The former Homeland star and his actress wife have two sons, Manon, nine and Gulliver, eight, and they are determined their children should practice writing with pen and paper, so they impose a computer ban during the week and only allow 10 minutes of screen time at weekends.

MCCrory tells Britain's Stella magazine, "There's a whole generation of children growing up who don't seem able to express themselves... They are not actually experiencing the putting the ink in the pen, putting the pen to paper, thinking about what they are going to say, looking up the words they want to say it with. Damian and I often sit down with Manon and Gully and a dictionary and a thesaurus and encourage them to write. When they say they want to look something up on a computer, we say no.

"We want them to have the space to think, you see. We also worry terribly that they are growing up in a society that is about instant gratification. If something's wrong - their appearance in a photograph, say - a child can now edit it to their liking or just press delete. But life's not like that, is it? I don't want my children to be perfect beings in a perfect world."