To me it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

But if the choice is a cool president and 8 or 10 percent unemployment in a declining economy and a country that seems to be going in the wrong direction and structural unemployment for young people at 50 percent I'd rather have a dorky president who fixed those problems.

I'm not a guy who curses very much in my personal life. When I curse it sounds like a kid trying to be cool. But I think there are quite a few people my father being one of them who use curse words rather eloquently.

I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

Rather be dead than cool.

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.

Computers rather frighten me because I never did learn to type so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

In the practical world of computing it is rather uncommon that a program once it performs correctly and satisfactorily remains unchanged forever.

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.