You’ve said that you were initially worried about the transposition to the modern era and the potential for gizmos to take over. How do you think you’ve overcome that problem, because actually, people love that, don’t they?

They do. It wasn’t necessarily the gizmos that worried me, it was just the tone of it. I feared the tone might be too cool and too knowingly cool. I can live without endless television programmes and films just centred around computers. I can sort of live without that. But, if they help serve the story, then I have no problem with it.

I think really, anyone will say who works in my game that without good writing, you don’t really have a chance at making something brilliant. You have a chance at making something quite good, but unless the writing is brilliant, you’re never going to make something brilliant. You’ll make something okay. And it’s really well written, and it’s really well – saving my presence – it’s really well cast, and I mean Ben particularly. That helps.

I think it helps that – now it’s the difficult third series – but when we started it was, like with anything, you feel as if you’re making it up as you go along. And the world is your oyster and you think I can make that choice if you want, and there’s something very exciting about that. We’re trying to retain that excitement, but with the knowledge that actually we have now created a thing… It’s a thing now, and a thing where people expect certain stuff, and people want certain things and it’s right to not deny them those things, but also this is still relatively early on in their relationship. We’re three years in, we’ll be nine episodes in at the end of this, that’s not very many. I think the danger would be if we said, ‘This is all now set in stone and there’s nothing else to discover’, but I think what I know we’re finding in this series is that there is other stuff to discover, which is great.

Have you seen Elementary?