Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker: That's yer Thatcher Ding Dong

Maggie Thatcher died. Git-haired One Direction sex minnow Harry Styles hastily tweeted an RIP, prompting many of his fans to wonder aloud just who this "Thatcher" person was, much to the amusement of onlookers not quite smart enough to understand how time works.

Charlie Brooker: live audience is weirdest creature

Now the TV audience has an offshoot: the extended online TV audience, which is quicker to judge and infinitely more vocal. The Twitter audience for every TV show consists of people actively willing themselves to be comically unimpressed.

Charlie Brooker: there are scripts for Series 3

Charlie Brooker says he has "ideas" for another run of Black Mirror if the show is recommissioned.

Terry Mynott: 'Charlie Brooker made me die inside'

It's never easy when impressionists meet their targets as Terry Mynott revealed at the launch of his new Channel 4 comedy The Mimic.

Charlie Brooker has been kind to me in print, so I must be careful not to be too kind about him, lest people suspect that I am dishing out a quid pro quo. On the downside, his weekly show behind a desk (Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, BBC Two) sometimes makes it look as though he wants to eat the desk in his anger at the world.

But his larger dramatic creations reveal a Swiftian intelligence that is quite unusual when translated into an updated, high tech, electronic (squrrk!) field. There is quite a lot of squrrk! in Black Mirror. He wants you to know that your attention is being zapped into lightning trips from one field of reality to another.

The main reality in the latest show seemed to be that a helpless young woman was on the run from dozens of zombie-type vigilantes: shades of A Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, etc.

But (squrrk!) not so fast. Towards the end it turns out that she is really the victim of a deadly game. With her wiped brain - Brooker is fond of the idea of the human mind being annihilated by television - she is being made to experience the suffering she caused when she tortured a child. But did she? Are the organizers of the game (see, as Brooker undoubtedly has, The Game, with Michael Douglas) normal people like us, at last getting the chance to inflict a just punishment that the psycho criminal will actually feel? Or what?

Doubts remain as the soundtrack says squrrk! Brooker used to be a companion at arms for Chris Morris but it is starting to look as if he, Brooker, has a scope all his own, and more powerful for being less parodic. He doesn't just make fun of television, which even I can do. He can see the fractures in life itself, as Swift could. On top of that he has the great virtue of having seen everything and yet not being derivative. His desk-eating savagery is too heartfelt for that.

Strong lead performances (Hayley Atweel, Lenora Crichlow and Daniel Rigby) have made the most of the nightmartish, almost ludicrous set-ups in Charlie Brooker's latest blast of three dystopian futures. Rigby is in perhaps the best of them, as a comedian who voices a rude satirical cartoon bear that ends up standing in a by-election.

#BlackMirror: Your reviews of The Waldo Moment

There was general Twitter apathy for episode three, series two of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. Fans tweeted messages of disappointment that "The Waldo Moment" didn't live up to the first two episodes of the second series, and criticised the "clumsy and obvious" satire.

Black Mirror: The Waldo Moment, Channel 4

Second run of Charlie Brooker's dystopian drama gets our vote.

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror (Channel 4) satirical dramas are fast gaining a cult status. Not all succeed, and some are unwatchable, notably the opener of his first series, where the prime minister had sex with a pig. But this follow-up series has, generally, shown more nuance than the first.

Last night's closing instalment introduced us to an interactive cartoon bear, Waldo, who, in the manner of Ali G, did interviews with real-life people. He tangled with an almost equally caricatured Tory party candidate (Tobias Menzies), whom Waldo proceeded to stand against in a by-election. As a mockery of the deeply compromised ideals of modern politics - people who simply hated politics could now vote for Waldo - the satire worked.

This was because Brooker didn't over egg it, at least not until the end, which descended into a hammy dystopian vision of Waldo becoming a means of universal mind control. But before that final five minutes, Brooker didn't let Waldo actually win the by-election, and he made the comedian controlling the bear utterly reviled by his own actions - "He's not real! He doesn't stand for anything!" He also gave the Tory one rather good line: "If that thing is the main opposition then the whole system looks absurd. Which it may well be - but it built these roads." The message that we may complain about our politicians but they're all we've got scored a bleak bulls-eye.

Black Mirror saw Charlie Brooker nail the zeitgeist

This was no simple swipe at the state of modern politics. 'I wasn't even articulate - or funny. Which is almost worse,' lamented lugubrious comedian Jamie, Waldo's voice and puppet-master.