Ben Elton interviews David Mitchell





BE QI host: Stephen or Sandi? (Come on, everyone must ask you.)

DM Hmm. Who do I mind alienating least? Stephen Fry’s been a hero since I was a small boy. But then, Sandi [Toksvig] might still invite me on the show. But then, Stephen’s just had a cancer scare. But then, I’ll be seeing Sandi sooner. Let’s just say I’m delighted Alan Davies is there.

I wrote a lot of sketches in the 1980s. You did in the 00s. It’s a horribly demanding discipline. Are you still hungry?

I’d love to do another sketch show. It is a demanding discipline but it’s also a numbers game. Any sketch show is [only] as good as the best sketch it didn’t have room for. So you can write and write, about anything, in any direction, with any characters, liberated from having to imagine any specific bit actually being on TV. I find that much less intimidating than the idea of writing a whole narrative piece like Upstart Crow. When there’s a problem with the script of a sketch show, you don’t have to solve it, you can just write something else.

If, instead of joining Cambridge Footlights in 1993 and meeting Robert Webb, you’d joined in the 1960s, who would you have formed a double act with?

Graham Chapman – a comic genius. Unfortunately, being a comic genius, he’d be unlikely to make the mistake of picking me ahead of John Cleese. Clive James? Eric Idle? Eleanor Bron? But they all had each other. I’d probably have ended up with Michael Howard.

Upstart Crow is shot live in front of a studio audience. Peep Show and Back are made on location, movie-style. Do you have a preference?

I prefer filming in front of a studio audience. It’s what I thought TV would be like when I was growing up: getting dressed up, walking on to a beautiful set and trying to make an audience laugh while five cameras are rolling. It’s stressful, but it’s a stress mitigated by excitement. And the working conditions are much more civilised – no 5am starts and lots of time for tea and biscuits and shooting the breeze with other cast members. We can happily sit for hours lamenting Brexit over hot drinks paid for out of the licence fees of Leave voters. Happy days.

My personal definition of a critic is someone who claims Harold Pinter wrote comedy. Do you think he had a single solitary funny bone in his entire body?

The first West End show I ever saw was The Homecoming (it was a school trip) and the structural integrity of my sides was not threatened. It was at the Comedy theatre, which has since been renamed the Harold Pinter theatre, perhaps in glum admission of what actually goes on there. I’m no expert on him, but he feels a bit cool to be really comic. Alan Ayckbourn is a really great comic playwright, but Pinter is much more respected – probably because he isn’t funny. Mirthless, beard-stroky critics who never raised a giggle in their lives still somehow think it’s easy to make people laugh.

A very naughty boy… Graham Chapman, David Mitchell’s comedy hero, in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Photograph: Allstar

Twitter? I don’t do it because I think it would fuck me up. How is it for you?

I think social media is a bit of a disaster all round. I look at my phone obsessively, needlessly. I put something on Twitter and slightly care how many “likes” it gets. And I’m 44. I dread to think how interlaced with the souls of the generations younger than me this tool of fatuous intercommunication has become. It may be that the invention of nuclear weapons will turn out, in retrospect, to have been less of a scourge of humanity than the internet.

You went to a private school (I won’t use that weasel word “independent”); should they lose their charitable status?

Yes. They don’t behave charitably. Their fees have gone up massively ahead of inflation in the last 20 years simply because, with the advent of a larger class of super-rich, the market will bear it. That’s a perfectly reasonable commercial choice – but not for a charity. You can’t justify calling them charities purely because they might otherwise struggle to survive, or we’d be giving charitable status to House of Fraser. (Actually, why not give it to House of Fraser? Department stores are much more likely to die out than donkeys.)

We love drinking together. I drink a bit too much and I don’t care. Do you and do you?

I certainly drink too much and I vaguely try not to – but largely so that I still can. I’m so addicted to boozy nights out that I’m willing to forgo them a bit in order never to have to completely cut them out.

To me Have I Got News For You looks like panellists get the material beforehand and Would I Lie to You? looks genuinely improvised. Are you at liberty to divulge?

In my experience, the panellists genuinely don’t get the questions in advance in either case. But of course, in the case of a current affairs show, it’s obvious what will come up, so some guests prepare some jokes, which you can’t do on Would I Lie to You? The best panel shows, in my view, come from proper off-the-cuff conversation from which the unfunny bits have been edited out.

If I hadn’t been a writer I’d like to have been a history teacher. Any frustrated ambitions?

As a teenager, I really wanted to be in Blackadder – and I think I’ve got about as close as I can without a time machine.

David Mitchell interviews Ben Elton





Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder Goes Forth, 1989. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

DM Why did you think Shakespeare would make a good sitcom character?

BE He was an overworked commuter. A self-made man who was sneered at by the posh boys (they called him Upstart). A social climber – he bought his family a coat of arms, which was kind of the customised number plate of its day. He was a family man with a long-suffering wife, a teenage daughter, a posh mum (who married beneath her) and a deeply dodgy dad. Good sitcom character? Derr.

If you’d written Upstart Crow in 1986, instead of Blackadder II, who would you have wanted as Shakespeare?

The truth is, your voice was in my head from the first moment I started writing Crow and it’s very hard to imagine anybody else playing the Shakespeare I imagined. But from the Blackadder years I think I’d go with Hugh Laurie; he’s a brilliant comic actor and he’d give a good version of the furious middle-class aspirational aspect of the character that I love. Also you’d absolutely believe his intelligence. Rowan of course is a performance genius, but I think he’s at his best when playing characters with a hint of real malice, and I wanted my Shakespeare to be at heart a genuinely nice and kind person. Rik [Mayall] for Marlowe, obv, and Ade [Edmondson] could have a crack at Bottom (pun definitely intended). But honestly, I’m glad we cast it in 2016 and not 1986, as I think we have the absolutely perfect cast right now.

If you were a guest on Celebrity MasterChef, what would you cook?

Roast beef and yorkshire pud with apple pie and vanilla egg custard to follow. My signature dish.

The new Crow series takes the piss out of Comic Relief, which you have been very involved in. Are you nervous people will take it the wrong way?

I don’t think I take the piss (which implies something blunt and sneery), I think the humour we’re offering is nuanced and empathetic. What charity can actually achieve, and how it should go about it, are clearly complex issues and certainly worth a comic riff or two.

I wish you didn’t live in Australia. What do you miss about Britain when you’re there? And what do you miss about Australia when you’re here?

My Australia thing is complicated. In 1986 I toured there with Rik Mayall. Our support act was an all-girl band, I fell in love with the bass player and my dual nationality course was set. I didn’t choose it but, as John Lennon said, life’s what happens while you’re making other plans. So I live in both countries and have done for 30 years, although actually the majority of that time has been in the UK. When I’m in Oz I miss my friends and family and pubs and when I’m in Britain I miss my friends and family and paddle boarding.

On the set of the 2017 Christmas Crow special: from left, producer Gareth Edwards, David Mitchell, Emma Thompson as Queen Elizabeth, Ben Elton and director Richard Boden. Photograph: Colin Hutton/BBC

Apparently, loads of people are buying land in Australia so they can move there when the environmental apocalypse hits. Who are you really hoping won’t show up?

Well I’d say Boris Johnson. Except blatantly self-serving, brutally entitled hypocritical shits who would sacrifice anyone and anything in pursuit of personal advancement are a global phenomenon. As sadly is the environmental apocalypse. In Australia, the barrier reef is in serious danger of complete collapse and the whole continent is about to burst into flames. I am involved in environmental causes in both Australia and the UK. It’s 30 years since I wrote my novel Stark about the super-rich trying to find a way to live in space to avoid eco-Armageddon on Earth and now that is actually happening! But there is no place to hide and there ain’t no Planet B.

As a satirical target, how do you think Theresa May compares with Mrs Thatcher?

For satirical comedy to be effective, it’s useful if the audience has a clear idea of the target. Thatcher was a political colossus, a huge and forceful personality; she was decisive, effective, had a clear vision and an admirable (if to me, horrifying) consistency of purpose. You do the maths.

What do you think the BBC should do to guarantee its survival?

Keep making great programmes that other channels might not think of making – sitcoms about Shakespeare for instance.

Do you think social media is ultimately going to make comedy impossible?

I don’t think there is any world in which comedy is impossible.

If you were Polonius, what advice would you give to your son?

Same as him: “Above all, to thine own self be true” (also to my daughter).

The new series of Upstart Crow begins on Wednesday at 8.30pm on BBC Two