I'm a worrier. In the UK, if I'm known for anything, it's sort of for being cynical.

Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.

I'm quite geeky and I'm very much into video games and technology and stuff like that.

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"]."

I'm a worrier. In the UK, if I'm known for anything, it's sort of for being cynical.

I did once leave one of [my kid] watching something on YouTube, something completely innocuous, and I went out of the room and the algorithm kept playing the next thing and the next thing and somehow worked its way around to showing him the trailer for John Carpenter's The Thing - at which point I walked back in. He wasn't happy.

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