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

Often the ideas in the show start out as ideas that make you laugh - outrageous "what if" ideas. I wanted an outlet for doing those.

Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.

I've always had a bad attention span.

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.

On the other hand [making a string of one-off episodes], there's a real freedom, because you're kind of reinventing the show every week.

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.