Rory Kinnear

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 - The National Anthem review

It's delivered with all the solemnity of a serious political drama, you know, the ones that always have Michael Sheen in the lead (in fact Rory Kinnear bears a passing resemblance), that makes the humour doubly funny. It's impossible to suppress a chuckle at line like "This is virgin territory; there is no playbook" or "Make sure there's no Peppa Pigs".

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.

The BBC has its own credit crunch so repeats are piling up (five, not counting regulars, on Radio 4 alone today). But, as someone once said, it's not a repeat if you missed it first time. So, if this first radio play by Peter Souter escaped you originally, don't let it pass unnoticed now. It's funny, romantic, recognisable. Also beautifully acted (Tamsin Greig, Rory Kinnear, Nicky Henson, Kerry Shale) and directed (by Gordon House). And it heralded the start of Souter's truly promising career. If BBC radio drama funds permit, of course.

Richard Briers stars with Rory Kinnear in Ed Harris's delicate, distinctive play about an old man remembering and disremembering. He's having a dialogue with his younger self (hence the double lead casting), revolving round pictures that lodge in the mind and why they linger. The thing is, some of it is being spoken out loud to the nurse who's checking him over. When she tells him there's a smart strange coat in the kitchen he gets very upset. Then all sorts of voices from the past flood in, echoing memories of childhood, of first love.

Alf is an elderly gentleman and he's getting very confused. He can hear voices in his head and one of them is his own from the days when he was married. This play by Ed Harris is billed as a tender comedy and there are moments when Alf's confusion becomes gently amusing. But the overall feeling is one of sadness and loss. Alf is grieving fomr his wife, but also mourning the troubled state of their marriage and the onset of dementia. He describes the attack upon his memory as like that of an imperial army, with different countries falling every day. Richard Briers and Rory Kinnear play Alf the older and younger with understated directness and genuine empathy. A brilliant drama.

Rory Kinnear squawked his way classily through an exuberant serialisation of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's evergreen satire of journalism.

By some strange turn of fate the new Classic Serial is Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's satire on the press (its ownership, practices and function). The story is simple. We are in the 1930s. A mighty newspaper proprietor, Lord Copper, believes wars are good for countries because they unite people against a known enemy. He is persuaded by a beautiful society hostess to send one of her social pets, John Boot, to report the war in far-off Ishmaelia. By mistake, another Boot, William, who writes the Daily Beast's nature notebook, is dispatched. William knows nothing of abroad or reporting. We understand that, like Voltaire's Candide, he will somehow come out of this mess quite well and make us laugh a lot. Jeremy Front has done a deft, sly adaptation, bringing out the brilliance of the characters. Sally Avens has cast it very well (Rory Kinnear as William and Stephen Critchlow as Corker are perfect, David Warner as Lord Copper is pluperfect) and directs it with panache. A better antidote to hysteria cannot be imagined.

The clatter of typewriter keys and a blast of jazz open this energetic dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel about journalism in the 1930s. William Boot (Rory Kinnear) is an unambitious countryside columnist who, by mistake, is sent to report on the civil unrest in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia.

Once there, Boot meets Corker, a roguish news agency reporter - and owner of a treasured collection of Bakerlite elephants - who initiates Boot in the 'dark arts of Fleet Street'.

This production works hard to include as many of Waugh's wonderfully insane characters as possible, from the star correspondents who file moving accounts about uprisings that have never happened, to the African president who sends the hacks on a wild goose chase to a non-existent town. And the most ludicrous location? Popotakis's Ping-Pong Parlour.