There were a lot of influences. William Eggleston, a 1970s photographer who did some great stuff, John Hinde who did these wonderful pictures of Butlins and Nostalgic Ireland where the colours sort of bleed out – we used those as models – and then we actually graded the archive footage to look like that. Essentially, it probably is very similar to the 2:35 [aspect ratio], the widescreen stuff, in terms of its framing. It’s a different piece anyway. There’s less humour in it but there’s more emotion. It feels slightly different but in terms of the aesthetic it’s probably quite similar apart from the colour grading and the aspect ratio.

What did you do in terms of shooting and editing to make this look distinctively different to anything else that’s on TV?

I don’t look at other drama and go, how can we make it different? There were very clear things that I wanted to do when I first saw the scripts for the first series. Because it was funny, it was really important to me to cast people who could do comedy. There weren’t lots of gags but there was a lot of wry humour and it was really important to me to bring out all that humour even though the subject matter was really, really dark. I think what you get is that tension between the humour and the tension and violence brings you into this absurdist landscape, a sort of heightened feel. I think that’s what’s different.

Obviously, I wanted to make it colourful. Somebody said to me recently, was that a way of making the darkness and violence more palatable, and I wish I could say ‘Yes! I absolutely thought about that’, but actually it was just a way of trying to heighten the landscape. When I read it first of all, I had this idea that it was obviously set in the real world, because the issues about the population explosion and GM crops and that sort of experimentation were very real. So it felt in some ways that we were in the real world, but behind the scenes. It was a bit like being on the North London line and seeing the houses from the back, things that you’ve never seen before. It was an attempt to see that real world in a very different way.

Then there were big influences from Polanski’s early films and Kubrick’s one point perspective framing. The Polanski thing was the big reference for me, with the humour and the darkness at the same time. It’s probably a combination of all those things. The music’s quite different as well, the music’s quite quirky so it’s probably the cumulative effect of all of those things.