The internet? It’s like creation of nuclear bombs, says comic

It’s given us shopping from home, instant communication, changed the way we find love – and, erm, produced a string of hilarious cat videos.

But comedian David Mitchell has branded the internet a ‘terrible disaster’. the BBC star, 45, even likened it to the invention of nuclear weapons. He told the Cheltenham Literature Festival that while ‘phones are very clever, emails are very quick and it’s so much easier to get a taxi now’, he would be more comfortable in a pre-internet world. Mitchell said: ‘I think the internet and the smartphone internet thing, is just terrible. I think it’s a terrible disaster. We will look back on it like the invention of nuclear weapons as something we really wish we hadn’t done.’ the Would I Lie to You? star also hit out at the impact of online shopping on the high street, cyber-bullying and the ‘post-truth’ world of fake news spread by social media.

‘there’s the fact that literally all the time, everywhere we go there’s people staring at their phones, talking to people on social media, insulting people on social media or bullying people on social media,’ he added.

‘there’s the fact it’s destroying our areas of traditional of commerce, shops you actually walk into, which in itself is destroying the fabric of these settlements we live in a way that nobody wants.’

Mitchell said he would prefer to go back to the late-1980s because ‘broadly everything good coming out of technology I think we’d got by then’. He said: ‘Landlines, answerphones, video recorders, news from Ceefax.’ But he added: ‘We can’t go back. We’re stuck with it.’