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.

I could worry that I'm going to bleed to death, you know, from cutting my finger on a sandwich packet, you know, if I sort of open a sandwich.

At the other end of the spectrum, George Gideon Oliver King Rameses Osborne, the fourteen-year-old novelty Chancellor and future baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon - a man so posh he probably weeps champagne.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

I'm known as being a massive dweeb who's into video games and so on.

We take things that would have struck us as miraculous five years ago for granted. Like Pokémon Go would have been insane, and now it's just like, "Oh, okay."

The logic for me, in writing it is that the different areas or different years are almost like different rooms.