David Mitchell

David James Stuart Mitchell was born in Salisbury on 14 July 1974, the son of hotel managers Kathryn Grey (née Hughes) and Ian Douglas Mitchell. As his mother is Welsh, hailing from Swansea, and his father was born to a family that was originally Scottish, he considers himself British rather than specifically English. He would explore his ancestry in a 2009 episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and discover his connection to the Gaelic scholars John Forbes and Alexander Robert Forbes. In 1977, when Mitchell was two years old, his parents left their jobs to give lectures on hotel management as this gave them more time with him. He has a brother named Daniel, who is seven years younger.

Mitchell's family moved to Oxford, where his parents became lecturers at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University). He attended the independent preparatory New College School. In a 2006 interview with The Independent, he recalled his childhood dreams: "When I was at school I either wanted to be a comedian-stroke-actor or prime minister. But I didn't admit that to other people, I said I wanted to be a barrister and that made my parents very happy. I didn't admit I wanted to be a comedian until I came to university, met a lot of other people who wanted to be comedians, and realised it was an okay thing to say." From the age of 13, Mitchell was educated at Abingdon School, a public school. Having always been top of the class at primary school and prep school, he realised after moving to Abingdon that there were plenty of people more intelligent than he, so he turned his attention to debating and drama "where [he] had a chance of being the best".

Mitchell often took part in plays "largely because [he] got to play cards backstage". His roles mainly consisted of small minute-long parts until he won the role of Rabbit in an adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh. This was the first time that he was "consciously aware [he] was doing a performance" and that this "was better, even, than playing cards". He had been "obsessed" with comedy writing since his school days as he "always felt that doing a joke was the cleverest thing" and "would intrinsically prefer a parody of something to the actual thing itself".

As part of his gap year, he worked as a "general dogsbody" at Oxford University Press, in their English Language teaching division.

He was rejected by Merton College, Oxford, then went to Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1993, where he studied history. There, he began performing with the Cambridge Footlights, of which he became president for the 1995–1996 academic year. In his first year at university, he met Robert Webb during rehearsals for a Footlights production of Cinderella in 1993, and the two men soon established a comedy partnership. According to Mitchell, these factors had a detrimental effect on his academic performance at university and he attained a 2:2 in his final exams.