Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:Channel 4’s marketing team had been very good. It was very hard to promote each individual episode without spoiling it, so they made these great promos for the series as a whole. And I think it was the second season where they came up with the image of the cracked woman’s face thing, which weirded people out on tube platforms. There were also some complaints when it went up on billboards opposite a school.

Joel Collins (series production designer):Underground people thought the show was edgy and cool, so you think about what to do next. In some ways, when we moved to Season Two, we could’ve done with the cash injection we later got from Netflix. We needed to take it up a notch, but it’s very hard when your constraints are identical and you’ve moved on creatively a year or two later.

Annabel Jones: Black Mirror was an expensive show for Channel 4 to make, because there’s no economies of scale across the episodes. You’re not reusing sets or using the same actors. But they still went ahead and commissioned a second series because it had been well received. I don’t think we needed any extra money. We were trying to make very intimate, interesting, engaging films. We didn’t want to be a high-octane sci-fi show.

Shane Allen:On top of the UK buzz, the international appeal was clear to see from the off, with that first series winning Best TV Movie/Miniseries at the 2012 International Emmy Awards and Best Comedy at the 2012 Rose d’Or Awards. A second series was pretty swiftly ordered and the cycle began again with everyone really buoyed up by what an impact the show was having.

Charlie Brooker:The second series feels more epic in scale, but more intimate in scope. That’s a real cunty phrase I just came out with, but there is a slight difference between Seasons One and Two. Fifteen Million Merits had been so high-concept in its look: there was a lot to invent there, whereas Season Two is all a little more understated. We were deliberately hiding technology, so there’s not big flashy gadgets around all over the place. It’s not in a hyper-idealised world. But that wasn’t in any way a budgetary consideration. That was just the way the stories came out.

There’s also a weird symmetry, where the first two seasons mirror each other. The National Anthem starts out like warped political satire; Fifteen Million Merits is a dystopian hellscape with somebody who’s trapped in a sort of prison; and then you’ve got a relationship torn apart by technology. But during the second season, those things come in reverse order.

In Conversation

Charlie Brooker – writer and executive producer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Hayley Atwell – actor

Owen Harris – director

Joel Collins – series production designer

Robyn Paiba – co-production designer

Barney Reisz – producer

When pregnant Martha’s partner Ash dies unexpectedly, she’s plunged into grief. In an attempt to ease her pain, she reluctantly tries an AI program that allows her to communicate with a virtual simulation of Ash via text. She progresses to speaking with Virtual Ash on the phone, then finally orders his unnervingly accurate android replica. While Martha comes to realise that this android can only ever simulate the real Ash, she also struggles to let go.

Charlie Brooker:In the mid-1990s, a friend and former flatmate of mine died suddenly in a diving accident. This was a couple of years after I’d moved out and I hadn’t seen him for a while. It was one of the first times that somebody I knew had died. This was somebody who’d seemed so full of life. It was really shocking.

And then about a year later, in the days when you still had limited numbers you could store in a phone, sometimes you’d have to delete things. So I was going through the list, and there was this guy’s name and number. I thought I should delete that, but suddenly I couldn’t. To do that would’ve felt disrespectful, callous and wrong. It was a memento, so I should keep it and find someone else’s number to delete. It was a very ‘ Black Mirror ’ moment.

A lot of Be Right Back stemmed from that: the notion of a souvenir that you know is not real, but which reminds you enough of somebody that it’s painful.

Annabel Jones:It’s a story about love and grief in the 21st century. How do you mourn in the modern world, where everyone is digitally present? We’re no longer living in a world where there’d be a shoe box of old photos in the attic. Your dead husband’s image and videos are still playing on Facebook and you can carry them and him around with you all the time. How do you let go in that scenario? If you’re heartbroken, I totally understand the impulse to hide away and lose yourself in that. But Charlie’s stories are so rich, it’s not just about that. It’s also about the disparity of our real selves and our ‘online’ selves.

Charlie Brooker:This script felt like a bit of risk, as it’s a relatively small story about two people. It’s mainly about Martha’s emotional reaction to Ash’s death, although there’s still this high concept of the robot based on his online presence. She’s lucky that he’s not some maniac: if you did that now, based on someone’s Twitter presence, you’d get a total monster living with you, constantly taking photos of himself.

I wrote that just after Konnie and I had our first kid. I wrote it in shifts while Konnie would sleep, and then I would look after him while she slept. This discipline actually meant I got the script written really quickly. I knew it was going well when I was annoyed to be interrupted, because it meant I’d got into the flow. Time and space disappeared, until I saw what I’d written. When you have a baby you go fucking haywire for a bit, so I definitely allowed myself to be more soppy and emotional than I might have been comfortable doing before.

I was aware that the first series had all had male protagonists, and so it was deliberate for Be Right Back and White Bear to have female protagonists, just as a balance. Also, Be Right Back would feel weirdly sleazy with a guy ordering this female sex doll. I don’t know why.

Annabel Jones:My first inclination for the character of Martha was Hayley Atwell. We were taken aback that she had seen the first season and loved it.

Hayley Atwell (actor):Those first three episodes were inventive, chilling and smart. I reached out to Annabel and Charlie to let them know what a huge fan I was, and to ask if they would consider me for future episodes. When I read Be Right Back , the hairs on my arms stood up. I found it disturbing and moving – a study of grief in the technological age. It felt surreal and bizarre, but plausible and humane. I thought it would be a hard shoot emotionally, but I felt confident we’d make something quite beautiful and haunting.

Owen Harris (director):The script made me feel I had the opportunity to create an emotionally compelling story. The episode came along just when we were all starting to feel a little unnerved by the amount of technology in our day-to-day lives. What drew me to the episode most, though, was the fact that it also explored these grander themes of love and death and loss, but in a human, intimate and typically Black Mirror way.