FOR OVER A DECADE, BLACK MIRROR HAS BEEN SHAKING UP TELEVISION WITH ITS TERRIFYING TECH-INSPIRED VISIONS. WITH A NEW SEASON UPON US, CHARLIE BROOKER TELLS US WHAT REALLY SCARES HIM…

WORDS ELLEN E JONES

ILLUSTRATION JACEY

Portrait: Michael Wharley

Kate Mara and Aaron Paul in ‘Beyond The Sea’

The infamous pig storyline from 2011’s ‘The National Anthem’.

Walls have ears? Anjana Vasan in ‘Demon 79’

Season 4’s ‘Metalhead’

BUILT-IN OBSOLESCENCE is not just for iPhones; it’s part of the human condition too. Charlie Brooker has been trying to tell us this for years now, at least since his dystopian, techno-paranoia anthology series first aired on Channel 4 in 2011. Right from the start, Black Mirror has blended genres of speculative fiction to spread existential dread, while asking us which parts of humanity’s hard-drive are essential to basic functioning, and which should be deleted in the next upgrade.

After making the leap to Netflix in 2016, the show has grown from a cult hit to an Emmy-winning, international TV phenomenon, with the power to make movie stars, direct discourse and even… maybe… predict the future? Under such circumstances, the slow fade into cultural irrelevancy would now seem inevitable, but instead the opposite has happened: in the four years since the previous season aired, global events have once again proved its prescience, and had us muttering, “It’s like something out of Black Mirror,” more frequently than ever before.

Now Charlie Brooker is back with five often low-tech, retro-styled new episodes — ‘Joan Is Awful’, ‘Loch Henry’ ‘Beyond The Sea’, ‘Mazey Day’ and ‘Demon 79’ — that collectively both upend our notions of what Black Mirror is, and could only be Black Mirror. Brooker’s reputation as Britain’s favourite home-grown doomsday prophet is thus assured, and yet in person he makes for an ever-cheerful, open-minded interviewee, willing to chat about matters both trivial and terrifying. Perhaps because in the Black Mirror universe, the truth often lies somewhere in-between.

Black Mirror is now 12 years and six series in, with a new set of episodes that go harder than ever before. How have you avoided jumping the shark, selling out and otherwise losing your edge?

Well, I don’t know. Some people would say otherwise, but it’s objective — subjective? Or objective? I always get those two mixed up, which is terrible for a writer. But when I started writing this season it was mid-2021, we were in the tail-end of the pandemic, and I remember thinking that technology had slightly plateaued. Now everyone’s talking about AI constantly, but then there wasn’t anything that disruptively new or terrifying that had come along. And also, at the same time, I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone’s got a little nubbin on their temple, and they wake up and go, “Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!” So I thought, “I’m just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is.” There’s no point in having an anthology show if you can’t break your own rules. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face.