Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

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.

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.

People gravitate towards their own era, nostalgia therapy is a real thing that's being tinkered with.

Obviously, you try not to repeat yourself so that forces you to re-evaluate what you're doing constantly [in Black Mirror].

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.