Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:It’s a bit annoying that people do refer to The National Anthem as the one where the Prime Minister fucks a pig, because that spoils it in a way. When people first encountered the episode, they probably thought, “Well, that can’t happen because they won’t be able to show it.” Normally the day is saved, but here the day was not saved and that’s slightly unusual. So, the fact that people feel the need to warn others about what happens kind of pre-emptively spoils it. But what can you do?

In Conversation

Charlie Brooker – co-writer and executive producer

Konnie Huq – co-writer

Euros Lyn – director

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Barney Reisz – producer

Joel Collins – series production designer

Shaheen Baig – casting director

Stephen McKeon – composer

In a society wallpapered with endless video screens, Bing and his fellow citizens earn ‘merits’ by riding stationary exercise bikes. When Bing falls for gifted singer Abi, he decides to use his enormous stash of merits to buy her a place on the popular talent show Hot Shot . Horrified by the results, vengeful Bing sets out to rage against the machine.

Charlie Brooker: Fifteen Million Merits was inspired by a lot of different things, but it mainly happened because my wife Konnie took the piss out of me. I was sitting on the sofa with an iPad and a laptop, and probably a phone, and a television, and she said something along the lines of “Literally, you’d be happy if you were in a box and the walls were all screens.” And I thought, “Yes, that’s quite an arresting image.” Also, I probably would.

Konnie Huq (co-writer):Charlie was quite into Twitter at the time and so was often swiping away at his phone. We had just got a new huge TV in what was not that big a living room. I commented that, in the future, walls would just be one giant TV screen, and then people could just swipe away at the walls. Light switches, lights, TV, internet: all electrics could just be incorporated within the giant touch-screen walls.

Back then, I was presenting [ The X Factor ’s ITV2 sister show] The Xtra Factor , and these panel-judging shows were at their peak in popularity. And when I was presenting [BBC children’s show] Blue Peter and asked kids what job they’d like to do, they often said they wanted to be famous, but they didn’t know what for! In Fifteen Million Merits , the people on screens are the famous ones that have made it in life. The ‘worker’ society are not allowed possessions or any luxuries. In a longer cut, Abi originally made things and did origami out of waste packaging, so as to have possessions.

Charlie Brooker:There was something that appealed to me about the idea of an incredibly reductive piss-taking version of capitalism, with the whole of society peddling desperately on fucking bikes for some coins to spend.

Konnie Huq:I had often thought gyms should be powered by the exercise equipment in them, so they could be totally self-sufficient. In the same way that TVs could be powered by the people watching them as they exercised.

Charlie Brooker:I was playing a lot of Xbox 360 games, and they’d just updated their system so you saw these little cartoon avatars of yourself. The Nintendo Wii had also come along with little cartoon avatars of everyone, and you could spend a lot of money, buying these things that didn’t exist. I’d been reading about people being beaten to death over objects they’d bought in online games that weren’t real.

At the same time, Konnie and I had watched Nigel Kneale’s one-off play The Year of the Sex Olympics , set in a dystopian society where everyone is fed entertainment all day long. They basically invent reality television to keep the masses entertained. So that was a really strong influence. In-flight entertainment systems were yet another inspiration. They’re something you cling to in an uncomfortable place. A teat you suckle to distract you from being on a plane.

So all these things came together. But the idea was an Apple store version of Hell. With these screens on the walls, a room was a prison cell but looked sort of chirpy. The Xbox Kinect had just come out with hand gestures and movements like that, so we put a lot of that into it as well.

Euros Lyn (director):Charlie had seen my episodes of Doctor Who , and liked them, then written something about how my name was worthy of sci fi, because it was so peculiar. This really made me laugh.

Charlie Brooker:Hang on; I gave his episodes a good review! But yeah, Euros’ name looked like something out of Star Trek .

Euros Lyn:I’d always loved reading Charlie’s articles in The Guardian and I loved Nathan Barley . So when he sent me the script, I knew I really wanted to direct. It was all a bit scary, because what was Black Mirror going to be? What was its tone? It felt utterly original. We knew we had a huge ambition, but that the cash was pathetic. At times, it felt like we were a bunch of students making a short film. Especially as the location for this one was the campus of an old college in Buckinghamshire.

Annabel Jones:Suddenly you have to build a whole new world, to suggest that everyone’s living in this massive tower block of conformity. How do you do that on a Channel 4 budget? We reused sets. Everything seen is in that one set that we’ve redressed for the bedroom, or the bathroom, or the lift. They’re modular sets being reused and reused.

Barney Reisz (producer):Because everything had to be designed from scratch, we needed a whole lot of prep time. We were low-budget, but it wasn’t no-budget. We certainly made the money stretch.

Euros Lyn:Joel Collins is such a talent, and a nice guy, which really helps. So I was working with him and his co-designer Dan May, to figure out the modular idea. Our set was built in a gym, so it had to fit in a certain space. We also knew we didn’t want the CG to feel “look at me”. We didn’t want to expose ourselves, in terms of not having enough cash, so we were really disciplined in exactly when we showed the audience that this set was one room on multiple floors of thousands and thousands of cycling chambers.

Joel Collins (series production designer):The whole thing was shot almost entirely live. When Bing makes a hand gesture, all that stuff is on the screen for real. It was quite a feat, but if we didn’t do it, we wouldn’t have the time or money in VFX for post production. Ultimately, it was a shitload of screens, with people behind those screens pressing buttons to trigger animations we’d created in our office. Thousands of avatars all doing different things. It was mental.

Annabel Jones:We had to fill all the screens in the cycling chamber. I remember one particularly uncomfortable day when we filmed Botherguts , a fictional gameshow that humiliated overweight people. Our ‘contestants’ had these water hoses and they had to try and knock down the people who couldn’t continue cycling, and were considered to have ‘gone lemon’. We couldn’t afford to film lots of different fictional programmes, so Endemol let us use two of their gameshows! If you look carefully you can spot Don’t Scare the Hare and The Whole 19 Yards . Endemol haven’t got Botherguts commissioned yet…