David Mitchell interview: ‘I do find myself on the same side as some terrible people’

After six years of writing a weekly Observer column – now anthologised in a new book – David Mitchell answers our questions about finding ideas, talking shop with his wife and saying farewell to Peep Show

• Interview by Tim Lewis - The Observer, Sunday 2 November 2014
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David Mitchell: ‘I never read the comments on the website, but other people tell you about them.’ Photograph: Chris Floyd

In your new book, you say you started writing regularly for the Observer – in late 2008 – at the dawn of a new era. What has defined it?
It was when the credit crunch suddenly became frightening. People had talked about it for months before and there was a vague sense we were going into an economic downturn, but that autumn – and it was totally coincidental – was when everything seemed potentially apocalyptic. Reading through a lot of the things I ended up writing about in the aftermath, other than the thing itself, it really changed our national mood. It finished off nearly 20 years of general optimism: a feeling that maybe everything genuinely is properly better now.

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• Read an exclusive extract from David Mitchell’s new book