Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

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 actually had that conversation with [Channel 4 Chief Creative Officer] Jay Hunt. We were at a bit of a crisis point. I'd written a totally different script - about war, basically - that got rejected at the last minute for various reasons. The whole of the series was in doubt. I said, "Well, there is one other idea ["National Anthem"]."

My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.

Men Against Jive is a brilliant title! That's a military story, that's a difficult one to explain really because that's sort of a war... it's not just a war story.

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.

Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.