Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Liam’s growing obsession with investigating Ffion leads him to assault Jonas and threaten him with a broken vodka bottle.

Jodie Whittaker:Your sympathy for Liam wanes when he can’t control his actions, or when he’s hurting somebody. You understand it, but can you side with it? I don’t know.

Charlie Brooker:Some people have a really reductive take on the story and go, “Wow, poor Liam. He found out that his wife was a bitch.” I really don’t think that’s what the story is.

Annabel Jones:Liam’s an obviously obsessive guy from the beginning, driving Ffion away. They had a break, during which she has a different relationship.

Jesse Armstrong:The story’s about someone whose natural tendencies are enabled by a piece of tech, so I think Liam already had that jealousy in him. But in a reductive way, it’s a cautionary tale about someone getting tech that allows the latent bad parts of their character to come out.

Charlie Brooker:Liam’s the benchmark for a lot of Black Mirror characters, in that he’s a weak, frightened, flawed person. He’s a bit of a bully to Ffion, and not that pleasant. But I hope you see that it stemmed from his insecurity. This tech has effectively granted him the superpower to go back in time and obsess over this footage, so it’s a very Black Mirror story where somebody slowly destroys themselves with a gadget.

Jesse Armstrong:I’m quite promiscuous in my ability to empathise, even with quite shitty characters who do bad things. Certainly, Toby brought a tragic depth and darkness to that character. But how much sympathy does Liam deserve? I don’t know… as a human being, I find it very easy to imagine being tortured by incidents from the past. Liam’s not a nice person and doesn’t act with as much charity as a really good person, but he’s also been driven a bit mad by this piece of technology.

Brian Welsh:Sometimes people get too hung up on sympathy. But what I will say, to contradict myself, is it was quite a hard film to get right in the edit. When you put certain, interesting takes together, you found that Liam was unlikeable and it was hard to stay with him. The turning point came when we pushed more towards the material where he was funnier.

Charlie Brooker:For me, the most horrible moment is when Liam asks Ffion to prove she used protection with Jonas. So he watches his worst nightmare unfold, and he knows there’s no way back from that. There can be no, “We said a few things last night that none of us meant, so let’s just have our breakfast, and I love you darling.” He’s fucking burnt the relationship to the ground.

Jodie Whittaker:The hardest scene to do was the emotional climax, with the full bedroom argument. You have to go from crying your eyes out, covered in snot and tears, to resetting the scene and shooting another take!

Annabel Jones:Maybe there’s a slight redemption for Liam, in that he realises what has happened and he rips the Grain out. It’s such a wonderful ending, because in doing so he knows he’s losing all memories of his family.

Charlie Brooker:It’s very powerful. Sometimes people think Liam’s killed Ffion, but the reality is she’s simply moved out. Or they think that he’s not the dad. But Liam is the father of the child, so he’s ruined his life. The moral, if there is one, is he shouldn’t have gone looking for something that was only going to upset him. His wife loved him and there were secrets in the past, but he should have let them lie.

When we had the BFI screening, a lot of comedy people came along – but it goes a bit Ingmar Bergman! It goes a bit fucking Scenes from a Marriage or something. It’s pretty raw.

‘It’s like I’ve had a bad tooth for years and finally I’m getting to dig my tongue in there and just root around in all the rotten shit’

Brian Welsh:At that screening, you could feel the audience tensing and cringing and laughing. We’ve all experienced jealous moments in our lives and it’s just that fucking car crash.

Jesse Armstrong:I’m not really a sci-fi person, but I felt very fortunate to be in a position where Charlie asked me. It was a happy accident and The Entire History of You is quite an outlier on my CV, but I’m very proud of it.

Charlie Brooker:I think the week after the episode went out, Facebook launched some new form of timeline: something we take for granted today, the ever-flowing roll of photos and memories. Very ‘Grain-like’. The timing felt downright spooky.

Jodie Whittaker:I met someone in LA, who stopped me in Whole Foods Market and asked if I was that girl from Black Mirror . I said, “Oh yeah, that Grain thing was terrifying, wasn’t it,” and he said, “I thought it was an amazing idea!” He worked at a massive tech company. I was like, “Wow, how can he not see this is not the way we should go…”

In Conversation

Shane Allen – then Head of Comedy, Channel 4

Charlie Brooker – executive producer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Joel Collins – series production designer

Shane Allen (then Head of Comedy, Channel 4):There was now a huge buzz around Black Mirror . It felt like the quintessential C4 show which would have been swerved or mangled elsewhere. Season One had that air of talked-about event television, because The National Anthem ’s concept was so audacious. That film met with a lot of coverage and opinion pieces, so it was terrific to then have two very distinctive and tonally very different pieces coming down the tracks for the rest of that first series, so that people could appreciate the range and ambition of Charlie and Annabel’s vision.

Charlie Brooker:We couldn’t believe we got away with the first series. And the way my brain works, I always think, “Oh we did all right there, so now I’m fucked because this will be the one where I totally cock up and everything goes wrong.” And then every time you don’t cock up, the stakes get raised. So it’s like rolling a six, five times in a row. Eventually it’s going to come up one!

Annabel Jones:Charlie’s always disappointed when we deliver a good season: “Why did we do that?”

Charlie Brooker:Not disappointed… it’s just that the sense of ominous terror grows. It’s like climbing further up the side of a building, going, “This is going well, now I’m clinging to the 20th floor!” And at any moment, someone could just open a window and go, “Wait a minute, what’s he doing on the side of the building, the fucking fool?”

Annabel Jones:Season One did throw up one of the disadvantages of being an anthology series: our viewing figures dipped across the series. You get a massive PR and marketing push for the first episode, and then the show has to survive by itself. When you don’t have any story or cast continuity, what are you going to pull people back with? And you can’t set up too much of what the next story is because of spoilers, so it cripples you. The show was being very well received, though, and had high production values, so everyone seemed happy.