How Charlie Brooker predicted our strange future in Dead Set and Black Mirror: Anthony Clavane

A few weeks ago, TV viewers in Germany watched in astonishment as a group of Big Brother contestants took part in the “reality” show whilst completely unaware that the world outside had been turned upside down by a dreaded virus.
Charlie Brooker accepts the award for outstanding television movie for "Black Mirror: San Junipero" at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)Charlie Brooker accepts the award for outstanding television movie for "Black Mirror: San Junipero" at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Charlie Brooker accepts the award for outstanding television movie for "Black Mirror: San Junipero" at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

You couldn’t make it up. Well, you could actually.

Twelve years earlier, in the horror serial Dead Set, Charlie Brooker made up a similar story about some Big Brother contestants who endured the trials and tribulations of the show whilst completely oblivious of the terrible events taking place in the outside world.

At the moment it feels like we’re all living in a real-life episode of a Charlie Brooker series. An episode, of course, that we’re all desperate to turn off.

Daniel Kaluuya as Bing and Jessica Brown as Abi in a Black Mirror episode. Picture: PA Photo/Channel 4.Daniel Kaluuya as Bing and Jessica Brown as Abi in a Black Mirror episode. Picture: PA Photo/Channel 4.
Daniel Kaluuya as Bing and Jessica Brown as Abi in a Black Mirror episode. Picture: PA Photo/Channel 4.
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So how come I’ve spent the last week binge-watching Black Mirror, the most quintessentially Charlie Brooker series of all?

Apparently, binge-watching your favourite TV show is bad for your mental health. It causes stress, anxiety and depression. According to clinical psychologists it’s like being addicted to a drug.

Viewers feel sad, anxious, bereft even, once their non-stop, marathon viewing session is over.

So, it would seem entirely illogical for me to sit down in my pyjamas in front of my laptop screen after a long day at work – which involves Zooming, emailing, Skyping in front of the same laptop screen (and in the same pyjamas) – to watch yet more Black Mirror.

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Lockdown obsessions, however, lack logic. It’s 11pm and I’ve crushed half a season of a dystopian sci-fi series. I’m falling asleep but I’m tempted to stay up and watch just one more episode, even though I know I’ll pay for it in the morning.

For some people it’s gardening. For others it’s baking bread or working out with Joe Wicks. For me it’s TV bingeing.

And yet, somehow, I find solace in Brooker’s beautifully-told stories. This is because, although usually set in a bleak, macabre near-future, they often hold up a mirror to the best, as well as the worst, of society.

Like Rod Serling’s landmark series The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror is not only hugely entertaining, it forces us to examine ourselves and our seemingly out-of-control world.

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As with Serling, and all great sci-fi writers, Brooker’s outlandish storylines can be eerily prophetic.

In one classic Twilight Zone episode, an invisible threat produces disorientation in a suburban neighbourhood; the resulting paranoia acts as a cautionary tale about how not to react in quarantine.

Ever since HG Wells’ 1898 novel War of the Worlds, which inspired the liquid-fuelled rocket, science fiction has possessed the knack of depicting where society was heading.

Stanley Kubrick “invented” the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Captain Kirk talked into a hand-held communicator – a mobile phone, Jim, but not as we know it – in Star Trek.

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Black Mirror often boldly goes where no sci-fi series has gone before. Its very first episode infamously portrayed a prime minister’s, er, interaction with a pig – four years before David Cameron was accused of a similar thing.

Since then it has come spookily close to predicting Brexit and Trump. A particular favourite of mine, Hated In The Nation, featured killer insects – who were not a million miles away from the robotic bees later to be developed by scientists.

In a recent tweet Brooker joked: “This is happening so frequently I’m just going to have to accept that I’m a soothsayer or a mystic.”

The fact that some of his concepts have come true in 
the real world doesn’t mean he is psychic. It does mean, however, that by tapping into society’s deepest anxieties, he is able to raise thoughtful questions about its future direction.

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“I will now make an optimistic prediction in the hope it also comes true,” he continued. “We’ll come out the other side of the coronavirus crisis a more empathetic, altruistic, and globally conscious society.”

So how about writing a new post-virus episode, Charlie, where our prime minister, having made a complete recovery, turns the world upside down by pledging to end the low pay, insecurity and poor conditions of all those unsung heroes of public duty who have been putting their jobs ahead of their own safety?

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James Mitchinson

Editor

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