Charlie Brooker

In this secular age for the great god TV with its flock now fragmented, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror dared to show streets that had been deserted for the goggle-box. But if you missed his satire you'll probably never guess the must-see: the Prime Minister having sex with a pig, to comply with kidnap demands and save a princess. We didn't see the actual act - not even Channel 4 could show that - though we got to watch other people watching: in pubs, on hospital wards, home alone, and in the corridors of power. Lindsay Duncan, who once stalked the corridors televisually as Maggie Thatcher, played the PM's press secretary; Alex MacQueen and Justin Edwards, who once stalked them in The Thick of It as, respectively, the baldy blue-sky thinker and the blinky-eyed Newsnight nutter, were in there, too. This was Black Mirror's first problem: these familiar faces didn't serve as reassurance when dealing with such shocking subject matter, they simply reminded you of programmes which were funnier, better.

Its second problem was believability, or lack of. Not the belief that such a scenario could play out, pig and all, but the one that the cops could be so stupid as to accept without checking that the severed finger delivered to the news network did in fact belong to the princess (it was fat and obviously a man's). For a story to shoot off into such flights of fancy, it first needs to have covered a few of the basics.

The satire, though, was good. Brooker is a sharp observer of the world whizzing round him, and being spun in every sense - where a government thinks it can conceal in the time-honoured way only for a little lad with a smartphone already to know everything, forcing a No 10 aide to concede: "It's trending on Twitter." And where a female journalist desperate for a scoop will ping photos of herself in the style of Ashley Cole to a government underling who'll blow what's left of national security on the issue because he's desperate for a shag.

Not a complete failure, then, and I liked the PM''first response to the kidnapping ("What do they want? Money, release a jihadi, save the f***ing libraries?"). I also liked the idea that a jobbing porn actor might be roped in to play the premier (that this fellow would be on some "By appointment to..." file). But much as I wanted to see Michael Callow with his SamCam deadringer wife as our current leader, I couldn't. That's no reflection on Rory Kinnear who was his usual brilliant self. Whatever else he does in his career, he'll always be answering questions about this.

15 Million Merits but the script ain't one

Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq get dark on the second installment of Black Mirror, but was she just there to fellate him while he banged this out?

Nauseous reaction to a joke-free satire

For my part, mild amusement turned first to distaste and then to nausea. No doubt Charlie Brooker would say this is precisely the reaction he was after..

Black Mirror, on a full week ago today but I insist on mentioning it, was brilliant. You couldn't get further away, for the next two Sunday nights, from Downton. Thank God. Rory Kinnear, as the PM who had to (after almost the most deranged twist yet in the mind of writer Charlie Brooker, what fun he must have had in the three minutes after thinking of it) - there's no way round this, "shag a pig on live TV to save the life of the kidnapped princess" and director Otto Bathurst somehow imbued the dreadful, dreadful act with... dignity. Stoicism, then, or a kind of elevated bathos. The whole thing, perfectly shot and acted, said a lot about Twitter and the cyberspace "hive mind", but it said more, near the end, about humanity.

This gloriously mad premise had, of course, the world wanting to watch. London's streets were emptier than in 28 Days Later: everyone was about to watch the PM... do... a pig, on live TV, to order, to save a life. We saw the glee-keen audiences, the pubs and hospitals, fail as the hour of his act chugged on. Heads were turned, hands thrown to eyes. Laughter turned to tears. Twitter-glee turned to shame, just for watching, for having wanted so much to watch. People remembered they were people, not perennial gossipy spectators on life. For something that was ostensibly about kidnapping, execution, pig-shagging and focus-group polls, it was strangely life-affirming. And very quietly, very wisely, very funny.

Just as The X Factor departs our screens, Channel 4 dances on its grave with this poison-pen satire. Written by Charlie Brooker and Konnie Huq (his wife of 16 months), it imagines a depressing future where our hero Bing (Daniel Kaluuya) is one of millions who ride exercise bikes in gyms all day while watching an X Factor-ish talent show called Hot Shot.

It's a resoundingly bleak world they've created: people live in cells with walls of interactive video screens playing ads you must pay to avoid; everyone eats from vending machines; and everyone wears grey tracksuits, unless they commit the crime of getting fat, in which case they wear yellow smocks and appear on a brutal game show called Botherguts.

Bing's dreary existence is lightened when he meets beautiful Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay from Downton Abbey) and sees a way out of the drudgery for her, via a place on Hot Shot. The story evolves (very slowly, mind you) as a haunting allegory about the way TV exploits and humiliates us, and the production design is superbly grim. Shame the targets feel big and easy.

As the ticker tape settles over in the ITV studios, a drama will begin on Channel 4 that is so closely modelled on The X Factor that there is no doubting that its scheduling directly after this year's grand final was a deliberate one.

Black Mirror's second episode, 15 Million Merits, is co-written by Charlie Brooker's wife Konnie Huq, who presented X Factor companion show The Xtra Factor in 2010.

Brooker abandoned his TV criticism column in The Guardian midway through his wife's stint on the ITV2 show, prompting many to speculate that he felt his partiality had been compromised by Huq's involvement in the franchise. The plot thickens.
Like The National Anthem, the first in the Black Mirror series, 15 Million Merits' plot is not its strongest point. But the fine performances from its stars - who include Julia Davis and Rupert Everett - more than make up for some weak links in the narrative.

And in terms of capturing the terrifying, oppressive nature of The X Factor, Brooker has it spot on with his barely fictitious show Hot Shot, which plucks ordinary folk from their dystopian drudgery and bombards them with stardom.

For X Factor fans, it will serve as the perfect way to reflect on what has been a more sinister and contrived series than any other.
It is dark and disturbing, but is it any darker and more disturbing than the real X Factor we know and love to hate?

TV review: Black Mirror

In the second episode of Charlie Brooker's darkly comic Black Mirror, The X Factor gets its comeuppance in a nightmare worthy of Orwell. It's striking to look at and beautiful - the virtual reality, the interactiveness, all the screens...

2011 has been like an end-of-season finale

This year, so much has happened it's impossible to remember it all in one go.

Black Mirror: The National Anthem was one of the strangest dramas I've ever seen - which would be more of a recommendation if it hadn't set out so blatantly to be as strange as possible. When "Princess Susannah" was kidnapped, the Prime Minister (Rory Kinnear) was told that she'd only be released if he agreed to have sex with a pig on live TV.

An excellent cast lent this rather more veracity than it deserved while director Otto Bathurst had chosen to play it as straight as possible - just as well as there were surprisingly few laughs in Charlie Brooker's script. What on earth, you may be wondering, were Brooker's intentions here? If pushed quite hard, I'd venture that he was trying to explore the limits of prurience. This, however, was not enough to stop it from being bloody silly. Remarkably puerile too - although you probably guessed that already.

The second of writer Charlie Brooker's three comedy-horrors. Tonight's drama satirises the sort of shows that happen to be on the other channels this evening. In a sarcastic vision of the future, everyone is confined to a life of physical drudgery. The only way to escape is to enter the Hot Shot talent show and pray you can impress the judges. The star-studded cast includes Rupert Everett, Julia Davis and Downton's Jessica Brown Findlay.