Know any good Shakespearean jokes? No? You’re not alone. The Bard may have been witty, but his gags — clunky, overly specific and relying on outdated slang — are often terrible. So Ben Elton and David Mitchell decided to make him a sitcom star.
Elton has penned Upstart Crow, about a writer battling to convince the world of his great reputation. It’s about Will Shakespeare, but, of course, Elton’s recent sitcom career has been difficult, to say the least. Upstart Crow — which owes its title to a snobbish attack on Shakespeare in a pamphlet by one of his contemporaries, the university-educated Robert Greene — can also be seen as an attempt by Elton to regain his good name.
The premise is simple. The young Will, played by David Mitchell, is trying to make a name for himself, finding plots for his plays in the chaotic events befalling him, his family and his friends. In the first episode, the chamberlain puts his randy posh nephew in Will’s care, where he falls for the maid. Suffice it to say, the nephew ends up dead and Will finally has the plot for Romeo and Juliet.
It’s not unfamiliar territory. Shakespeare in Love did this back in 1998. Doctor Who has dabbled in young Shakespeare’s life a few times. Then, of course, there’s the Blackadder time-travel one-off, Back & Forth — where Edmund beats Will up in revenge for “Kenneth Branagh’s endless, uncut, four-hour version of Hamlet”.
The excellence of the Elizabethan Blackadder casts a bit of a shadow over Upstart Crow. There are more than a few moments of grace, however, not least thanks to Mitchell, who has gradually worked his way to the top of Britain’s motley crew of panel-show faces-cum- sitcom actors by dint of his astonishingly quick wit and his willingness to clown. Crow is his first solo lead — and he had no qualms about Elton’s script.
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“I liked the idea that there’s a big joke that’s been played on Shakespeare by history,” says Mitchell, 41. “He was literate, so in the top echelon, but certainly no aristocrat, and didn’t go to university. He was looked down on at the time and he’s looked down on now — to the extent that people deny his existence.”
He’s not siding with Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi on the authorship question, then? “Not at all,” he says. “I love the idea that you don’t know where genius is going to strike. They say that this ordinary man, who went to a grammar school in Stratford, couldn’t have been an artistic genius because he’s too provincial, and genius comes from sexually ambiguous Italians or noblemen at the Elizabethan court. Nonsense — they just don’t like ordinary, middle-class, bumbling British people being talented.”
The strongest riffs in Crow play on our modern responses to the Bard’s work. Mitchell’s Will is constantly defending his writing, insisting that no one will ever mistake “Wherefore art thou?” for “Where are you?”, or assuring people that writing all those love sonnets to a man doesn’t mean he’s gay. Or does it?
“I think I’m playing him as a bit bi-curious,” Mitchell nods. “He’s interested in sexuality not being straightforward, in the same way that, in The Merchant of Venice, he’s interested by what it would be like to be part of a reviled minority ethnic group.”
Mitchell is probably a bit Bard-curious himself, rather than a fanatic either way. “He can bring a lump to my throat, but I doubt the most fun evening imaginable is an uncut production of King Lear. There are too many people saying Shakespeare is just as gripping as the recent Mad Max reboot. He wrote a long time ago, so to make the plays entertaining now, you have to work quite hard.”
“Good comedy is vital to our collective soul
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And Mitchell knows about hard work. The eldest son of lecturers, he went from public school at Abingdon to Cambridge. He still dresses a little like a scruffy young fogey, and can deliver a drawling, supercilious tone when required, although in conversation he’s cheerful and self-deprecating.
He met Robert Webb in the Footlights, and they got into television via the initially unsuccessful sketch shows Bruiser and The Mitchell and Webb Situation. Then came Peep Show, in 2003.
Channel 4’s flat-share comedy lasted 12 years, and its characters — including the bumbling drug dealer and musician Super Hans — entered the culture to such an extent that Eddie Mair, recently amazed by the treasury secretary Greg Hands’s duff replies in an interview, wondered: “Who is chief secretary at the treasury, Greg Hands or Super Hans?”
“I got lucky with Peep Show — I essentially applied for a job as a TV comedian and I’ve tried to hang onto it ever since,” Mitchell explains. “In the 1980s, as soon as you got on television, everyone knew you. Today, it’s gradual. I’ve been doing this job for 10 years plus, so just by sheer bloody-minded persistence, I’ve entered more people’s consciousness.”
Bloody-mindedness — and panel shows. Peep Show’s cult success led to Mitchell guesting on the likes of QI, Mock the Week and Have I Got News for You, until he won a regular spot as team captain on Would I Lie to You, and hosted The Unbelievable Truth and Was It Something I Said?. “Getting into panel shows… I wish I could put it in a slightly artier-sounding way, but, essentially, finding I liked them and could be funny as myself made a huge difference.”
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His Shakespeare is more panel-show Mitchell — smart, exasperated — than self-loathing Peep Show Mitchell, although he feels a little closer to the latter in real life. For instance, his wooing of his wife, the author and presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell, was terrifyingly close to a Peep Show plot: the duo met and dated briefly, then she dumped him for someone else and he spent three years in hopeless unrequited love until she returned. They were married in 2012; their daughter, Barbara, was born last May.
Is life at Casa Coren-Mitchell a constant round of zingers? “We both like jokes a lot and, occasionally, if we think of a funny thing, we say it to each other,” he says cautiously. “But I think it’s a normal house. I mean, I��ve had very few relationships in my life, but I imagine most of them involve telling jokes.”
He adds wearily that this is not a good time for jokes: “I’ve noticed with great regret that on topical shows and panel shows, a lot of jokes I would consider to be vanilla are making audiences suck in their breath, rather than laugh.” He shrugs. “There’s a new cultural oversensitivity about offence — online offence tourists looking at today’s outrage as if it’s a leisure activity.
“I know comedians feel this. If your remark hits Twitter and they all start calling for you to be abolished, even if it blows over after three hellish weeks, you’re going to think, ‘That joke wasn’t worth it.’ The circumstances are not the best for topical jokes right now.”
This particularly upsets Mitchell because he believes, and always has, that good comedy is the cleverest thing — better than drama or thrillers, and vital to our collective soul.
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“Everyone, from Hollywood to high art, thinks that comedy is trivial,” he says. “But it’s so important for the health of a civilisation to laugh at things. You test what you think about an issue, your own contradictory feelings and where the lines of hypocrisy lie so much better with a joke.
“I mean, ask Shakespeare. They may not have been the best jokes in the world, but he always knew they had to be there. Protesting about jokes is a nasty step onto a nasty road, and I hope we stop before it’s too late.”
Upstart Crow will be shown on May 9 on BBC2
