David Mitchell: Back Story - David Mitchell

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like comedy. Some really have no sense of humour at all – they genuinely don’t find things funny. Consequently they often laugh a lot in the hope that they won’t be found out – that, by the law of averages, they’ll be laughing when a joke happens. I find that sort of person extremely unsettling.

      And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots.

      For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.

       - 6 -

       Death of a Monster

      My attempt to swerve round another bus stop is scuppered when I can’t help stopping to stare at the advert on it – for Turkey. ‘Bootiful!’ declares a bronzed Bernard Matthews as the Aegean sparkles behind him. It must have been his last gig before he died – and a great piece of lateral thinking from the guys in Ankara.

      Or it would have been, if they’d actually had Bernard Matthews. Sadly – and this is where I can’t pretend ad executives are fools – the Turkey advert halts me in my tracks not with a great visual pun, but with a picture of a girl’s arse. The arse is flecked with white sand and in the background are some Roman ruins. Now, that’s pulling in two different marketing directions. You can get away with women in bikinis on holiday pictures because you’re saying it’s a sunny climate in which to go to the beach. If the woman looks sexy and men associate the destination with sexy thoughts, that’s not your fault. You might even give the bikini woman a toned husband and small child to make it even more respectable. Although that reduces the subliminal sexiness.

      But if you stick white sand on the arse of the bikini-clad woman, there’s nothing incidental about it. You’re in the realm of also showing a tantalising glimpse of the side of a breast. Really, you might as well at that stage. You absolutely never see that sort of bikini-clad woman with kids. You’re overtly going for sexiness and taking the risk that you look a bit cheap as a result.

      So putting a Roman ruin next to the sandy bottom is mixing your messages. It’s too late to go all ‘lecture tour of the Med’ – that’s like a Spearmint Rhino club saying it’s got a library. It doesn’t take the curse off the arse any more than if one of the adhering bits of sand turned out to be an interesting shell or fossil. An alliance between the history-liking parts of the brain and the bronzed and shapely woman-liking parts of the penis is unlikely to convince. It’s a coalition without credibility.

      Holidays were a big deal for my parents when I was little. Most of the year was spent planning the summer holiday, which puzzled me because I would have been just as happy spending the fortnight at home. It seemed nonsensical to be going somewhere we wouldn’t have access to a television.

      The first summer holiday I remember was in France when I was four. We went to a village called Benodet on the Brittany coast and stayed in a caravan. A British holiday company had put loads of them there, so that holiday-makers on a budget could soak up the Gallic atmosphere by living in France as trailer park trash for two weeks. I must say, I loved it.

      It was a big financial stretch for my parents, largely because of the poor exchange rate. It may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t aware of that at the time. But, no, I’m not that intelligent/tedious, I’m afraid/relieved to say. I think at that point I probably wasn’t even aware of how money worked in my own country.

      I remember shopping trips with my mother when I was very small. In those days, food shopping still involved going to lots of different places: baker’s, butcher’s, greengrocer’s, fishmonger’s, etc. All the old types of shop were present except for the grocer’s, which had been supplanted by a supermarket. But my mother would only buy things like tinned food, sugar and flour there – nothing that needed to be fresh. I don’t think she would have said so but I suspect she considered that ‘common’.

      The other ‘shop’ I was aware of was the bank, which, I had been told, was where you went to get money. I assumed that they just gave it to you and then you exchanged it for all the other things you needed. When you ran out, you went back for more. The relationship between work, earning and spending was lost on me. It was an attitude prescient of the boom conditions of the early 2000s. It came as a nasty shock when my mother explained to me that the bank only looked after your money – it didn’t give it to you – and you had to work in order to get hold of it.

      So my parents’ reduced spending power, thanks to a weak pound and a strong franc, was beyond my understanding and I only know about it because it was mentioned on future holidays.

      ‘It’s a lot easier now you get ten francs to the pound,’ my father would often say.

      ‘Yes, it was terrible when we first came. Everything was so expensive,’ my mother would reply.

      That memory won’t go away. When I’m befuddled and incontinent in a home, in anywhere between one and six decades’ time, my last coherent remarks will be on the subject of exchange rates in the late 1970s. In the summer of 1978, all I knew was that French things were prohibitively expensive, as I wouldn’t have put it at the time.

      Eating out, for example – which didn’t bother me but must have been a shame for my parents because it meant we largely ate food they’d brought with them. But I was introduced to French bread, Orangina and Boursin – all things that were then unobtainable in Britain. The fact that I liked the Boursin came as a massive surprise to my parents who, like most Britons at the time, thought garlic was a bit exotic. They liked it, but they thought of it as an adult or acquired taste, rather than a very basic ingredient that the British inexplicably decided to turn their nose up at for a few generations.

      The other food which I was encouraged to try was lobster. At one point in the holiday, as a special treat and to make up for the fact that they couldn’t afford to eat in any of the nice French restaurants, my parents decided to buy and cook a lobster. A lobster that was alive. I know that’s the only way fresh lobsters come, but it seemed to me a perverse way to buy food. I was aware that much of what I ate had once roamed free and careless, but my instinctive response – and one that I stick to – was not to think about it: to avoid contemplating the fact that my dinner may once have been a lovable, cuddly, helpless thing.

      I discovered that lobsters didn’t fall into that category when my parents purchased what I can only describe as a small monster. I am not saying lobsters are evil. The fact that they are hard, cold, spiny and viciously armed, rather than large-eyed and soft-furred, is not, I realise, a moral failing. It is arbitrary, maybe even prejudiced, that humans tend to lavish affection on fellow warm-blooded mammals and quite right that those who choose to keep spiders, snakes and scorpions as pets should not be run out of town as twisted perverts but respected as animal-lovers.

      But lobsters definitely look evil. And, while I admit that I have never met one under conditions likely to bring out the best in a crustacean, I have yet to see evidence of their goodwill. It is human nature to be repelled by such creatures – just as it is human nature to think, quite wrongly, that it might be a good idea to cuddle a lion cub.

      As a four-year-old, I was even more hardline about this than I am now. In this weird country where no one could speak comprehensibly

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