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With Boris Johnson, you don't think of him as a politician, oddly. You think of him as a media personality because he's a comic character. He's basically Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof.
"Be Right Back," in which Hayley Atwell brings Domhnall Gleeson back from the dead using his social-media profile, sprang out of an unrelated conversation. Other stories you thrash away at for weeks and weeks.
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.
I could worry about pretty much anything you put in front of me, so I'm not actually sort of anti-technology. So it doesn't sort of come out of that. It's not like a fear of the future. It's a fear of everything.
When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic and when you're being sarcastic, they think you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.
When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic, and when you're being sarcastic, they think you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.
In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat.
I like technology, but 'Black Mirror' is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.
The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
I think more and more people became aware that social media was starting to feel like a more toxic space. And, I mean - quite a lot of incidents of people getting very, very angry about all kinds of things and attacking people.
When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the Internet? Chances are God won't find out. Being ancient, God probably can't work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it's made of fine china.
What's odd about the selfie stick is that while it might faintly improve the photo you'll post on Facebook, it definitely makes you seem like a shallow, awful clown to any bystanders in the humdrum physical space you're posing in.
I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.
While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.
If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.
I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.
I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.
What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer or the shop or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant - their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it.
[Black Mirror] is always about unforeseen consequences and unforeseen problems, it's not usually that someone's created a machine that they want to enslave mankind with, it's someone's invented a new kind of... paperweight that enslaves mankind.
Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.
I didn't pass my degree due to never handing in an acceptable dissertation, and while it didn't harm me in the long run, my failure to complete the course properly probably led me to spend the next six years or so coasting, unsure of what to do next.
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.
Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.
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.
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.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.
If I ran a national burger franchise - which I don't - I'd make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
A sort of angry populism here in the UK and across Europe, a sort of anti-political mood and what then steps into that place? In one episode [of Black Mirror] you won't have seen, there's a very simple gaming gadget that turns out to be a monstrous idea, which I suspect we will end up doing for real.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of 'SpongeBob SquarePants.'
There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.
[The rumor that David Cameron maybe once did this unspeakable thing with a pig's head] it was freakish and weird. It seemed such a coincidence that I couldn't quite process it. And then, as it sank in, I genuinely had the thought, "Am I living in a Truman Show sort of VR simulation designed to send me insane?"
Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.
Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.
Women - why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone-sodden pig's ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment ... you name it, it's in a gigantic man-wrought mess.
I'm somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I'll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, "This room's quite rectangular, isn't it?" I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels
When you look at things like social media, that's an immensely powerful tool that I'm all in favor of. I think it's amazing. It's a powerful tool, and it's one that we're, as a species, still grappling with learning to use. It's like we've grown an extra tail and we inadvertently lash out and knock over all of the furniture.
What are people going to expect when they sit down to watch a new episode of Black Mirror? And what you're going to expect is somebody with a translucent TV in a drone strike and a robot walking by... or frowning at a phone and going 'aaah! Oh no! I've just deleted my own leg!' or whatever. So I thought well, let's not do that.
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.
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 convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only "saddoes" dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled "sad" - it's like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.
We've got characters in the UK like Boris Johnson, who's kind of like a proto Trump in many ways even down to the crazy blonde hair. Then Mayor of London, now Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was widely seen as a cartoonish oaf and that made him strangely undentable as a politician. No one could land a blow on him because he was already ridiculous.
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.
[British television series] Hammer House of Horror. I used to really enjoy these one-off stories where often there would be an incredibly cruel twist. A good example is the episode with Burgess Meredith and there's a nuclear war and he drops his glasses. To this day, you can show that to anyone and they'll go "Bwrrrrrrrr!" You know, sort of wander away shuddering.
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.
Our four-year-old, like a lot of kids, you introduce him to an iPad and he quite quickly gets drawn in in a way that you're like, "Wow, I've got to stage an intervention here." He picked up on gaming terminology really quickly. If you say, "Keep practicing holding a pencil and see if you can draw a letter, the alphabet," he understands that if you do that you've unlocked Level Two.
What is useful about when there is a sort of pull-out to reveal moment going on is that it actually focuses the mind when you're writing the earlier scenes because you're thinking 'right, how do I? I can only show this amount of the room... I can only show these characters from the waist up because they've all got robot legs!' it's a challenge so it keeps you engaged on some level.