IN HIS OWN WORDS: David Mitchell

With David, 44, taking the role of William Shakespeare in Upstart Crow (8.30pm, BBC2), we take a look back at what he has had to say about his life and career so far…

On the agonising three years between finding himself ‘smitten’ by Victoria Coren – now his wife – and asking her out: ‘I was hopelessly in love. I told no one about it. I didn’t tell my closest friends or my parents of the enormous sadness that overshadowed my life.’

On his outlook on life: ‘I’m a worrier. I worry that something is going to go wrong, a horrific accident or an illness or, on a less serious level, a career mishap. That is probably how I avoid feeling guilty for being so lucky, that I worry that something is going to go wrong.’ On the British attitude to comedy:

‘Comedy is very heavily scrutinised in the press, but there’s a good reason for that: People really give a damn about it. When a sketch show or sitcom is deemed not to be very good, people take that personally. That’s the downside. The upside is that we live in a country that really cares about comedy and when it works, my God, they love it.’

On the perils of social media: ‘I think social media is a bit of a disaster all round. I look at my phone obsessively. I put something on Twitter and slightly care how many “likes” it gets. And I’m 44. I dread to think how interlaced with the souls of the generations younger than me this tool of fatuous intercommunication has become. It may be that the invention of nuclear weapons will turn out, in retrospect, to have been less of a scourge of humanity than the internet.’