Charlie Brooker

Black Mirror leaves viewers thrilled and horrified

Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's new Channel 4 comedy drama, has received a very positive reaction on Twitter, with viewers being a little disturbed by its tales of abduction and porcine sex but thrilled nonetheless.

Black Mirror had plenty to say about technology as force for evil. The first of three satirical dramas by Charlie Brooker, National Anthem played out like a psychotic episode of Spooks. There was the same clipped urgency as officials strode down corridors, the same fight against a fundamentalist deadline and the same ripple effect as ordinary citizens were caught up in the crisis. It was only the nature of the threat - a kidnapped princess and a YouTube ransom note that demanded that the Prime Minister commit an obscene act with a pig live on TV - which hinted that we were in the hands of a rather more twisted storyteller.

Familiar territory to Newswipe fans, this was a what-if scenario spiralled to its darkest, most paranoid conclusion. Brooker has named The Twilight Zone as an influence but you might throw in Brass Eye and The Thick of It, too. Rory Kinnear and Lindsay Duncan were brilliant as the PM and his Home Secretary, delivering absurd lines with poker faces. It was, perhaps, a little over-egged, waging war on everything from the press and politics, to Twitter, the Turner Prize and the Royal Wedding but you couldn't fault its bilious verve.

So how does Charlie Brooker's new comic drama - the first of two, with a third written by Jesse Armstrong - open? A touching tale of a WI picnic in 1940s Lancashire? Not quite.

No, we get angst, nightmare and warped comedy dipped in the blackest of paint. A royal princess is kidnapped and the ransom demand - and please stop reading now if you're of a delicate disposition - is that the Prime Minister must have sex with a pig, live on national TV, or the princess gets it.

Rory Kinnear is brilliantly grim as the PM, horrified to discover his beastly dilemma is all over the internet before he can get a lid on the story. He and the whole cast play it very straight, deadpanning lines like "This is virgin territory, Prime Minister, there's no playbook" - which only makes them funnier.

What unfolds as the crisis plays out is filthy and hilarious, but with a dark, satirical edge. Think The Thick of It - and then some.

In his preview of Black Mirror (Channel 4), Charlie Brooker offered The Twilight Zone as one of the key influences for his new Sunday night dramas. To the untrained eye, the first of them, National Anthem, looked suspiciously like political satire - and a very superior one - rather than a sci-fi vision of technology's power to distort the world. All the gadgetry seemed only too familiar and the voyeurism all too credible: there's more dystopia in an episode of Spooks.

Rather less credible was the premise in which we were asked to believe, that Princess Susannah - think Kate Middleton - had been abducted and that the kidnappers had threatened to kill her unless the prime minister - think David Cameron: really, please do, as you'll never be able to take him at all seriously again - had sex with a pig live on television. As it emerged right at the end that the kidnap was a piece of performance art by a Turner prize-winner, plausibility was further stretched to breaking point. Could you picture Tracey Emin holding up a police escort and abducting Kate? Or that no one would notice that the severed finger came from a man, not a woman?

Yet none of this really seemed to matter, as good satire often lies as much in the fun you have along the way as in the absurdity of the set-up. And where this scored heavily was in the way everything was played as near-straight drama. There was an inexorability about Rory Kinnear as a PM tortured by focus groups and Twitter stats, whose decision to fall on his pork sword is ultimately driven by how he will be perceived in the ratings, that was both touching and funny. And Lindsay Duncan's understated press secretary - no Malcolm Tucker she - was just a delight. "Don't get it over too quickly, sir," she advised, as the PM prepared for the performance of his life. "Otherwise, the public will think you are enjoying it rather too much." Brilliant.

Brooker is no shrinking violet - though he did rather skate around the bio-mechanics of getting a hard-on in the presence of a pig, so either he has some taste boundaries after all or inside knowledge of politicians' attraction to the trough - so naturally the PM was not spared closing his eyes and thinking of the polls. In so doing, he lost the love of his wife and gained the sympathy of the nation. So no getting any bright copycat ideas, anyone. Imagine having to feel sorry for Cameron.

Black Mirror review

It felt like Charlie Brooker had pitched A Serbian Film crossed with The Thick Of It to the people at Channel 4, and Black Mirror had been commissioned despite it occurring to everyone just how soulless and unenjoyable the former is, and how the latter would be terribly difficult to imitate in a one-off drama.

Charlie Brooker's hotly anticipated comic horror series launches tonight, with Rory Kinnear starring as prime minster Michael Callow. A move away from his sneering, one-man topical shows, the first in the Black Mirror three-part series represents Brooker's first foray into TV dramas. Expect it to be dark, expect to be clever and expect it to be very, very funny.

Acerbic broadcaster and columnist Charlie Brooker is behind this new three-part satirical drama series, which examines the ways technology has changed our lives. Tonight's first episode, which he wrote, is billed as a "twisted parable for the Twitter age", and follows the crisis that engulfs a fictional Prime Minister when a beloved member of the Royal family is kidnapped.

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