Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

With The National Anthem locked and loaded, the team approached the London press screening with no small degree of trepidation.

Charlie Brooker:We had no idea how that would go. Fucking nerve-wracking.

Otto Bathurst:Everybody came in, and because it was Charlie Brooker everybody thought it would be funny.

‘It’s already happening in their heads. In their heads, that’s what you’re doing, what my husband’s doing’

Charlie Brooker:When the ransom demand was made, everyone just laughed, which was the reaction we wanted. Oh, it’s a black comedy! And then gradually they got more and more worried and felt more and more sick…

Otto Bathurst:The very pivotal moment was with the onscreen people in the pub, watching the live broadcast. It suddenly becomes very clear that actually humanity, society and media and all of us are responsible for this. The tone in the screening room was absolutely thrilling. Everybody was completely silent.

Annabel Jones:When the journalists in the press room did exactly what the people in the pub were doing onscreen, that’s when we knew we’d got the tone of the series.

Charlie Brooker:They went from incredulity and amusement to disgust and sadness. You’re meant to be left with sadness at the end of that. It’s sad and it’s pathetic and everyone is cheapened by it.

Otto Bathurst:The roundtable press discussions afterwards were amazing. People were very affected by it. I think that’s because of Rory and the way he plays it. When he’s broken down and slumped in the toilet at the end, you feel real empathy for these guys. And that’s what I like about it: it’s complicated. It’s all too easy to throw trite comments around about how politicians are destroying the country, but I wanted to show how it’s more complex than that. These people are really flawed human beings.

Charlie Brooker: The National Anthem was named after both the national anthem that we sing, like patriots, and there’s also a Radiohead song called The National Anthem . Often I’ll name things after songs, but that one just came up on Spotify and I thought it was a good title. I probably can’t articulate why, but… everyone’s singing the same song. There’s patriotism in it, there’s a royal connection, there’s a sort of chorus of people throughout the whole episode and there’s something about doing your duty. So it felt like the title summed it up somehow, like a statement in some way.

Otto Bathurst:You feel culpable for what’s happened to Callow. You kinda go, “Oh shit, this is awful – look what I’ve done!” We all buy the papers and get on the Twitter feeds. If that story broke now, the speed at which it would go viral is horrendous. Everybody says we’re powerless, but we’ve actually never been more powerful. For once, we actually do have power and the opportunity to change things. Thirty years ago we didn’t, because news was fabricated by the barons of Fleet Street and we couldn’t get our hands on it. You couldn’t get your opinion out there and now you can, incredibly easily. We’re in a position of real power. We also have real responsibility, and we’re not taking it.

Charlie Brooker:Starting Black Mirror with a big, noisy film certainly didn’t hurt, but I had no idea of how that was going to go down. We consciously didn’t allude to what was going on in it, in any of the pre-publicity. There was a whole trailer campaign for The National Anthem that deliberately made it look like a much straighter story where a princess has been kidnapped and the Prime Minister had a terrible dilemma to face. Channel 4 also did weird things, like run a trail for it on ITV and a couple in cinemas. So a lot of people did tune in thinking it was going to be a political thriller, and then when that bomb drops in the first five minutes or so… At that point you either going to go, “I’m in”, or, “Nah”. So we knew it was divisive.

In September 2015, four years after The National Anthem was broadcast, allegations emerged that the British Prime Minister David Cameron had placed a ‘private part’ into the mouth of a dead pig as a student initiation rite. Cameron denied that this ever happened.

Charlie Brooker:Oh God, that was weird. That was so odd. Especially because our art department created onscreen tweets for the film, which included the hashtag #snoutrage. Which then ended up being the hashtag for the Cameron scandal in real life. So that’s really quite mental.

Annabel Jones:Lots of people asked, “So did you know?” I mean, imagine Cameron when that episode went out! He must have thought, “They fucking know! They’re coming for me!” I think they did watch it – or that’s what I heard.

Charlie Brooker:When that actually happened, I had a moment of weird vertigo. For a moment I genuinely worried that everything in the universe is a figment of my imagination.

Annabel Jones:I love how that was Charlie’s ‘go to’ theory! Rather than “Maybe someone had told me”, he goes straight to, “I’m living in a parallel reality”!

Charlie Brooker:It was just such a weird coincidence and I knew no one had told me! So for a moment I thought, “What if all of my life is a dream?”

Annabel Jones:The Cameron story ruined a good line that we always used to say in interviews. Whenever someone said how we seemed able to predict the future, we’d say, “Well, except for The National Anthem ”. And then that was stolen from us.

Charlie Brooker:For fuck’s sake. It’s so weird that The National Anthem was the most prophetic one we did!

Otto Bathurst:I’m proud of The National Anthem because it’s so close to being awful and ridiculous, but we walked that tonal tightrope. For the scale of what it was, we made a pretty big footprint. When I’m talking to people, it’s constantly referred to. Black Mirror is way, way bigger in the States than it is in the UK – especially The National Anthem . The idea of Obama or Trump being put in front of a pig… in America they’d never be allowed to make a show like that! Whereas in the UK, we’re used to very heavy satire, so it wasn’t quite as shocking. It was such fun to do. I’ve done movies that took two years to make and Black Mirror took three months. There was a lot of fun in this new territory we were discovering.