Charlie Brooker Talks To Us About Black Mirror, Twitter And The Ethics Of Insults

Tonight’s the night that Charlie Brooker‘s provocative, funny show Black Mirror premieres on Channel 4.

Brooker was very clear that he didn’t want us to give away too much, so I think I’m going to leave this just to what he said. That way, he’ll have nobody else to blame but himself.

So here is some of what Brooker said to Jim Goodwin, Bleeding Cool’s emissary into the world of Black Mirror:

In a broad sense, the three stories in the series are about how technology is changing the world. It’s about a sense of unease. The world has changed very much in the last ten years in ways that I can’t express or come to terms with.

It was inspired by watching The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected, things like that. It felt like something was missing, which was the opportunity to tell dark, one off tales.

What I always liked about those things was that you didn’t know exactly what you were going to get but you thought you were going to like it. It was like getting a nice box of chocolates… I sound like Forrest fucking Gump. But you didn’t know quite what you were going to get. Often with those things, they were quite uncomfortable but that was part of the enjoyment.

I think there’s a lot of high concept drama series around and you tend to find that they’re great for the first three episodes then you get bored of the one concept so this felt like a neat way of exploring “What if” ideas. They’re all “What if” storylines.

In my head, the idea for the first episode, The National Anthem, was a cross between when Gordon Brown had to go and apologise to Gillian Duffy and I’m A Celebrity, in an odd way. That was effectively the starting point. With Gordon Brown we saw it was like “Go and say sorry, you fucker, because we caught you out.” Essentially, it was like a prank had been played and he now had to go and apologise for speaking his mind in private. An odd spectacle.

Something else that was in my head, kinda, was the year of the London Mayoral Elections and Brian Paddick was up as the Lib Dem candidate. One month he’s on Newsnight alongside Boris Johnson and Ken Livingston. He doesn’t win and then, a few months later, he’s in the jungle, standing alongside Timmy Mallet, trying to drink a pint of liquidised kangaroo penis.

Then, earlier this year, he was back on the news, commenting on the phone hacking thing. You kind of forget that happened, you sort of erase it from your memory. I remember when George Galloway got down on all fours and pretended to be a cat. I thought “This has ruined him” and it kind of didn’t. I remember listening to his radio show and he was using Top Cat as a piece of jingle music so he was sort of revelling in it. It’s impossible to really shame yourself in modern society, I guess.

I hope that people are watching the show rather than tweeting about it, but there’s a lot of references to Twitter in there and it will make people reach for Tweet Deck in a hurry. I do it myself – I tweet through The Eurovision Song Contest and things like that but I hope people are too engrossed in the story to do that.

During Prime Minister’s Questions on Sky, they have a panel with people tweeting. Kind of like boxing commentators. It’s quite odd that’s feeding in, another layer. I think that’s what will happen.

I was reading the other day about a thing for telly execs where they could record in real-time the Twitter feed of all the comments being made about your program and then play them back alongside the program when you’re analysing it later to see at what point did public opinion. “At this point everyone said this one character was a c**t” so you fire the actor next week. I just thought that’s the ultimate focus group.

I say a lot of vitriolic things, that’s what I do, but I don’t go up to people and say them.

It fascinates me that people think that there isn’t a real person on the other end of the screen. You see things like with that girl Rebecca Black who did that Friday song. I can imagine saying “It makes me want to kill myself and her, ha ha”, but then there were lots of people and that thing where the ball starts rolling and where everybody is trying to outdo one another in saying how much they hate the song.

Then they’re telling her directly that they hate her. Then they’re telling her that they hope she dies of anorexia and you go “Hang on, you are bullying a thirteen year old girl.” Surely the largest incidence of bullying in history.

If you point that out to people sometimes they get very angry and say “Oh, you hypocrite, you wrote this about somebody in your column…” But I didn’t phone them up and dictate and go “I hope you fucking DIE” which is what people were doing to that girl. There’s a line, isn’t there.

And, indeed, here’s a piece from 10 O’Clock Live in which Brooker addresses the bullying of Black.

10 O'Clock Live – Charlie Brooker on Rebecca Black by bbspy

Check back later for Jim’s comments on the episode.

Black Mirror airs on Channel 4 at 9pm, wrapping up just in time for a trip to the loo before Misfits.