In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.

It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.

You don't have the economy of scale of building a set once and casting once. You blow up the world, basically, at the end of each episode.

My kids are very young. I'm sure there's a world of horror for me to worry about as they get older.

A sort of angry populism here in the UK and across Europe, a sort of anti-political mood and what then steps into that place? In one episode [of Black Mirror] you won't have seen, there's a very simple gaming gadget that turns out to be a monstrous idea, which I suspect we will end up doing for real.

What we were also trying to do is vary the tone slightly across the season of Black Mirror, because there are six stories this time around, so you don't want it to just be the devastating, bleak-em-up.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.