David Mitchell
David Mitchell
English stand up comedian and half of the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, alongside Robert Webb. He is best known for starring in and writing the Channel 4 series Peep Show, for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Comedy Performance in 2009. He has also written and starred in several sketch shows including The Mitchell and Webb Situation, That Mitchell and Webb Sound and, That Mitchell and Webb Look.
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 July 1974
CitySalisbury, England
People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.
Every single customer I spoke with had a problem with at least one major vendor, and every major vendor was named by at least one customer.
Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.
He's really been working hard. He's been here all morning, helping to unload the truck and carry food boxes for people.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
We have supported the school throughout this process and are pleased that a satisfactory resolution has been reached.