most peaceful time in the history of civilisation. Despite the sometimes terrifying headlines – and reality – of terrorism and disease, man has never been as civil to man as now. In part, this is down to centuries of manners and rules being passed down. Or so the theory goes.
Mitchell, too, is mostly an optimist, and believes our manners are not substantially worse than a generation ago, it’s just that the rules are more uncertain. “I don’t think we are descending into uncouth barbarism. The exception to that is the internet, which is a totally new arena. We are still in the era of medieval barbarism, here. What we need for cyberspace is the equivalent of the development of chivalry and table manners.”
He says he only rarely goes online to look at comments left beneath articles written about him or by him, and definitely tries to avoid getting stuck into a debate. “Occasionally, I very lightly engage. But as a rule I try to avoid it. Because it’s very easy on Twitter to read something that someone has written that is infuriating and think it is an important part of your day to reply to that and set their thinking straight. I try to step away and remember this didn’t exist a few years ago.”
The other modern development is the smartphone, which he admits he is wedded to, and a source of endless etiquette anxiety. “Our phones are these seductive little glowing objects that, when we are feeling insecure or bored, we turn to for a moment’s comforting diversion.”
I ask him how he feels when guests to the Mitchell/Coren household put their phones on the table. “I feel a mixture of irritation and sympathy. It annoys me, because it means they aren’t completely spending their time with you. But I am aware of the draw. I know I look at my phone when I shouldn’t. Also, the world is sometimes a frightening place. A mobile phone perpetually reassures us that nothing terrible has happened to our loved ones.”
The past year was a busy one for Mitchell, with not just the arrival of Barbara, and more panel show appearances than even Barry Cryer in his heyday, but also the final series of Peep Show, a sitcom that brilliantly exposes the neuroses of being a young(ish) man in modern Britain. After 12 years, he promises the show has definitely been killed off.
“We’re very sad it ended, but we felt it was the right time. Part of me feels slightly relieved that it’s all done now, and it’s something that all of us involved with it are proud of, and we can’t now screw it up. It’s too late to have a last episode where they are all aliens or something that might retrospectively ruin the enjoyment of the last series. There is an element of relief in that feeling.”
That is Mitchell down to a T. He feels relief instead of triumph, and finds it easier to say sorry than thank you. But, then, he is a very well-mannered man.
‘When I go to a social occasion, I think: is there going to be hugging?’
Behaving Ourselves begins tomorrow on BBC Radio 4, 9am