Afterlife was quite a dark episode for you. How did you find the change from writing comedy?

Afterlife was pretty much the first episode I've written that wasn't really a comedy; that wasn't at heart a comedy. It was quite dark.

[There were] few opportunities for humour, and I was really worried about that because the part of writing that I'm most confident about is I know I can find the jokes. When there are no jokes to be found, when in fact it would be wrong to find the jokes, when it would feel jarring to have humour there.

I felt like I was a little at sea, but I'm getting a lot of compliments on that episode. I'm really surprised the number of people who really liked it, which was really gratifying because I didn't feel that I was in my most comfortable area.

But it's actually made me eager to take on the challenge now, so I don't cringe any more if I'm assigned something that doesn't have obvious humour, because I know that I'm okay even without it. I think. We'll see.