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Victoria Coren Mitchell
‘I felt immediately comfortable with the readers’: Victoria Coren Mitchell Photograph: Patrick Olner/BBC/Zodiak
‘I felt immediately comfortable with the readers’: Victoria Coren Mitchell Photograph: Patrick Olner/BBC/Zodiak

Victoria Coren Mitchell: ‘The Observer and I have been a very happy fit’

This article is more than 7 years old

The columnist looks back on some of her highlights at the paper - including the time she busted some ‘funeral crashers’
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When and how did you first come to write for the Observer?

I started writing for the Observer in about 1998/9, just after Roger Alton became editor. He asked me to write occasional features and to cover for Richard Ingrams’ column when Ingrams was on holiday. Roger is very good at understanding the appeal of a mixed read; other people at the time probably thought I was a bit trivial or mainstream in my interests, but he was happy enough to bring that into the paper alongside the more heavyweight political opinion and harrowing news. I started writing my own regular weekly Observer column in 2002. It was a very happy fit, I felt comfortable with the readers immediately. I liked them.

What do you consider to be your finest hour as an Observer columnist? And your least glorious?

I think a highlight would be the piece (and later follow-up piece) I wrote for the Observer about “the funeral crashers”: a gang of unsavoury characters who bumble around the southeast of England, attending funerals and memorial services for people they’ve never met, enjoying free food and drink on the pretence of having known the deceased. I set a trap for them and wrote about it. I was proud to avenge my father (whose service they tried to gatecrash), proud to expose them in the paper, and very glad about a last-minute decision to end on a note of forgiveness. The gang might be still at it, by the way, so do look out for “Terrence Jolley” if you have a death in the family. Meanwhile there are opinion pieces I’ve written that I might not agree with now, but I don’t have a big problem with that. A newspaper column isn’t a poem; it’s not about the eternal. It’s about the week.

If you had to be stuck in the Kings Place lift with five Observer journalists, past and present, who would you choose?

Five, eh? Okay. George Orwell, of course; much as I like Jay Rayner, it would be weird not to take the opportunity to meet George Orwell. Rachel Beer; I know nothing about her but she was female, Iraqi, Jewish and the editor of The Observer in the 1890s – how on earth did that happen, and how could she not be fascinating? Clive James, probably the greatest TV reviewer of all time, whom I know a bit but not terribly well and is the kind of person you could talk to for hours and days without getting bored. Nigel Slater, because I’ve never met him and I’d like to. And then, obviously, the columnist David Mitchell. That would save me a phone call home to say I’m trapped in a lift.

If the Observer were to disappear tomorrow what would you miss the most?

I love everything about a proper, print-and-paper newspaper. Whether it’s rustling through the letter-box like a delivery from Father Christmas, or I’m picking it up from a shop on the way to read it slowly over a cafe breakfast, I love its feel and promise. I hope that newspapers will live on for centuries. The Observer specifically: I would miss its tone, the way it combines acuity of thought with gentleness of heart. It’s funny but not glib. It’s analytical and kindly at the same time, like you would teach children to be if you could. I’d miss that voice and quiet power. But most of all, I’d miss the crossword.

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