“You hear politicians invoking that thing – ‘Blitz spirit’ – but someone told me that was a bit of a lie. It was an exaggeration from Churchill to say to the other major cities getting bombed that the East End was dealing with it fine, so you should follow their example. So when people talk about that, I wonder how much history they’ve actually read,” he says.

“The true moment of spirit that I don’t know if we’d match now is Dunkirk. To think of all those people that boarded their own fishing vessels and risked their lives to cross the Channel and pick up young men they’d never met before, just because they were from the same country as them... It blows my mind. And I wonder if there’s enough camaraderie and togetherness [in Britain] for that to happen today. We’re so polarised, so split in what we think is right, that I don’t think it’d happen any more. And that’s a real shame.”

We’re meeting before the first episode of World on Fire has been broadcast, and Harrison has no idea if it’ll do well. He never does. Some projects, like last year’s A Very English Scandal – in which he was the bumbling hitman opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe – are clearly of the highest quality, but whether the public will take to it is another matter.