The inside story of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian vision

Given that Charlie Brooker’s 2005 satire of Shoreditch idiots, Nathan Barley, turned out to be a prophecy rather than a comedy, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the first episode of his tech-fantasy drama, Black Mirror, should anticipate the news by including a storyline in which a politician copulates with a pig.

That story — Brooker’s fiction rather than Lord Ashcroft’s unsupported claim about a prime minister — appeared in The National Anthem, which was broadcast on Channel 4 in 2011. It wasn’t always going to be a pig. For a while the sex act was going to be a loving embrace between the PM and a cheese-wheel.

Beyond that, the idea for the plot came from watching the speedy thriller 24, and imagining an episode in which Jack Bauer was presented with an obscene dilemma. “And then,” says Brooker, “I thought if you played it totally straight it would be hilarious.”

Brooker’s pig-gate is emblematic of a sense of humour which mixes righteousness and disgust, and sometimes forgets to be funny. His television criticism, as published in The Guardian and practised on the BBC series Screenwipe, was similarly emetic.

As a critic, Brooker was a carpet-bomber of nihilistic scorn. Again, he was ahead of the times. Psychopathic flame-throwing has since become the default mode of social media psychopaths everywhere, though with Brooker there was always the suggestion that his rage was tickled by disappointed ideals.

Certainly, Black Mirror takes a nuanced view of technology, social media, the whole narcissistic electro-apocalypse.

This book, an uncritical compendium of interviews about the show’s 19 episodes, suggests that the original focus of the show wasn’t always going to be technology — it was mentioned along with terrorism and “generally contemporary things”. But gradually, as it always does in science-fiction, technology has taken over.

When Brooker started work on Black Mirror in 2010, tech was a good thing. “Fast-forward to now and suddenly smartphones are twice as addictive and harmful as cigarettes and your timeline’s full of fascist memes and photographed atrocities.”

How do they do it? Well, the show doesn’t come with a manual. Producer Barney Reisz suggests that the key is thinking outside the box. “In fact, to Charlie, there is no box. It is more like an endlessly squidgy, expanding mass of possibility.”

A better clue can be found in the list of influences, because Black Mirror is a show in which Brooker’s internal television critic tries to resolve its differences with his inner fan-boy. Accordingly, its influences range from horror film Cannibal Holocaust to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (George Saunders’s first story collection), and those are just two consecutive entries under “C”.

You could also have Hammer House of Horror and Heaven is a Place on Earth (Belinda Carlisle’s chart-topping power ballad). Or The Year of the Sex Olympics and The Young Ones.

For the sake of brevity, it’s probably best to stick with The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks, dramas in which normality was royally warped. Because, says Brooker, it turns out that “f***ing lunacy is the new norm”.

Inside Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, with Jason Arnopp (Penguin, £20).