The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

As long as we've still got crazy "what if" ideas, we can continue [Black Mirror]. It's outpacing reality that's probably the challenge.

My continuum? Blimey! For me,Black Mirror is all part of the whole.

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.

The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life - whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you're 85 years old.

I was more aware initially of shows like Tales of the Unexpected. And the BBC used to put on a lot of one-off, bizarre television plays.

It's interesting, in the U.K., I'm known for doing comedy things, which often doesn't translate to the U.S.