Black Mirror

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, Channel 4, review

A shocking but ballsy, blackly comic study of the modern media.

Black Mirror: The National Anthem review

As genuinely thought-provoking as it was darkly funny, The National Anthem lived up to my high expectations as one of the best hours of television in 2011.

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".

Review of Black Mirror - 'The National Anthem'

This carefully crafted and compact drama is engrossing, with the tension rising by degrees as the time moves ever closer for the PM to meet the kidnapper's demands.

Black Mirror: 'The National Anthem' review

The first episode of Black Mirror is hilarious, horrible, barely watchable, utterly unmissable and absolutely, 100% true.

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.

Charlie Brooker talks about Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker says his new part sci-fi, part satire comedy Black Mirror is not 'anti-Twitter', but highlights the insidious effect the exaggerated opinion of social networks can have.