Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:What is it with me and writing reasonable Tories? What’s going on? Because, tribally, I fucking hate them. But then, oddly, I try and avoid that if I’m writing.

There was a moment we cut out, where Monroe’s in the back of the car. He looks out, sees a Waldo poster and says, “He’s making the whole system look absurd. Which it may well be, but it built these roads.” And then in the script, the car immediately goes over a pot hole. Which was a nice little moment. It only got cut because it didn’t visually come across like the car was going over a pothole. It just looked like a mistake, as if the camera had wobbled.

Bryn Higgins: Black Mirror films are ideas-led and satirical, but the ones that work particularly well bring proper human emotions in. We certainly tried to get as much emotion as we could into Jamie and Gwendolyn’s relationship, but it’s a crowded story when you’ve got 45 minutes.

One of the main things I like about The Waldo Moment , though, is the energy. It makes its move towards a total dystopian future pretty quickly. It would’ve been great to have had a little more space to explore that, and see more of the emotional, human fallout from Waldo’s actions, which was the destruction of a very promising young female politician.

‘If you were preaching revolution, well that’d be something. But you’re not because that would require courage and a mindset. And what have you got? Who are you? What are you for?’

Jodie Foster (director, Arkangel):I especially love The Waldo Moment ! It’s an amazing combination of satire and all of our sociological fears that seem to have come true. I do feel like Charlie has some kind of Spidey sense about what’s about to happen. Black Mirror has so many things he couldn’t possibly have known about. The Waldo Moment really speaks to where we are right now in politics.

Annabel Jones:I do think The Waldo Moment has had much more impact, post Trump.

Charlie Brooker:Yeah. When people stumble across it now, they’re quite frightened. It’s very prophetic, in a way that probably none of us thought at the time. Maybe I could just go back and tinker with it. Get the cast back in and add Jamie’s line, “But I can’t go and stand in that town, because that’s where my ex-girlfriend is running for election!” Shall we schedule that? I mean, George Lucas did it.

In Conversation

Charlie Brooker – executive producer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Shane Allen – then Channel 4’s Head of Comedy

Charlie Brooker:Again, I think the second series went well. Be Right Back was nominated for a BAFTA and Black Mirror was now going out in 80 territories.

Annabel Jones:You sort of go, “Oh! We thought these were small, parochial, very British stories. Who’d have thought other countries in the world have technology?”

Charlie Brooker:Or pigs.

Annabel Jones:Or pigs. So we began to realise that Black Mirror was filling a gap. There weren’t many anthology shows out there, and certainly not shows that were dramatising these sorts of things. There was an appetite for it, and so we felt quite buoyed by that.

Shane Allen (then Channel 4’s Head of Comedy):Unfortunately, as happens often in TV, musical chairs at Channel 4 had resulted in a new element in the creative process. Someone had flipped their nut over the budget, which was far and away above what comedy tariffs were set at, and then, to my horror, started to become involved on the editorial front.

I had to keep all this away from Annabel and Charlie as much as I could, so they could get on with making Black Mirror with as much creative freedom as they’d always enjoyed, whilst I made my exit plans. I have such mixed feelings about the whole thing: seeing this amazing show come to life was one of the most exciting creative experiences, but there was much to contend with on a daily basis.

Annabel Jones:Shane is now Controller of Comedy Commissioning at the BBC, and probably has the best record of supporting talent in UK TV. If you look at the companies he’s worked with, and the people he’s helped realise shows, he’s impeccable. There was a matter of trust with Shane, based on a long-standing relationship, his instinct and his general ballsiness! Whereas I think people who don’t know you as well maybe don’t have that same trust, understandably.

Charlie Brooker:We were then still coming through Channel 4’s comedy department, and because we were an expensive show, there was a question of whether we should’ve been under the drama budget. So there was a growing danger that we might become homeless.

Annabel Jones:Any show needs its champion at a broadcaster. When Shane left, the incoming Head of Comedy didn’t have a relationship with us. It wasn’t his show, he’d inherited it but it was taking up a huge chunk of his budget and stopping him commissioning the shows that he should have been making.

Charlie Brooker:Also, he probably wondered why he was suddenly having to give notes on a drama series. You wouldn’t expect the head of drama to be giving notes on a comedy.

Very soon after the second series went out, we had a meeting with Channel 4, who said they wanted to make more Black Mirror . My memory is that we agreed to do four more episodes. But this time, they wanted to see detailed synopses for each film in advance. Which I found somewhat outrageous at the time! But we went off, came up with some ideas, and wrote them out. One of them was called Crocodile : a very different Crocodile to what we ended up with in Season Four, but there was some degree of overlap.

Another of the stories was a bit Men Against Fire , which would end up in Season Three. Very different, but with similar elements, like another evolution of that early war script Inbound . Then there was a story that ended up as part of White Christmas , the dating one. Angel of the Morning , it was called. Anyway, the upshot was that we handed these stories into Channel 4. And then we waited.

Then we were just waiting for a long time. When the feedback finally came, they thought these ideas weren’t very Black Mirror .

Annabel Jones:We were trying to get a meeting to discuss why these weren’t Black Mirror , so we could attempt to understand what the concern was, to see what we could do.

Charlie Brooker:But it turned out that they just didn’t want these ideas – and were no longer going to allocate the money for four episodes. I think, at one point, they mooted the idea of doing a special, but Annabel and I felt this wasn’t great. I was supposed to just go off and come up with another load of ideas? That didn’t inspire much confidence.

Annabel Jones:We’d been in the industry long enough to know that some shows work and some shows don’t. It’s always an uncomfortable conversation, but either you’re decommissioned or you’re commissioned. And given that the show had won lots of awards and had been really positively received on the whole, it was strange. I think we felt there wasn’t any clarity from the channel. We also felt un-championed.

Charlie Brooker:We went off and spent a year making some other TV things like A Touch of Cloth , and I did more 10 O’Clock Live . But in terms of Black Mirror , we didn’t know what to do. It was all left a bit open, and Channel 4 had shown so little enthusiasm that we thought we should focus on stuff that we thought might actually happen.