If you found yourself watching Adolescence wondering just how the cast and crew managed to get through those hour-long takes without anything going wrong – well, they didn’t.

Netflix recently revealed that for almost all of the hard-hitting drama’s episodes, takes were into the double figures before they found one that was able to be used.

And in a new interview with Variety, cinematographer Matthew Lewis opened up about some of the issues that brought shooting to a halt.

He recalled one incident in which the iPad controlling the lights “just crashed”, leaving the entire set plunged into darkness.

“There’s a take where I walked into the wall,” he then admitted. “I turned a corner out of the medical room, and as I was turning the corner, the inside of the door frame hit the gimbal. It twitched left, and came back to the centre. It was half a second, but there was nothing that could be done.

“That was half an hour before the end of one of the takes. The take was dead. But that was a humbling moment, for sure.”

However, the most frustrating of these incidents came while shooting the third instalment, with the cast and crew making it almost to the end of the hour-long episode before a technical hitch sent them back to square one.

Matthew revealed: “In episode three, there was something about the room, and the signal would freak out and we would lose focus.

“I thought I was pushing in on Owen as he’s being wrestled out of the room – to the right of my monitor, I have a chart so I can see the focus wheel moving up and down, and then it wasn’t moving. I was moving in on Owen and I could see his eyes go soft. I was like, ‘Oh, shit. What’s happened?’. 

“I tried to override the focus, and focus pulled for a bit, but I clicked it onto autofocus, and it snapped to his face really quickly. He gets pulled out of the room, and it pulls to the wall, and he’s banging on the windows, and I pull back to find Erin Doherty. As I’m pulling back to her, as she’s crying, it lost its mind and started to pull all over the place, and the focus went crazy.

“It was midway through the week, and I thought that was the one. So when we lost that, I thought ‘We were so close’.”

As for which episode was the most difficult, Matthew described the second as an “absolute nightmare” thanks to the school setting, the 320 young people playing school students and 50 adults, including crew members dressed up as teachers so they would blend in during moments they appeared on camera.

Earlier this week, producer Hannah Walters – who is married to the show’s lead actor, Stephen Graham – disclosed that cast member Ashley Walters also caused one take to be abandoned due to one particular slip of the tongue during filming.

All four episodes of Adolescence are now streaming on Netflix.