Generally I know that we've hit on a good idea if there's a moment where I'm going "HA HA HA!" because that's usually my starting point, me laughing.

We've got characters in the UK like Boris Johnson, who's kind of like a proto Trump in many ways even down to the crazy blonde hair. Then Mayor of London, now Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was widely seen as a cartoonish oaf and that made him strangely undentable as a politician. No one could land a blow on him because he was already ridiculous.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

Overall, looking at the stories [Black Mirror], almost every story we've ever done is concerned with authenticity or reality in some way.

You sort of perform your personality, I guess, to everyone on some level.

Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.