Brooker agrees: "Quite rightly, when Andy Serkis played Gollum [in the Lord of the Rings trilogy], everyone's amazed by that, but what you're amazed by is the human, you're seeing a human performance shining through.

Ahead of Black Mirror season 7 landing on Netflix on April 10, the notoriously candid writer-director revealed he's been deliberately avoiding the Apple TV Plus hit because people keep telling him it's "much better" than his long-running sci-fi series.

The high-strung satirist, who says he calms down when everybody else is on edge, on surrendering to Alexa and his knack for making prescient TV: “The cynic in me says, ‘We should have fucking monetized that.