Hayley Atwell

You'd be hard pushed to call the first part of Charlie Brooker's returning series a comedy. In fact, Be Right Back is often downright sad. Martha (Hayley Atwell, giving a career-best performance in a demanding role) is stuck in an isolated countryside cottage, mourning the loss of her partner, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) - a guy she loved deeply in spite of his irritating obsession with Twitter. Then the opportunity arises to reconstruct his personality through his online history of emails, tweets, Facebook updates et al. Initially appalled, Martha's resolve starts to crumble as her loneliness intensifies, before some unexpected news forces her hand...

Even if, as with some of the first series of Black Mirror, the denouement can't quite live up to the restless invention and plausible clairvoyance of what's gone before, this is still high-calibre television bursting with ideas and emotional engagement.

There may not be any Prime Ministerial pig sex this time, but we're still confident that Charlie Brooker's dark satire Black Mirror will be just as disturbing and thought-provoking second time around.

In Be Right Back, the first of three new troubling tales from the Wipe mastermind, a grieving soul named Martha (Hayley Atwell) discovers that her deceased boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) can be resurrected in digital form using information on his various social networking sites. Scarily believable, Black Mirror may convince you to log out of Facebook for good or think twice about what you type into Google.

Joining Jonathan Ross in the studio tonight are London-born actress Hayley Atwell, who was recently seen in William Boyd's superlative drama Restless and is starring in Monday's Black Mirror, and Hollywood actor John C Reilly, whose CV ranges from the harrowing We Need to Talk About Kevin to the farcical Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Music comes from pop duo Hurts.

Martha (Hayley Atwell) wishes that her boyfriend Ash (Domnhall Gleeson) wouldn't spend so much time online. But when he dies in a car accident, all that information on social media allows Martha to use a new service to talk to a "virtual" Ash. This, though, is the first of a second series of dystopian takes on modern life from writer Charlie Brooker - so Martha should brace herself for more than comfort from her synthetic dead boyfriend.