David Mitchell on new detective series Ludwig, his career so far and what irritates him

“Peep Show was written for me and Rob [Webb], and then when Ben Elton wrote Upstart Crow [with Mitchell as Shakespeare], he sent the script to the BBC and initially said, ‘I’m looking for a younger David Mitchell.’” We both laugh, a touch ruefully... tempus fugit, and all that. “But with make-up and figuring that in the 16th century by the time you were 30, you looked like you were 50, it was fine.”

Mitchell’s instinctive brake if he feels he’s steering too close to self-serving waters is humour: “It’s the best way of being cast. I would advise it to all actors. If they’ve got you in mind already, you’re ahead of the pack, because no one is going to be as much like you as you are.”

We move onto the co-creator and writer (with Sam Bain) of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong, and his more recent global hit series all about the appalling behaviour at the heart of an American media empire family, Succession. Both shows share great writing but could hardly be more different, could they?

“It’s definitely there in the whole sense of the futility and laughability of human endeavour,” Mitchell observes. “What he’s had the imagination to create is a world where you realise these people in positions of enormous power and influence are just like the people in the flat in Croydon who can’t get their relationships right.

“People in positions of power may in general have above-average intelligence, but they’re still flawed, feeble, self-interested, disappointing humans, a lot of the time. I think taking the warm but also contemptuous view of humanity that he has in Peep Show, and putting that on the huge stage of these incredibly wealthy, entitled people was brilliant. So there is a continuity thread. And obviously the dialogue – and he wrote a lot of it – is superb throughout.”

Did he want a part in Succession? “I probably wouldn’t have said no.” A quick pivot away for ironic distance… “It would have been amazing to have been in Succession but I couldn’t have played any of the parts better than the people in it, unfortunately. You don’t look at any of those actors and think, ‘Oh, they’ve dropped the ball there.’ I always worry I’d look British and s**t in that context.”

John “Ludwig” Taylor – Mitchell’s new character – is a solitary puzzle-setter whose identical twin brother James, a sociable family man and DCI in Cambridge’s Major Investigations Team, has gone missing. James’s wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell-Martin), a friend of the twins since childhood, has summoned John to assume the identity of his brother and – highly challenging for anyone, let alone a reclusive oddball – go into the office police headquarters to solve the mystery. The problem for Lucy is that Ludwig (John’s chosen nom de plume after his favourite composer since childhood) can’t help but solve murders in each episode, using puzzles, which distracts him from the job at hand.

On set he will do a crossword when waiting – “although not on Ludwig,” a giggle, “because it would be a bit like a busman’s holiday.”

What personality traits does he share with his character? “I think the fundamental thing is that both he and I are risk-averse. In lots of ways I am a shy, introverted person. But I’m also a professional performer and that’s a very extrovert thing to do. However, there is a side of me that fully empathises with the life John wants [as a hermit]. But it wouldn’t make me happy and I suspect that means I’m not a real introvert.

“A lot of performers have that oscillation between tremendous self-confidence and tremendous self-loathing. The self-loathing is the thing to emphasise when you’re talking about yourself because the self-confidence sounds unbearable. So sometimes I feel like I’ve failed myself and I want to do better, but also sometimes I feel, ‘That was amazing! They all clapped!’”

He is sweetly delighted when I confess that my wife and I love “soft murder” – “That’s a great phrase,” he says, adding slightly dreamily, “soft murder is ‘fun’ murder, ‘puzzle’ murder, not traumatising ‘a child has disappeared’ murder.” Yes, Miss Marple, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise… “Scandi murder, though, that’s hard.”

One of the appealing things about Mitchell is that his self-deprecation is so recognisable and authentic. He jokes several times that he would like to present an image of himself as someone different to who he is – the fantasy Mitchell is a bien-pensant intellectual who always has a novel on the go (he loves reading but is slow at it; “I’m embarrassed by how few books I’ve read”), a devoted theatre-goer whose taste in cinema is intense and foreign.

When I say he should watch the Professor T detective series in the original (Belgian) before our one starring Ben Miller (also excellent), his wary response is: “But it’s subtitles, isn’t it?” Is that a problem? “It’s... not an advantage. It’s not a deal breaker, but it just means you can’t watch it while you’re eating dinner because if you look down...

“I know I ought to love subtitles and I would like to project myself as ‘That is where I am in the culture’ – somebody who loves nothing more than a wonderful piece of foreign language cinema. And what a terrible disadvantage it is for it to be in our horrible vernacular. So officially I am on Team Subtitle, but I just find it slightly impractical, not being able to understand what they’re f***ing saying.”

His parents Ian and Kathy are still alive and Mitchell, who turned 50 this summer, recalls his childhood with an amused affection. He has a brother Daniel, younger by seven years, almost the same gap as that between his daughters – Barbara, born in 2015, and June Violet in October last year – with Victoria Coren of Only Connect fame.

The Mitchells Senior were hotel managers for Trusthouse Forte and it’s part of their family folklore that David, as a baby, would be put in a large cupboard where the cleaning equipment was kept because in those days there was also a telephone there: “You could get a baby-minding service from the reception, but what you did was leave your phone off the hook and the person in reception would hear if the baby cried.

“Not something that today would be considered sufficiently safe. And, anyway, the family mythology is that I was in this cleaning cupboard and that my first word was ‘Hoover’. ”

As he grew older, his parents moved to the Oxford suburb of Headington to lecture in hotel management at what was then Oxford Polytechnic – “I grew up in the house my parents still live in. They always described it as: ‘We stopped managing hotels to be there for you.’ But my dad found it quite stressful, and my mum I think always missed it.”

From childhood on, he has always been fascinated by murder stories – the Joan Hickson Miss Marples, David Suchet’s Poirot, Holmes – both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett. “Growing up in Oxford, of course we loved watching Inspector Morse – it was one of the last programmes I watched with my parents as a teenager. These shows, such as Only Murders in the Building, are my complete comfort zone for television.”

He reminisces about family holidays in Brittany, getting the ferry from Portsmouth to Cherbourg to stay in a static caravan, later graduating to gites. An abiding memory is of the family in the car, he and his baby brother listening to a tape of Bernard Cribbins reading an abridged version of Swallows and Amazons.

“I remember the hot car, the long journey and this tape that we’d listen to again and again to the extent that Daniel could do the tune of the words. It would go ‘Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome’ [ he recites in a bright RP voice] and he would go, with the exact same intonation, ‘Swarrrann and Aranaaans by Artharrransaan.’ It was adorable.”

A typical Coren Mitchell family activity at the moment is playing Cluedo. “It’s brilliant! We’ve started playing it a lot with the eldest – the youngest is not quite up to it yet but will hopefully be persuaded to play in her little fenced-off zone.”

He doesn’t like the way there have been efforts to modernise the game – “It was set in an idealised 1930s country house murder scenario – the golden age of crime. So, to bring it up to date is to miss the point.”

Does it irritate him a lot? “Yes, I don’t think they understand the appeal of the product they’re trying to ‘improve’ and that’s often the way. I don’t approve of mint KitKats, either.”

Oooh, who doesn’t love a Mitchell irritability jag.

“There are lots of irritating things and I quite like them,” he says. “I’ve always found, as somebody who tries to find something funny to say, that a lot of that comes from things that irritate me.”

Can he give me some more? “Well, you say ‘give me’ – that’s like doing the prep for an episode of Room 101. What you’re asking for is dense comic material. Blimey, if I could do it that quickly I’d be touring in a one-man show!”

I still remember Tracey Emin’s two bugbears: clowns and cocaine. “Well, I’ve never had cocaine so I don’t think it would be fair of me to speak ill of it,” – which may be just the funniest line in more than four decades of interviewing – “for all I know, it’s great!”

He settles on the “Cluedo thing”, before – boom – he lands on one and takes off on a magnificent rant…

“I know I’m not going to sound young when I say this, but it has always irritated me that a large number of social gatherings – when the entire purpose of them is for people to chat – are drowned out by music.

“Now, I understand there are social gatherings where a key part is to dance. And I’m fine with that – and the music needs to be loud for that. But you go to parties and there’s no dancefloor, no one is going to dance, it would be absurd to dance, it’s just about chatting and you can’t hear a thing. Now that, I think, is so unnecessary and I don’t understand it. I mean, you must be familiar with this?

“It’s quite often, like, a BBC drinks do. They’ve given the organisation to someone who organises such events and people like that think what people want is to be drowned out by music all the time. Because they come from a different milieu than the middle-aged people who are coming out generally to have a chat. I’m not sure it would be worthy of the one-man show, it might not be funny enough, but it’s definitely exquisitely annoying.”

Do millennials annoy him? “I would try not, in any circumstances – particularly in an interview, to dismiss a whole generation. I just don’t know if that’s a way to push DVDs. Not that millennials buy DVDs [which he still watches]. But it does feel, for the first time in a while,” he concedes, “that there is a generational divide.”

The back story to David and Victoria’s marriage in 2012 is quite well known. They met at a party, he was instantly smitten, but she, alas, chose Another Suitor, leaving him – a man who likes nothing more than to amuse – pining for three long years of melancholia. But eventually Victoria was ready for him and – so far so good, a happy ending.

We must assume that he does believe, in his case, in love at first sight? “Oh yes, but the complication there is that I think I met her briefly several years earlier.”

Really? “Victoria disputes that, and then she gets irritated with me for not having fallen in love with her on the first occasion when we met – when I say we met,” he corrects himself.

As well as being a quiz show presenter, Coren Mitchell is a poker champion and David accompanied her to big and small poker tournaments – the first one in Nottingham and another in a place he least expected to go, Las Vegas – which he, also unexpectedly, completely fell for.

He’s extremely proud that his wife is the first woman to have won the European Poker Tournament and is the only person – man or woman – at this point to have won two. Mitchell has over the years been notably uxorious about his wife. Does he believe there is a lover and a lovee in any relationship and if so, is he the former?

“Oh, I don’t think so. One of the things I love about her is – I think she really loves me. For a relationship to carry on and succeed, it’s got to be mutual.

“She’s obviously my favourite person in the world and very bright, but if I were to try and define it more, the thing I find incredibly attractive is that she has the intellectual self-confidence not to project her self-confidence all the time.

“This is sort of vital as to why we’ve got a good marriage – she thinks intelligence should primarily be used for jokes. And I completely agree with that.”

If I were to interview Victoria, would she speak about him with a similar heartfelt eloquence? “The thing about it is – in an interview people often ask about her. And when I’m asked about her, I’m going to say that I love her and she’s amazing. But I wouldn’t have brought her up. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. She’s often on my mind. At the same time, I think I have a very happy marriage to a wonderful person, but I don’t consider that to be of broader interest.

“And so I always feel in this situation that I don’t want to be coy and say, ‘I refuse to discuss my wife – let’s talk about scene 15, it’s such a wonderful puzzle.’ But at the same time, by answering the implication can be that, ‘He can’t stop going on about his wife – OK. You like your wife. Get over it.’”

David Mitchell – the one-man show on tour? He should definitely do it.

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Ludwig is coming to BBC One and iPlayer on BBC One and iPlayer at 9pm on Wednesday 25th September.

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