There’s a question at the heart of Utopia that I can’t answer, which is, with a burgeoning population, what do we do? I have lots of answers for lots of the world’s problems, and no-one ever asks me so they’re still going on [sighs. Everyone laughs]. For this one, I don’t have an answer because my slightly lefty liberal sensibilities just cannot offer anything. There’s talk about birth-rates going down, but our birth-rate went from 2.7 to 2.4 in the last fourteen years and we still produced another billion people. Even if the birth-rate does lower to 2.2 or 2.3 we’ll still be producing another billion in twenty years and it’s just a fucking nightmare. Phosphates are not going to last, we’re not going to be able to feed this amount of people. I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think that Utopia’s going to come up with an answer for that, and I think if the world looks to Utopia for an answer to that, we’re really in trouble, but to me that makes it interesting, because it’s difficult and I don’t understand it.

Your writing doesn’t ever flinch does it?

I didn’t start out as a writer, I started out doing shit jobs that I hated and so for me, when I started writing – I left school very young with no qualifications and I went back to university when I was about thirty – for me it was incredible because I’d done shit jobs for years and years and to not get up in the morning firstly was amazing, but also to deal with the subjects you wanted to be dealing with and for that to be your raison d’être was just incredible for me. I feel really connected to writing. In so many ways, it’s saved me. So I get very angry when people aren’t brave with it.

Watching it though, when you do something bad as a writer, like pull someone’s eye out with a spoon, is really horrible. It doesn’t feel good. Because you think, ‘that came out of my mind and everyone now is thinking what a disgusting person I am’. But my view is that when you think of something bad, the next thing you think is, I won’t do this, I can just do without the hassle. I won’t put someone gouging someone’s eye out, or I won’t have a child massacre because it’s easier for me not to. I’ll find something else, I’ll write something else and no-one will say ‘What a dick’. But then I think if you do that you’re a fucking coward, you’ve got to believe in your characters and your story and you’ve got to have the courage to do those things.”