Charlie Brooker

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?

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.

Brooker's disdain for everything is wearing thin

Despite the better elements of "National Anthem" I couldn't get away from that lingering undercurrent. The notion that the general public is terrible. Unlike the fantastic Dead Set, Charlie Brooker takes an altogether more sneering tone at the faceless public as a whole.

Review: Black Mirror episode one - The National Anthem

Charlie Brooker's obscene satire was thrillingly daring and highly intelligent...

Charlie Brooker does not have a very high opinion of people, I think it's safe to say.

The TV columnist turned programme maker - with Screenwipe and its offshoots - turned to screenwriting with the excellent drama, Dead Set, which ended with the entire population of the world turned into mindless zombies, staring at the Big Brother house. Now, his new anthology drama series Black Mirror begins with "The National Anthem", in which the entire population of the world also gathers to watch TV: not as the undead, but as the morally dead, cheerfully demanding an act of sheer cruelty. Well, at least he's consistent.

Sadly, the drama itself isn't, although it is full of such bizarre elements that it may not seem to matter - but it does, because a fantastical plot doesn't excuse forgetting about how people actually behave. The premise is practically designed to incite the rage of traditional viewers who tune in by accident: popular, pretty young duchess, known as Princess Susannah and obviously no relation whatsoever to Kate, is kidnapped and will be killed unless Prime Minister Rory Kinnear, who is nothing like David Cameron, has actual sex with a pig on live TV.

What Brooker is getting at, I suppose, is the way in which the internet now leads the national agenda - whether it's Facebook-led protests, Wikileaks or Mumsnet demanding to know Gordon Brown's favourite biscuit - along with making it possible to view images like Gaddafi's execution, which then filter down into the mainstream media. Over the last few years, it's often seemed as if satire is being outpaced by reality as once-unthinkable events become commonplace; it must be hard to imagine something that takes the news to a higher pitch of unbelievability and presumably that's why they came up with the pig. But to make satire work, you have to take it seriously: in Jonathan Swift's infamous A Modest Proposal (which suggested the Irish famine might be solved by eating babies), he carefully backs up his outrageous idea with statistics and legal arguments. Only by couching his proposal in such rational terms does he best serve his real purpose, to point out the true horror of starving infants.

Yet in "The National Anthem", everything surrounding the central crazy idea is just as silly. Having apparently abandoned the usual principle about not negotiating with terrorists. The PM's advisors solemnly cite online polls and Twitter to decide whether he should or shouldn't go through with the act, while news reporters behave equally stupidly. Meanwhile the public all seem to lose their marbles and, without giving away what happens, their reactions to what eventually happens are ridiculously implausible. As the story plays out, it spirals past satire into surrealism, which is a shame, as it loses any moral force. It's also too long for its one joke (it could have been a three-minute sketch) and ends limply by hypocritically indicting us all for laughing - except it wasn't that funny.

Black Mirror - "The National Anthem"

The first in a trilogy of dark tales from misanthropic satirist Charlie Brooker, "The National Anthem" was a gleefully twisted and unsettling hour of comedy.

We all know that Charlie Brooker is one hell of a columnist and critic, but he's also barely put a foot wrong when it comes to fiction. Sitcom Nathan Barley - which satirised Hoxton media twits - was not, it's fair to say, a critical success, but one of the main complaints was that it satirised something that was already out of date. If anything, it now feels ahead of its time; I for one would love to see what Ashcroft makes of the Twitterati.

Dead Set (zombies in the Big Brother house) fared rather better, and now there's The National Anthem, the first of a three part mini-series of Twilight Zone-inspired sci-fi satires called Black Mirror. This has been hugely lauded, and rightly so - well cast, well written and with a premise to make your stomach turn, it was something genuinely different from the genuinely different mind of Mr Brooker.

There were a few funny lines along the way (I loved the TV news editor telling his graphics guys to "keep it functional, no Peppa Pig") but this was no comedy; indeed it was played dead straight by the excellent cast which included Rory Kinnear, Lindsay Duncan and Tom Goodman-Hill. And the reaction to the bizarre ransom demand on social networks, on TV and in homes around the country was pitched perfectly - outrage, disgust, jokes and, ultimately, morbid fascination.

If anything, it was all too real for 45 minutes to carry off the "denouement", shall we call it. Every other element of this drama was so realistic that for the PM to actually go through with it for the sake of public opinion...? It was a bit too much to take, in a couple of senses. But in the main, The National Anthem is to be applauded: brave, well-made, and it made its point clearly, concisely and very creatively.