A lot has changed for David Mitchell in the last six years. In 2008 he began to write his weekly column for The Observer (his career having already been established as a Varsity columnist in 1995). He was a 34 year-old single comedian still performing in Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look. Now, in 2014, he is not only married to Victoria Coren, but the latter show has finished with the former set to end next year. His new book, Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse, collects together newspaper columns dating as far back as February 2009. Whilst a lot may have changed for Mitchell over that period, he sees 2008 as marking the dawn of a “new world era” (unrelated to his newspaper column), an era of “pessimism and petulance” which he tells me that we still find ourselves in:

“This is the post-credit crunch era – the great recession era. I think certainly for Britain we were going through a period of relative optimism and seeming economic prosperity from the mid-1990s until 2008” he reflects. “In 2007 the first rumblings of the credit crunch started, and in 2008 we really realised we were in an economic disaster.” Mitchell speculates that there is a link between the credit crunch and the current surge in political radicalism: “I think it’s indirectly changed our mood, and I think the country feels sort of psychologically different as a result of that. A lot of the anger and recrimination – and people lashing out and voting for UKIP on the one hand, and listening to Russell Brand on the other – comes from this slight petulance”. He still harbours hopes of moving “into a more optimistic time”, but isn’t sure about our chances of escaping these “judgemental times” any time soon. This pessimism transfers into his vision of the future of the newspaper too: “One of the things that’s keeping me going is that newspapers may cease to exist in their current form quite shortly,” he says, “so I’m inclined to enjoy the fact that I’ve got a newspaper column in this potential last year of the newspaper, rather than spinning out early to discover there’s no industry to go back to in a few years time.”

Just as I begin to doubt if this is the comedian David Mitchell on the phone, the conversation returns to comedy when I ask how he felt revisiting pieces he’d written as long ago as February 2009: “What was very weird was that there were some of them that I’d completely forgotten. It’s very odd to read 1000 words that you definitely wrote yourself of which you have no memory,” he tells me. He compares it to “seeing footage of yourself drunk, getting undressed and dancing on a table. It’s like you’ve lived a secret life which you weren’t aware of.” Safe in the knowledge that this entire interview isn’t going to be a bleak overview of the last six years, I move onto much more familiar ground, and the Cambridge Footlights.

“I’ve seen several Footlights shows since I left...They’ve almost all got something in them that’s interesting, and they’ve almost all got something in them that should be cut – and that’s absolutely true of the ones I was involved in.” The Footlights is a society with a history far longer than Mitchell’s: “I like to think of it carrying on,” he says, “It’s got a good tradition... every so often I try to catch a Footlights show, and I hope it’s an institution that knows that most people who have gone from it to be successful wish it well.”

President of the society from 1995-1996, Mitchell presided over a retrospectively classic era of the Footlights, which also involved Robert Webb, Richard Ayoade, Matt Holness and John Oliver. I ask, therefore, whether there was ever a point at the time when they could have predicted this success? “We were all hoping we would, but it’s odd because at the time the Footlights was as washed up as it’d ever been. It felt like we were looking back to the era of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, thinking that it could never be like that again. And that was an amazing era! But we were very frightened that we were barking up the wrong tree and deluding ourselves.”

Whilst Mitchell is a familiar, British Comedy Award-winning face to British television viewers, Ayoade is now a BAFTA-nominated film director and John Oliver has his own HBO satirical late-night talk show in the US. Yet, despite all of these accomplishments, Mitchell is humble, hopeful that their successes will encourage current student comedians: “It’s very nice to hear it talked about as an exciting era and time for Footlights, because we felt lost, just like hopeful children.”

“It’s worked out for us, and I’m very grateful for the era I was part of – I hope it would be heartening for the people in Footlights now that think ‘I wonder if this will work out?’ to know that was exactly how Rob and I, and Richard, Matt and John felt the best part of twenty years ago.”

In typical mood-cutting fashion, I unwittingly put a stop to our nostalgic remembrance of Mitchell’s Footlights years by reminding him that Peep Show will finish next year: “I’ll be very sad to leave it behind, but I think it’s the right time for it to stop. Rob and I are getting middle-aged now, and the situation is not about middle aged men.” Whilst he confesses that he will “shed a tear when we leave the flat for the last time,” he is also taking the time to reminisce about the astonishing success of the show: “I’m very grateful that we’re in a position to know in advance when it’s stopping, so we can savour it, and enjoy the fact we made a successful show for much longer than we ever expected to.” Peep Show has run for over a decade now, much longer than many of the sitcoms that Mitchell grew up with. “I’m very proud of that,” he emphasises.

So whilst there is an equal level of pride and melancholy about the passing of Peep Show, there are no signs of Mitchell taking time off. He explains to me that he is developing a new sitcom with Robert Webb and Simon Blackwell, a “brilliant” writer for such projects as The Thick of It, Veep and Four Lions, but that it won’t see the light of the day until “the year after next at the earliest”. He admits his interest in partaking in some theatre work in the near future, inspired by Robert Webb’s recent roles in the West End productions of Jeeves and Wooster and Neville’s Island, but otherwise it seems like he’s very happy to continue with what he is doing, and enjoying now: the radio sketch series That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and the panel shows Would I Lie To You? and The Unbelievable Truth.

As the interview begins to wind to a close, I approach the recent controversy surrounding the comedian Andrew Lawrence’s comments regarding “women-posing-as-comedians” and the lack of right-wing comics. After I explain these furore, and after Mitchell confesses to not knowing much about the topic other than that Lawrence seems to have angered a lot of comedians, he seems quite baffled: “Well comedians do tend to be left-wing but they’re not putting it on. They’re sincere. It’s very difficult to be funny when you’re being insincere. I’m not going to change my personal politics to create better balance in a panel show [any more] than I’m going to change my personal gender. We are who we are as people, and it’s up to the producers to book a panel show and then it’s up to us to turn up and be as funny as we can.” What is equally wrong about Lawrence’s point, Mitchell argues, is that “The BBC would love to address that very issue of political imbalance that he’s talking about because they’re very sensitive to those accusations. You’d be much more likely to get on the BBC by pretending to be more right wing than you are than by pretending to be more left-wing.”

After taking the unmissable opportunity to invite Mitchell to this year’s Footlights pantomime – which he confesses to loving “more than any other Footlights show simply because it’s the most fun to do” – I close the interview by returning to how it began, asking for a prediction for the future. How will the comedy scene deal with increasingly specific censorship rules? Whilst he acknowledges “there’s certainly more scrutiny on what’s broadcast after Sachsgate”, he is refreshingly optimistic about the future of TV and radio comedy: “I think it’s slightly relaxing, which is a good thing. Yes, I think it’s made the comedy environment slightly less appealing,” he concedes, “but not massively so. All I’ve ever wanted to do is make people laugh, so I wasn’t going to give up on it just because it’s slightly harder to get the word fuck onto BBC 2.”