[My parents when I was a kid] would go, "It's a nice hot day. Why are you inside watching the TV?" And you go, "Well, 'cause it's better?"

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.

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

There's something I find very satisfying about a nice ironic twist.

I would say the thing you can still see in Black Mirror is that I was probably traumatized by the specter of nuclear war. I was born in 1971, and in the '80s I came to understand that I was inevitably going to be frazzled to death in the nuclear apocalypse.

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

I tried to be all intellectual and erudite and with others I'd just swear and curse and be an idiot. And suddenly, when they're all in one space, I don't know who I am.