I tried to be all intellectual and erudite and with others I'd just swear and curse and be an idiot. And suddenly, when they're all in one space, I don't know who I am.

What are people going to expect when they sit down to watch a new episode of Black Mirror? And what you're going to expect is somebody with a translucent TV in a drone strike and a robot walking by... or frowning at a phone and going 'aaah! Oh no! I've just deleted my own leg!' or whatever. So I thought well, let's not do that.

When I was a chain smoker, I used to wake up and the first thing I'd do was reach for a cigarette, basically. And now I do the same thing for a smartphone, basically.

While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.

I actually had that conversation with [Channel 4 Chief Creative Officer] Jay Hunt. We were at a bit of a crisis point. I'd written a totally different script - about war, basically - that got rejected at the last minute for various reasons. The whole of the series was in doubt. I said, "Well, there is one other idea ["National Anthem"]."

Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.

Most of the books I read these days are children's books at bedtime.