Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Shaheen Baig – casting director

Joel Collins – series production designer

Barney Reisz – producer

Robyn Paiba – co-production designer

Shane Allen – then Channel 4 Head of Comedy

The British Prime Minister Michael Callow is woken by a phone call, unaware that this will be the worst day of his life. Princess Susannah has been kidnapped, and will be killed unless he has “full unsimulated sexual intercourse with a pig”. As the pressure mounts from social media, news channels and Callow’s own advisors, he is forced to grasp this dilemma by the trotters.

Charlie Brooker:The fact that we start Black Mirror with The National Anthem does throw quite a lot of people, perhaps because it makes them feel quite sick, in a horrible, doomy way. There’s a queasy inevitability about it. I know it makes it difficult for some people to recommend the show! Some people just do not get that one, but I see it as darkly funny. People say it’s ridiculous, and of course we know it’s ridiculous, but we play it straight. It’s supposed to be ridiculous to start with and then it’s not. I’d had the idea before that it would be a very funny episode of 24 if Jack Bauer was presented with a dilemma of having to fuck a pig. And then I thought that if you played that totally straight it would be hilarious. But while working out the beats of the actual story, you realise that it wouldn’t be very funny. And having done Dead Set , I was more confident that you could take something preposterous but make the tone very straight.

Charlie had also been inspired by the British jungle-based reality show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! , in which various celebrities are forced to do terrible things, often live on ITV as presenters Ant and Dec look on.

Charlie Brooker:I was watching somebody like Peter Andre – I can’t remember who – but they were absolutely terrified, almost in tears, shaking, crying, sweating. They had to do something like eat an arsehole with an eyeball pushed into it, that’s been rolled in dog shit while a spider crawled over the roof of their mouth. They were gagging, and there was something about seeing it live. I thought, “I’m not enjoying this, what the fuck, this is awful!” At one point it cut to Ant and Dec and I thought Dec looked infinitely sad, like he had gazed into the abyss.

Annabel Jones: The National Anthem was about humiliation and the public’s appetite for humiliation. The public will celebrate anyone if they are prepared to humiliate themselves for the public’s entertainment. Celebrities had begun to realise this: some were going on I’m A Celebrity… for redemption, and others to try and extend their careers. But it wasn’t just celebrities – when Dead Set was on air, Brian Paddick was in the jungle. The previous year he’d been Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police Service and standing to be the Mayor of London! How nuts is that?

Otto Bathurst (director):I’d had a job cancelled, literally at the last minute. My agent then sent me the script for The National Anthem , which I read on Friday and then we were in production on Monday. Boom!

Annabel Jones:Otto agreed with us about playing it all straight, and he tonally held the line. In the casting and the production design, this had to be as real as it could be. So we were blessed to have Rory Kinnear as the Prime Minister Michael Callow. I’m very anti casting any comedy actors in Black Mirror . At the very beginning, this approach felt crucial, because we needed this to not feel like comedy. Charlie’s history, and the perception of him in the UK, was as a comedy writer, so it could have tipped too far that way.

Charlie Brooker:There were probably more jokes in the original script. In one scene, the porn star Rod Senseless has a conversation with the Prime Minister, but its weird comedic tone felt misplaced. At that point in the story, the milk had already curdled and the tone had already gone all disturbing and heavy. And then suddenly, Rod Senseless pops up to give the Prime Minister advice on how to fuck a pig.

Otto Bathurst:Actors fundamentally want to do interesting stuff and there’s little interesting stuff around, so actually it was very, very easy to cast. We got our first choice for every single role, because everybody thought, “Okay… I’ve no idea what’s going to happen here, but let’s give it a shot!” At this point, nobody knew what Black Mirror was. The budget was tiny, so it felt like a mini experiment that no one was paying too much attention to.

Shaheen Baig (casting director):I loved that there was no pressure whatsoever to have stars, which was really rare. Charlie’s concept and script were the stars, so it was just about finding the best person for the part.

Otto Bathurst:The stroke of genius was getting Rory. He’s one of the greatest actors of his generation, completely phenomenal. I actually can’t think of anybody who could’ve carried off that tonal balance. He was a pretty despicable character, but there was a vulnerability and a tragedy to him, so by the end you felt rather sorry for the guy. If you have any compassion, you can feel sorry for these leaders sometimes, because they are boxed into such horrendous corners by people pulling their strings. Yes, of course the Prime Minister doesn’t fuck pigs, but metaphorically he’s having to do that kind of stuff every day. That’s politics. To maintain power, you have to do appalling, awful, compromising things every day. Rory nailed that absolutely beautifully.

Charlie Brooker:The story is mainly about Callow, but it does ping around all over the place, which was useful for me while writing. Sometimes we just jump away from Downing Street because I’d have no idea what they would say. So you can just skip to the people in the hospital commenting on what’s on the news, or you can have the news as an fucking exposition delivery system. So it does allow you to do all kinds of shorthand things, but that was one story with a lot of spinning plates.

‘Well I’m not fucking a pig. Page one, that’s not happening’

Joel Collins (series production designer):I ran the visual effects on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie for a year, having started in puppets and Muppets at Jim Henson’s company. With an anthology, you get to put your hand in a bag of sweets. There’s nothing better than trying a different flavour each week, for someone who really enjoys moving around complex genres and technical issues. Our team made the Black Mirror logo with the cracks: it was very exciting to do all that.

Barney Reisz (producer):Joel has a great eye, is incredibly inventive and is as mad as Charlie, in a different way. He had his company Painting Practice, with brilliant people like Justin Hutchinson-Chatburn and Dan May around him doing VFX [visual effects], pre-visualisation and all sorts. So they were perfect for us, because they were very technically savvy, having come from a features background. They embraced Black Mirror as a fun experiment.

Joel Collins:With The National Anthem , I just tried to keep it grounded. You’re trying to take something fucking absurd so seriously. But the awful thing about it is, no matter how much you want to laugh, you know it’s just an awkward laugh. So it was about making it feel real and subtly straight. Robyn Paiba helped run that one with me. I remember her laughing about how Black Mirror conversations can go from the complexity of rigging televisions to how a pig might have sex with a human, and whether they have normal or coiled penises.