David Mitchell: ‘I wanted to be prime minister when I was a teenager – like Winston Churchill’

David Mitchell was born in July 1974 in Salisbury, Wiltshire. He performed with the Footlights society while studying at the University of Cambridge, where he met comedy partner Robert Webb. The pair went on to star in much-loved sitcom Peep Shop and their own sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Mitchell has since starred in shows including Upstart Crow and Ludwig, is a team captain on BBC One’s Would I Lie to You? (BBC One), is a regular on panel shows including Have I Got News for You and QI, the host of The Unbelievable Truth on Radio 4 and has a weekly column in the Observer. In 2021, he published Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens, his first history book.

In his Letter to My Younger Self, Mitchell examines his schooldays, getting into comedy and family life.

At 16, I was doing my first year of A levels at a minor public school in Oxfordshire. I’d done pretty well in my GCSEs – I got one ‘B’, which disappointed me, but it was biology and I don’t feel it’s held me back. My plan was to try and do well in my A levels and go to Oxford or Cambridge. Which is what happened.

I had in no way embraced parties or meeting girls. Maybe I was slightly closed off to admitting I was a teenager and doing the things teenagers are supposed to do. I was at an all-boys school and hardly knew any girls, let alone ever had a girlfriend. That was many, many years in the future. It bothered me, but I hoped things would sort themselves out when I went to university. 

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I wouldn’t characterise myself as someone who was bullied, but some people had a hell of a time. Anyone could be a victim of intense ridicule at any given time. I don’t know whether schools are like that now. My daughter’s school seems quite nice – but she is only 10. Back then, if you were kind you’d have to conceal it by also being sarcastic. People weren’t opposed to kindness on principle, but overtly being kind could make you vulnerable to mockery. So that is where I was when I was 16: better than at 15, but still no return to the levels of self-confidence I enjoyed when I was 11.

I was very keen on acting in school plays. I was already trying to write sketches – these long, character based scenes where the funny joke was that they were old men saying mad things. The sketches would run for pages and pages. They were interminable. None of them were ever performed. A group of us at school that all liked plays and debating coalesced towards the end of the fifth year. I did a lot at the debating society and loved the performance side of it. That’s the first time I got off-the-cuff laughs. 

I was hugely into comedy – even more than I am now. This was the era of Blackadder, the fourth series went out when I was 15 and I loved the mix of history and comedy. It’s still amazing to me that I have worked with Ben Elton. Being in a show that he wrote [Upstart Crow] really was a dream come true. Blackadder and Monty Python were big influences. I would also listen to tapes of The Goon Show and I was beginning to understand more about Beyond The Fringe. You could only watch things when they were repeated on TV, but my awareness of Spike Milligan and Peter Cook, who at the time were less obviously to the fore than Rowan Atkinson and John Cleese, made me a bit of a comedy buff. 

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I was not encouraged to have the ambition to be a comedian. That sounded to all the authority figures around me like a bad idea. What I should aspire to do, I was told, was some fun amateur dramatics while knuckling down to get a good history degree, then doing a law conversion course and becoming a barrister. I don’t blame people. It doesn’t work out for most people who want to be comedians. The question is, do you have to give it a go? Because if you don’t, the odds are you probably shouldn’t. But I had to give it a go, although in 1990 I was still working that out. So I was content to be a swot in the hope of going to a good university and doing as much amateur dramatics as I could. 

Musically, I was nowhere. And I still am, really. I’ve never developed a taste in music, which some people would view as a huge gap and I accept it probably is. This was the era when I famously bought (relatively famously anyway – it was on Would I Lie to You?) my only album. It was But, Seriously… by Phil Collins. I went into WH Smith and it was number one in the shop’s chart so I thought, I’ll get that one, that’ll be the best. I listened to it a few times on tape. 

It’s difficult to know what I’d like to say to my younger self. If I had been in deep psychological crisis at that point, I’d want to whisper reassurance. But I wasn’t. If I told my 16-year-old self what my job was now, he’d be very pleased. But I wouldn’t want complacency to set in. He’d be so delighted about the whole comedy thing, then he’d say, did you not think of politics at all? Because I also wanted to be prime minister when I was a teenager. I wanted to be a popular one who made speeches that people quoted. What I wanted, I think, was to be Winston Churchill in a film. The same with the barrister thing – I didn’t want to be a barrister; I wanted to be Rumpole. It was the theatre of it.

With my antiquarian approach, I was well aware of Footlights and its role in British comedy. So I had my eye on Footlights as soon as I got to Cambridge. That all opened up very quickly. I loved university from about day four. Days one to three were a bit unnerving, being energetically courted by the various evangelical Christian societies with their cups of tea. But then I found a group of people, including Robert Webb, who were into exactly what I was into. 

Meeting Rob is the most important moment in my career. We immediately clicked personally, but also when we first performed together, we quickly got a sense that we had a chemistry that worked with an audience and that, as a double-act, we were slightly greater than the sum of our parts. To meet the right person creatively – and to realise it – is a tremendous stroke of good fortune. My younger self would be excited at the idea of being in a double act. To be able to say, you’re going to meet this guy, he’s going to be a very good friend and you’re going to write a lot of funny things with him – that’s very nice. And it’s been brilliant coming back to work with Rob again, although we never really stopped. I’m very glad both that we’re working together again and that we do separate stuff. It feels perfect. 

If I went back in time to talk with my younger self, I’d be waxing lyrical about my wife and children. But he’d be much more excited to hear that he would end up on Have I Got News for You. That’s a reference point he’d get. When I was first on, a very long time ago now, it really felt like a moment. Part of me was able to look around and think, this is pretty amazing. But you’re also as nervous as you’re ever going to be. 

I found it desperately embarrassing to admit when I fancied someone – I always felt the chances of any romantic success were zero. If there was going to be any, I felt it would happen organically by just hanging out. But someone has to make the running, and, in general, that’s not the person you’re currently infatuated with. I don’t know if it would do any good at all, but I would tell my younger self, if you like someone, just ask her to go for a cup of coffee. Be overt. No one will laugh, the idea is not absurd, there will be people who like you. If you get told ‘no’, that’s not nice, but it’s then done, and you won’t live in this absurd aspirational limbo for so long. Because that was my experience for years and years. 

I was very late to proper relationships. I didn’t really have a significant romantic relationship before I met my wife. Considering how many mutual friends we have, it’s odd we didn’t meet earlier – but I think whenever we met, this was going to happen. My younger self would be pleased if I told him he was going to be married and have children – but I don’t think he’d fully understand how important that is. He would think of having a family as sort of like having a mortgage.

Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping is on Channel 4 now.

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