Charlie Brooker is living the dream. The acerbic TV critic who wrote the Guardian’s
Screen Burn column has become a creator of TV shows.
They include
Nathan Barley, co-created with Chris Morris, which parodied empty-headed cool hunters; a string of shows Brooker presented himself including
Screenwipe,
Newswipe and
How TV Ruined Your Life; and
Dead Set, in which the only survivors of a British zombie outbreak are the cast of
Big Brother.
Dead Set was as scathing as any of his reviews of terrible reality shows. The highlight was when the housemates clambered onto the roof of the Big Brother house to find out why they weren’t being told to go to the diary room any more and looked out over a sea of burning cars and chaos on the other side of the walls. At which point one of them asks, “Does this mean we’re not on telly any more?”
His new show is
Black Mirror, a three-part
Twilight Zone for technophiles. It’s science fiction, but the kind that uses tomorrow to talk about today.
In the first episode a member of the royal family is kidnapped and the ransom note is a video on YouTube. It demands the prime minister perform an act so taboo that journalists can’t talk about it, despite it immediately becoming a trending topic on Twitter. It’s worth pausing this episode to read some of the internet comments that flash across the screen – they’re exactly as horrible as you’d expect if you’ve ever made the mistake of scrolling down after a YouTube video.
That story is the kind of thing you could imagine happening next week, but by the second episode (co-written by Konnie Huq),
Black Mirror goes proper sci-fi with a dystopian future that looks like it was co-designed by Apple and Nintendo, with somebody from Microsoft’s Xbox division consulting. Everyone in this future’s working class has a virtual representation called a doppel, a cute digital cartoon version of themselves that looks like a game avatar and can be dressed up by spending money they earn by pointlessly riding exercise bikes all day long. The only glimpse of a ruling elite are the hosts of an Idol-style show that is your only chance of escape from a life of drudgery, if you win. It’s like Simon Cowell rewriting George Orwell.
The final episode (written by Jesse Armstrong of
Peep Show) gives us a near future in which implants record everyone’s memories so they can access them again later through an interface that looks like an iPod Shuffle for the brain, even plugging themselves into TVs so they can show off memories like they’re holiday photos. The main characters mostly use them to score points in arguments: “No, that’s not what you really said, look I’ll prove it.” Which is just as bad for their relationships as you’d expect.
You get so used to seeing people on TV and in movies using technology in ways that are hopelessly wrong – every part of a web page loading instantaneously, mobile phones loud enough to be heard over helicopters – that watching people interact with high-tech gear believably seems incredibly refreshing. Even when that technology doesn’t exist yet,
Black Mirror gives it the kind of interface you can’t help but compare with the device you just watched it on and the one in your pocket. But when you look at them, you look back, reflected in the black mirrors of their screens.
Black Mirror isn’t a show about user interfaces. It’s about the ambivalent feelings everyone has about how we’re being changed by technology, how the way we communicate is mediated by electronic devices and privacy increasingly feels like a dated concept.
I’m thinking it’s time to buy a new phone, but I may have taken away the wrong message.
Black Mirror was broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 in December. You could wait for it to be picked up here, probably by the ABC, but if you’re technologically literate enough to be the audience for the show you probably started downloading it three paragraphs back.
-Jody Macgregor
3Screens is on Twitter: @jodymacgregor