One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

I pitched Jay Hunt the opening scene (prime minister, middle of the night, he's woken up...). She paused, and then she laughed. She was very intrigued and all that, and then she said, "Does it have to be a pig?" So we went through various options: Could it be a supermarket frozen chicken? A giant wheel of cheese? A pig seemed just the right level of absurd, but then when he walks in and there's actually a pig there, it's awful.

Our four-year-old, like a lot of kids, you introduce him to an iPad and he quite quickly gets drawn in in a way that you're like, "Wow, I've got to stage an intervention here." He picked up on gaming terminology really quickly. If you say, "Keep practicing holding a pencil and see if you can draw a letter, the alphabet," he understands that if you do that you've unlocked Level Two.

I'm a worrier. In the UK, if I'm known for anything, it's sort of for being cynical.

In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.