David Mitchell interview: 'I stay away from edgier jokes now'

David Mitchell can pinpoint the moment when Britain’s sense of humour changed. In 2008, Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross left a series of lewd messages on the answerphone of the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs which included, among other things, comments about Brand’s relationship with Sachs’s granddaughter. Questions were asked in Parliament.

“It’s no coincidence that the whole Sachsgate thing happened at exactly the same time as the banking crisis,” says Mitchell. “We needed to lash out at something else, to judge a freewheeling irresponsible comic moment as if it was the worst thing two human beings had ever done.

"A lot of people thought that wasn’t a very nice broadcast, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But it looked like it was the end of the world with the banks, so it was like, ‘Let’s get furious about something which in our heart of hearts we know doesn’t matter.’”

As a comedian andwho is aone of the leading lights of the TV panel show circuit, and whose first sketch for the Cambridge Footlights sketch involved a person in despair who gets put through to an answerphone when he calls the Samaritans (“As a 19-year-old I was obviously drawn to the subject of suicide”), Mitchell must be feeling the pressure.

“I came into comedy when you could swear and didn’t have to worry about being audited,” says the 44-year-old. “But in the past 10 years, people have been quick to take offence – they are less accepting if you cross a certain line. So, for practical reasons, I stay away from edgier jokes more than I would have done in the past.”

There are, however, personal reasons for Mitchell’s changing humour. He now has a young daughter, Barbara, with his wife, the author and journalist Victoria Coren, which he tells me makes him appreciate gentler jokes. “Having a small child gives you an insight into human vulnerability. The world seems harsh and frightening, I don’t feel strong and young any more and so I don’t have a taste for darker humour.”

Indeed, there is a gentleness and a warmth about Mitchell, which is in contrast to his urbane, super-intelligent public persona. When we meet in a BBC office, he is looking relaxed and faintly grizzled with flecks of grey in his beard – he doesn’t strike me as someone who wants to score intellectual brownie points. We’re here in part to talk about his Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow, in which he stars as the great playwright himself; written by Ben Elton, it returns for a third series next week.

It’s a traditional sitcom in the best sense of the word, one of the few “multicamera” comedies to have succeeded in the past decade. Its success, I think, is down to its mixture of old-school pratfalls, hilariously anachronistic observations and refusal to patronise its audience. Knowledge of Love’s Labour’s Lost or the handkerchief motif in Othello are not essential, but definitely add to the enjoyment. Predictably, some criticised its retro atmosphere.

“The media can be irritatingly fashion-conscious,” says Mitchell. “One of the most annoying responses to the first series was when somebody online wrote ‘Why the canned laughter? They didn’t need it in Black Adder.’ Well, firstly, it wasn’t canned [it was from a live audience] and secondly, there was [audience laughter] on Black Adder. But of course I had no comeback to this idiot.”

It wasn’t always going to be so delightfully old-fashioned, however: oddly, he tells me, there was a suggestion that they should shoot it like the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall – “all crackling fire and quiet. No one would have cared about the lines if we’d done it like that.”

He admits he doesn’t understand the more recherché gags, indeed that he doesn’t always understand Shakespeare. But as a rather academic child growing up in Oxford he knew it was something he should embrace.

“My self-image then was of an arty swot, so when we came to studying Shakespeare, I knew that this was someone I had to be inspired by rather than bored by. I think a lot of our appreciation of the arts is preordained by our self-image, in fact.”

Mitchell even finds some of Shakespeare funny, archaic though many of the jokes may now be. And he disputes the general rule that comedy ages much worse than drama. “In TV, comedy has lasted longer. They repeat Dad’s Army or The Good Life, but they don’t repeat Poldark – they remake it. Seventies Poldark is incredibly hard to watch because of its clunky production values, but the clunky production values of Dad’s Army aren’t a problem.”

Along with Upstart Crow, Mitchell stars in another, very different sitcom. Back, by Simon Blackwell, will return to Channel 4 next year, and features Mitchell as Stephen, a middle-class, divorced alcoholic who takes over the family pub following the death of his father. It is very, very funny, and very, very sad – one in a wave of what have been termed “sadcoms”, also including such critical hits as Flowers and Fleabag. Mitchell points out, however, that melancholy has always been at the heart of many classic comedies.

“On the surface, it may all be jokes and antics, but look at Fawlty Towers – it is the greatest sitcom ever in my opinion but that marriage [Basil and Syibiyl’s] is extremely bitter and unhappy. It is a very unjolly scenario. The Simpsons is about an obese semi-alcoholic loser; The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is about a nervous breakdown. There is more continuity in what the sitcom is about than stylistic changes have made evident.”

Back reunites Mitchell with his comedy partner Robert Webb whom he met at Cambridge and with whom he has worked with constantly over the past 25 years. They starred in another sitcom triumph, Peep Show, for 13 years. I wonder if their relationship has changed.

“It is a lot less intensive now – we do things separately and when we get together it’s joyful,” he says. “There was a time when we were doing Peep Show, our sketch show, a tour, a film and that Apple ad campaign and that is a lot of strain to put on a working relationship, and it was a lot of time to spend with someone you’re not in love with. We are not rowers, we remained tersely polite and gave each other space.”

Mitchell, a self-confessed singleton for years, did eventually find love. With a fair amount of psychological quackery, I assume that Coren is the reason for this quietly happy soul sitting opposite me. He doesn’t like the idea of public interest in his private life, and recoils at the thought of them as some sort of power couple.

“I am proud of my wife, but I don’t want to feel that we are putting ourselves forward,” he says. “We don’t want to be secretive about the fact that we’re married, but there is no reason why anyone should be interested. And we don’t want to project ourselves. Some very famous people fall into that trap – to project a lifestyle that can be taken as an advocacy of that lifestyle. Gwyneth Paltrow is a key example of someone who has done that and I don’t think people respond well to it.”

Indeed, it would be hard for any publicist to build Brand Mitchell. His ambitions seem endearingly modest. “The only reason I would say I had ambition is because sometimes I believe it is politic to affect to want something greater, in order to cling on to what you’ve got. But it would be an affectation because I don’t want to go to Hollywood and I don’t want to be in a Bond film. I want to do sitcoms and another sketch show.”

Mitchell, it strikes me, is someone who knows his own mind, has a comfort zone and is happy to remain there. But I wonder whether his breed – the “white Oxbridge male” as he puts it – means that the trade he plies is endangered. His answer is typically level-headed.

“I don’t feel endangered, and if I did it would only be because the pendulum of history is hitting me in the face several centuries after it should have done. I can’t complain.”

Upstart Crow begins on BBC Two next Wednesday at 8.30pm