Back Story by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Humor, Comedians, Autobiography
ISBN: 9780007382941
Publisher: Harper Collins Ome
Published: 2012-10-10T23:00:00+00:00

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Attention

I need pants. I’ve needed pants for some time but now it’s getting critical. A lot of them are ‘rogue’ pairs now – basically just waistbands with some cloth hanging down, not really doing whatever pants are supposed to do that justifies not washing trousers nearly as often, and also increasing the likelihood of a penis or bollock becoming noticeable in a trousers-down scenario.

When I say ‘trousers-down scenario’, I’m less worried about a sexual one (where the visibility of penis or testicles is probably on the agenda anyway – though it’s embarrassing to be clothed in rags) than about costume fittings or changes while filming. When you’re making a sketch show, you’re forever being helped from one awkward outfit into the next, and the good people who are there to deal with hooks, zips and buttons shouldn’t have to avert their eyes to avoid a genital glimpse. In so many areas of my work, all my clothes are provided apart from pants, and yet it seems that even maintaining a supply of those is beyond me.

My collection of pants is now about fifty per cent rogue, and almost all of the ‘good’ pants, ones for special occasions or stressful days when you want to feel that everything is in order, are deteriorating into ‘okay’ pairs, while most of those are wearing down towards ‘rogue’. There’s sort of a tipping point: when you’ve only got three or four pairs you’re properly happy with left, they get worn and washed so much that the rate of their decline is vastly increased.

There’s an obvious solution to this problem, so I turn left off Wigmore Street, down Orchard Street, towards it: Marks and Spencer. One of the two big ones on Oxford Street. I know it’s a cliché that everyone gets their pants from Marks and Spencer but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s also a fact. I don’t know if they do good or bad pants, as I have never compared them to those available anywhere else and think that it would be a vanity to do so – although I do have one pair from John Lewis which I was given by a costume lady after a sketch involving my getting doused in fake cream had put my own pair beyond use.

I hadn’t known John Lewis did pants and I’m confused by the fact that they do. Where’s the market? I would have thought that the kind of middle English conventional attitude, expecting quality but shunning showiness, that is the hallmark of a John Lewis customer would lead inexorably to buying pants at Marks. Marks and Spencer’s is the John Lewis equivalent for pants. But those who shun the Marks-pants-buying societal rule are surely unlikely to seek their alternative at the High Street’s other citadel of conventionality? That would be like a rebellious son of a Baptist minister running away to join the Methodists. Anyway, I find the waistband on my John Lewis pants slightly annoying and frankly consider that to be the least inconvenience I deserve for owning them.

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