The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

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.

Online you're encouraged to perform one personality for everyone.

I can worry about anything.

"National Anthem" was just a funny idea I'd been knocking about. I initially thought about a beloved celebrity having to do that - and then I watched an episode of 24. In my head, I was writing almost a parody of a 24-style president woken in the middle of the night with a crisis. It seemed more interesting to play it ultrastraight and to have the viewer's initial reaction be one of laughter and disbelief - and just have the whole thing become progressively more uncomfortable.

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!