Black Mirror continues this Sunday with 15 Million Merits, a satire on reality television co-written by Charlie Brooker and his wife, Konnie Huq. Brooker says it’s set in “a world in which every surface is an interactive distraction and people are condemned to a life of drudgery where the only escape is fame.” It stars The Fades’ Daniel Kaluuya (or Tealeaf from Psychoville) and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, along with Rupert Everett, Julia Davis and Ashley Thomas. Here’s a clip:
Charlie Brooker’s trilogy of twisted tales about the dark side of technology began tonight with The National Anthem, a story of a royal kidnap plot with an extraordinary demand which cannot be kept under wraps due to the ubiquity of social media. Continue reading
Charlie Brooker’s trilogy of techno-wrongness Black Mirror arrives this Sunday evening and I for one am really flipping excited about it. Here’s a clip from the first story, The National Anthem, where Downing Street has just seen a video showing that a young member of the Royal family has been kidnapped:
One of the things I’m looking forward to the most during the next month or so is Black Mirror, a series of three twisted Tales of the Unexpected-style comedy-dramas brought to the screen by Charlie Brooker, all on the subject of tech-paranoia and worries about the modern world. The trailer has just landed, so here it is:
The first story, The National Anthem, is the most grounded in reality, with Rory Kinnear as the Prime Minister, caught up in something of a social media storm. Brooker says, “It’s sort of inspired by these news events that get whipped up in the social networks and Twitter, and everything feels like it’s rattling slightly out of control. I’m thinking about things like The Raoul Moat saga and when Gordon brown had to go and apologise to Gillian Duffy. You get this sort of strange centrifugal force that builds up throughout the day with the rolling news networks and public opinion.”
The second was co-written by Brooker and his wife, Konnie Huq. 15 Million Merits is a satire of entertainment shows and reality TV in a dystopian world where the only escape is entering the “Hot Shot” show, not entirely dissimilar to the sorts of ideas explored in The Year of the Sex Olympics, The Running Man and, more recently, The Hunger Games. It stars The Fades’ Daniel Kaluuya and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, with Rupert Everett and Julia Davis as the talent show judges and is directed by Doctor Who’s Euros Lyn. It also has some rather swish effects, where every surface acts like an iPad.
The final episode (with the working title In Memoriam, eventually titled The Entire History of You) is written by Peep Show and Fresh Meat co-creator Jesse Armstrong. It’s set in a world where everyone has a memory chip in their heads which records everything they see and do – a sort of Sky+ for the brain. Might sound ok, but as the couple in this story discover, it can have a pretty major down side.
So, these are cautionary tales? “Kind of”, says Brooker, “but above all it’s entertainment and satire, they’re all quite dramatic, but there’s humour in them as well, which often tends to be quite bleak. But they’re not finger-wagging, saying ‘all this technology is bad’. It’s not that. It’s exploring a lot of what ifs with technology at their heart. I’m slightly wary of even mentioning the technological aspect to it, in case it makes it sound like someone reading out the instructions to a satellite box. They’re very much rollicking tales.”
Today Channel Four Chief Creative Officer, Jay Hunt, announced new commissions including Drugs Live, in which people will take a scientific look into the effects of various recreational drugs by showing people taking some on live television, an idea the Daily Mail will be thrilled about, and the acquisition of the American remake of The Killing, the Danish crime thriller which people have been evangelising about at dinner parties across the country (apparently). But one commission stood out above all others: Black Mirror.
Described as a “hybrid of The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected which taps into our contemporary unease about our modern world”, Black Mirror will be a series of three standalone hour-long comedy-drama-shockers written by Charlie Brooker. As he’s on our screens opinionating about television so often these days, it’s easy to forget that he’s a great screenwriter too, penning the wonderful zombie series Dead Set and co-writing Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, a series which didn’t go down well when it first aired but now is thought of as something of a cult classic.
Brooker’s misanthropy is perfect for something like Tales of the Unexpected, where the characters were often likely to meet a terrible fate. The three stories will be themed around tech-paranoia, the growing feeling that the modern world has gone a little wonky now that we can feel bereft without our iPhone/Android/Blackberry and Facebook knows more about us than we do. It’s not an uncommon subject matter for film or television these days, but I’m pretty certain this will be a thought-provoking, surprising and, most of all, funny take on the way technology is changing our lives.
Brooker himself says, “Growing up, I always loved The Twilight Zone and shows of that ilk. Black Mirror won’t be anything like those, but on the other hand, it’s closer to them than, say, Downton Abbey. It combines satire, technology, absurdity, and a pinch of surprise, and it all takes place in a world you almost – almost – totally recognise. It changes each week – like the weather, but hopefully about 2000 times more entertaining. If you don’t like it, you will be beaten about the face and neck by Channel 4 executives.”
To ensure that doesn’t happen, it’ll probably be a good idea to tune in when the series is shown later in the year.
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