During the recent school holidays, Charlie Brooker made a deal with his seven-year-old son. “I said, ‘Right, you’ve got these tests coming up’ (these stupid SAT things),” he tells me. “I had a book of mock exams and I said, ‘If you do one of these every morning, half an hour, maths or English, then you can do whatever the fuck you want the rest of the day.’” Actually he didn’t swear, Brooker adds.
And what did Brooker Jr want to do for the rest of the day? Play video games. He likes the ones where you create levels and customise characters, like Super Mario Maker. “If anything, he’s more into computer games than I am, which is a statement I didn’t think it was possible to utter,” his dad, 48, tells me, not unproudly.
It was a good deal, that worked for both of them. “I assuaged parental guilt by making him sit an exam, he got to play computer games all day long, so it meant I could also do what the fuck I wanted.”
Brooker’s other child, five, is – disappointingly – less into gaming. Less into Dad too (“I don’t want you, I want Mummy,” he shouts when he hurts himself) but that’s by-the-by and possibly not for ever. “He wants to watch little bastards opening presents on YouTube, that’s his jam,” says Brooker, before adding that the jam phrase is not one he has used before. He does that sometimes, stepping aside from himself to have a listen to what is spewing from his mouth: is that good, bad, or just surprising, he seems to ask himself.
Does he make any attempts to limit the kids’ screen time I wonder. “I mean you try to a bit, but I don’t worry too much about that because I sort of think by the time they’re grown up the only job left will be robot polishing,” he says. “So they might as well enjoy themselves and get used to clicking things. I kind of think as long as they’re happy … I have heard myself saying: ‘It’s a lovely day outside, come on,’ which was my parents’ theme tune I remember in the summer holiday. ‘What are you doing sitting indoors, playing on the Spectrum? It’s sunny!’”
Brooker grew up in the village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell in Oxfordshire. An early portent of what lay ahead was a comic he made himself, filled with violence, anger and jokes, and then sneaked into his primary school comic box.
At home his dad showed him repeats of Monty Python, and Charlie liked watching things like Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, The Young Ones. “Generally speaking, shows that were tinkering about with the format. I remember seeing Airplane! in the cinema and thinking, ‘I didn’t know they made films like that, that’s the best film ever made!’ When I was a bit older I would stay up and catch The Twilight Zone. I always liked nasty, twist-in-the-tale type stories as well – Hammer House of Horror is another one, because it had this horrible British sensibility, so it looked like a sitcom but there were people being stabbed in the neck with trowels. Stuff that broke the fourth wall, was anarchic, The Young Ones, stuff that had a strong flavour.”
Around about the same time, at the local leisure centre, he discovered the first arcade games, such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. “And thinking you can control that, that’s interesting.” Brooker now has a vintage arcade game at home.
He didn’t get a degree; Central London Poly didn’t want his dissertation on video games. So he played them instead, and smoked weed, and wrote comic strips and columns for a gaming magazine. He watched television, and he made the parody listings website TVGoHome that held a mirror up to the medium, like a tailor saying: “Look, Sir, Madam, look how absurd and grotesque you are.” And he wrote the Screen Burn column for the Guardian’s Guide, in which he did the same kind of thing in print.
Then, as well as hating television, Brooker started to make it too. He wrote for Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show, and for Chris Morris’s brilliantly caustic spoof news show Brass Eye. With Morris, he wrote the hilarious series Nathan Barley, which managed to encapsulate everything that was ludicrous about the early 00s and was based on the TVGoHome entry Cunt. The Wipe shows followed – Screenwipe (kind of Screen Burn on telly) and Newswipe.
Somewhere around 2000 he met Annabel Jones, then an executive at Endemol, which was buying a piece of Zeppotron, the production company Brooker had accidentally set up with other 11 O’Clock Show writers but didn’t know how to run (I think it’s fair to say that running companies isn’t high on Brooker’s list of talents). They’ve been working together ever since.
And now they are co-showrunners of Black Mirror, the anthology series that looks at the world – now and in about 10 minutes – its people and technology, and worries and laughs and screams about it – as do you, the viewer. It’s as if Brooker, the writer, has stuck some kind of probe on your temple that reads your fears, and collates them into a cohesive story that is projected on to a screen that you have to watch. You want to watch, too, because it’s funny, and human and about characters you care about (as well as about yourself, who, of course, you care about more than anyone else). And somewhere, perhaps in a cloud, or just a dark room, Charlie Brooker sits with a joystick, controlling your thoughts, laughing maniacally, possibly screaming as well.
It all came about after Dead Set, a horror zombie satire Brooker and Jones made for Channel 4, that had nowhere to go because everyone had been killed off. Brooker and Jones talked about the lack of anthology shows on TV, that take an idea and explore it – and the world – in one episode. They imagined a kind of Twilight Zone for the age, dealing with relevant themes, and they pitched it to Channel 4. “Foolishly they said yes,” laughs Brooker.
It started in December 2011 with three episodes, including The National Anthem, in which the British prime minister is forced to have sex with a pig on live TV by a man who has kidnapped a favourite member of the royal family. There was a further series and a Christmas special. Then Black Mirror and Channel 4 parted company, which might have been the end of it if it hadn’t been picked up by Netflix, which has commissioned loads more, plus an experimental one-off-special, and has thrown money and love at it.
What started as a seed almost four decades ago in the comic box of an Oxfordshire primary school, germinated for years in an imagination fed on horror and humour, telly and tech and computer games, has grown into something huge.
We meet at Netflix’s central London offices. Brooker, man of the moment, arrives with an entourage like Kanye West to whooping and hollering from the assembled staff … no, of course he doesn’t. He shuffles out of the lift, bristly and pale in a tired looking T-shirt and hoodie, a man-child emerging from somewhere dark (like an edit suite, or the inside of his own head). Jones, 47, beside him, is as you would imagine a showrunner on a global TV series to be: presentable, groomed, articulate. She grew up in Pembrokeshire, not playing computer games, but watching telly – her early TV influences include Dennis Potter and Tales of the Unexpected. You can see echoes of Roald Dahl in a few BM episodes; the ones with a final rug-pull, such as Crocodile.
We’re shown to the boardroom, called Our Planet after the David Attenborough show, where there is a box of Queer Eye-branded tissues on the table and a big screen on the wall with a camera underneath, pointing at us. It’s for video conferencing, but there is also something appropriately sinister about it. “This is going out live on Netflix, probably,” says Brooker.
They like working for Netflix, and not just because of the money it throws at them. “You’re not being judged on the number of people watching a show, you’re being judged on how interesting it is, how much people like it, whether it creates a debate,” says Jones. In fact, they don’t even get to know what the viewing figures are.
She explains the problems with an anthology series for a traditional broadcaster: they’re expensive, sets have to be built for each episode, ratings tend to decrease over a run because of the lack of cliffhangers or continuity of cast. That’s what happened at Channel 4. It doesn’t matter how much people love it or talk about it: rising costs and falling viewers is not a combo beloved by broadcasters.
After the White Christmas one-off in December 2014, starring Jon Hamm, Brooker and Jones were in a state of limbo with Channel 4. They’d gone to LA to try to get US networks to co-produce a third series, but they returned without a deal, their champion at Channel 4, Shane Allen, had gone to the BBC, and the station’s bosses weren’t offering another series.
That’s when Netflix, which already had the back-catalogue, stepped in. “Suddenly those shows that are more word-of-mouth, and get talked about through friends or online rather than event-viewing, can prosper.” says Jones. “We found ourselves in a bidding war with all the people who had just said they didn’t want it and now realised they had to change their commissioning to compete with Netflix.” Netflix, which has about 150 million subscribers, tends to win bidding wars, and did.
I wonder what they now do differently for a global audience. Nothing, says Jones. “I think there’s a real worry that once you get commissioned for a global platform and try to make global shows, if you do that you are doomed, because then you are not making the film you have a personal experience of or affection for, and you start creating by numbers.”
One thing that has changed is that there has been a broadening of the range – of tone, genre and length. That was a deliberate decision brought about through necessity and because of the Netflix way of dumping a six-episode run all at once. If they’d all ended as bleakly and nihilistically as the seven Channel 4 episodes had, it could have got boring and predictable as well as unrelentingly despairing. “It was a conscious decision on my part,” says Brooker. “The first Netflix one I wrote, San Junipero, is one of our most uplifting, positive ones.” Also one of the most beautiful: a simulated-reality fairytale loaded with longing and despair, but in which love eventually overcomes loneliness.
The diversity continued into the second Netflix series. Contrast USS Callister, a colourful high-concept romp, and Metalhead, which is basically half an hour in black and white of Maxine Peake being chased by a canine deathbot, and one of the tensest, most excruciating half-hours you’re ever likely to spend. Metalhead is my own favourite. I still have nightmares about it.
“Did you ever think, ‘Why doesn’t she just throw her coat over it?’” Brooker asks. He means to stop the guard dog robot solar-recharging while Peake is up the tree. Someone had pointed this option out to him. No, I didn’t, but now I know, that’s what I’ll do when the time comes.
Brooker and Jones sit on one side of the table, addressing each other as much as they do me. They’re clearly close, more like siblings than work colleagues; siblings who share a world and get on but pretend that they don’t, and bicker.
How does it work between them, I want to know. “That’s assuming it does work between us,” says Brooker, cackling. He goes high-pitched when he gets animated, like he’s gulped down a lungful of laughing gas. Is this squeaky, jovial goon really the force behind such brilliant dark beauty?
I ask Jones to explain her role and Brooker interrupts. “Yeah, hang on, what do you do, who are you?”
She ignores him. “We have been working together for nearly 20 years, and I suppose there’s a familiarity…”
“And therefore contempt.” More giggling.
“... and disrespect between us that allows us to work very openly and candidly.” And so it continues.
When Jones goes to the loo, I ask Brooker what she does. “Fuck knows, she couldn’t explain could she?” Later, he gives in to generosity. “I’m often trying to either appal or amuse or entertain you with an idea,” he says, addressing her. “And you will say, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And you will sort of drag more of it out of me. Or sometimes you’ll put up blocks and say, ‘Well that wouldn’t work because…’ and I’ll go ‘Yeah but…’ and that sort of leads to a conversation.”
Jones is the first person to see the first draft of any script. They’ll work on it together before showing it to anyone else. She has a sicker sense of humour than he does, Brooker says. “You don’t like scatology, and the more you dislike it the further I go. I’m more childish, you are sick.”
Slowly, amid all the needling and – horrid word alert – banter, I’m getting some idea of how it works. While he is the creative force behind Black Mirror, she is the facilitator, the sounding board, as well as the grownup in the room if there are other people in it. Television executive people, for example. It’s probably fair to say Black Mirror would never have seen the light of day without Annabel Jones. Perhaps it’s her with the joystick, cackling ... except that she’s not into video games.
Are they friends? “I would say so,” says Brooker, faux reluctantly.
Do their partners get jealous? “Oh my God, they are grateful,” says Jones. Grateful that it keeps them out of the house. Brooker agrees.
The last episode – Jones rather grandly refers to them as films, though to be fair they have become more cinematic with Netflix’s financial might – was Bandersnatch. It was ... or is, as there is no past tense on Netflix ... interactive. So you, the viewer get to make decisions for the main character, a young programmer in 1980s Croydon. It’s an extraordinary achievement, groundbreaking even. Not just because of the logistical nightmare of making decision-tree television, but also because it throws up problems such as how do you create a proper, real character when you’re handing over a lot of the stuff that would make him a character (decision-making) to everyone else?
Bandersnatch overcomes the hurdles ingeniously. But for some of us traditional old farts who don’t want our television in kit form, it was just a bit too frumious. It’s been a long day, you want to put your feet up and watch something, you don’t want to torment someone in 1984. “The tricky thing is, it’s its own genre, like musicals, and some people don’t like musicals no matter what. Some people don’t want to make decisions, and that’s fair enough,” says Brooker. Before adding, inevitably, that they ... we ... can fuck off.
There’s no decision-making to be done in the three new episodes that land on 5 June. I’ve seen them and they’re fabulous, in different ways. I can’t tell you too much, obviously, or they’ll set the death-bots on me. But I can probably mention some of the themes that come out of them – ageing, long-term friendship, long-term relationships, commitment, pornography and reality, fantasy fulfilment, unfaithfulness, death, grief ... God it sounds bleak, but it’s not all bleak, there is light and laughter as well.
And Miley Cyrus is in one! She is great, in a starring role that is very personal to her and draws on her own experience, without giving too much away ... and there’s a Miley Cyrus robot.
For the tech and tech-related issues, think not far off – 10 minutes into the future if we’re not already. There are Alexas and smart speakers, next-level gaming (amazing gaming, and I’m not a gamer), gaming nostalgia, next-level porn, current-level social media, social media founders and CEOs, and digital data rights after death.
It’s not a show about technology though, says Jones. “I always get frustrated when people say it is. The stories are hopefully entertaining, very intimate stories about human failures and dilemmas.”
“We very rarely go: ‘Oh, I’ve read this news report and Samsung has invented a fridge that sings to you while you eat yoghurt,’” says Brooker. “No, that would be a terrible basis for an episode. It tends to be: wouldn’t it be weird if…”
He’s not denying the importance of tech to Black Mirror. “There is always a technological explanation for what is going on in our episodes – that’s what differentiates us from something like The Twilight Zone, where it is the supernatural or the uncanny or the unexplained.”
He mentions a famous Twilight Zone episode in which a woman goes into bus station and sees an identical copy of herself, which is not explained. “We wouldn’t do that. We’d have to come up with she’s in VR or she’s a clone. But that’s the only real difference. People didn’t say to Rod Serling [The Twilight Zone’s creator], what’s the show about magic and ghosts and aliens you’re doing, what is it about aliens that fascinates you so much? It was clear that that wasn’t what The Twilight Zone was about. I think it’s similar with Black Mirror: we are doing a supernatural show that has no supernatural element in it, and using that to tell stories that entertain, and that put people in really unusual situations and dilemmas that you can’t see elsewhere. That’s really what we are trying to do.”
What kind of criticism of BM gets his goat? “I guess if people take it too seriously, or think it takes itself too seriously. Or when people say ‘I want to do something like that, but with a sense of humour.’ I’m like: ‘For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you?’”
Actually Brooker doesn’t seem to be very angry about much. It is almost disappointing, when frothing apoplectic rage is what he is – or certainly was – famous for. “When I was doing columns, and doing the Wipe shows, that was me to an extent playing a character. TVGoHome was abrasive stuff, but it’s in character, sort of.”
What would 20 years ago Charlie Brooker, furious in his bedsit, think of new Charlie Brooker, successful, sunny and sweet? No he’s not having sunny and sweet. “I think I’m quite goonish, probably more goonish than I would portray in print, and probably more stupid.”
But to answer the question, he would have been astounded, he says. “That I would have been doing a show that people could see all over the place. I’d probably be pleased, yeah definitely pleased. I wonder if I’d like … yeah, I reckon I’d be into the show, that would be weird.”
Having kids has affected his world outlook, it can’t not have done. “Because you drop down the hierarchy in your own head, so you worry less about ephemeral things and more about, ‘Oh shit, what is the world going to be like?’ Now I worry less ‘Am I going to get incinerated in a nuclear fireball?’ and more ‘Is that going to happen to my children?’. Or, ‘Which of my children am I going to have to kill in the bunker, when there’s no way out?’”
“It’s the five-year-old,” says Jones. Yeah, mummy’s boy.
Fire and no way out is a recurring worry it seems. I ask about the immense wealth that must have resulted from having a global hit, does that not help the outlook? “We don’t tend to swan around in yachts or anything like that,” says Brooker. He doesn’t look like a yachter to be fair. He has bought a pinball machine, the best pinball machine you can get, he admits. “We don’t walk around going we do this big successful show and blah blah blah, probably because we are…”
“Too busy making it,” says Jones.
“And too fucked up. Speaking for myself there…”
“Yeah, speak for yourself.”
“Because I genuinely think if someone gives you an award or something, I think, ‘Ugh, this is heavy, or I’m not going to win one next year’, or ‘Oh God, what if someone shoots me from the audience, where are the exits, what if this building catches fire?’”
OK, so sunny was wrong. Is he happy at least? “Erm, is anyone? Generally, I have my moments.”
What about the future of the show? “I think, because we can keep on reinventing it, there is no shortage of ideas.” he says. It would be hard to do an Airplane!-style comedy episode of Black Mirror, though he wanted to and has had to be talked out of it. Or a documentary episode, though they have discussed that too. “But other than that, if I look at the ones we have done, I think the tone of them is wildly different, so hopefully we can just keep doing them. Until the robots take over. Which will happen. One afternoon…”
