Black Mirror

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.

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.

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: Eerie, scary and ludicrously true

Hyper-realistic Black Mirror might be, but with the PM having to shag a pig on live television, is it really that far removed from Bushtucker Trials? After a dodgy run, Brooker is back on form and bang on the money...

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.

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.