AS CHARLIE BROOKER’S SCI-FI ANTHOLOGY SERIES BLACK MIRROR RETURNS, WE GO ON SET OF ONE OF THE SHOW’S MOST EPIC EPISODES YET TO WITNESS THE WORLD-BUILDING FROM THE INSIDE…

WORDS ELLEN E JONES

Emma Corrin rocking the 1940s screen starlet look as actor Dorothy Chambers in ‘Hotel Reverie’.

IF YOU WERE LOOKING FOR a visual metaphor to describe the inside of Charlie Brooker’s brain, Stage 8 of Shepperton Studios on a blustery day in May 2024 does the job. Here, all is abustle with a new season of his eerily prescient, darkly satirical sci-fihorror anthology Black Mirror, and Brooker is mentally juggling a hefty workload.

“We’re doing the final mix for Episode 1…” says Brooker, as he leads us through a sound-proofed outer door and into the massive, aircraft-hangar-like space, where an entire to-scale replica of a 1940s Cairo hotel lobby has been constructed. “We’ve locked Episode 2, but we’re doing VFX…” he continues, picking his way through the leather armchairs and tables, artfully set with halfdrunk cocktails and, on one, a 1949-dated copy of ‘The Cairo Clarion’. “With Episode 3, I’m about to see the first cut of that on Friday…” Still in search of a quiet spot to talk properly, he walks out onto the hotel’s back veranda, which commands an impressive view of a souk on the banks of the Nile. Or rather, a 45-foot-high, hand-painted, blackand-white scenic backdrop of the scene. “And, at the moment, we’re shooting this.”

“This” is ‘Hotel Reverie’, an episode from Black Mirror’s seventh season, which invokes the sweeping romances of 1940s cinema, from Brief Encounter to Casablanca —albeit with a very Black Mirror twist. To add to the general air of busyness, the production of ‘Hotel Reverie’ has overlapped with another episode, a sequel to Season 4’s multiple-Emmy-winning space epic ‘USS Callister’, and elsewhere on the Shepperton backlot, Ridley Scott’s second unit is shooting pick-ups for Gladiator II.

All in all, it seems Brooker may have died and gone to a self-imagined heaven. “It’s kind of what you thought a movie studio was like when you’re a kid,” he says, as a dapper chap in a Bogart-worthy tux saunters past. “Like that sort of Blazing Saddles thing, with somebody in a space suit talking to a Roman centurion.” Eventually he finds us a place to sit, by an ornamental pond —the very same spot in which Issa Rae and Emma Corrin will, in a few hours’ time, be shooting a moonlit tête-à-tête scene. Brooker collapses into a high-backed rattan chair. “And then I’m about to start writing the final episode. I don’t even know the character names yet, so that’s slightly terrifying.” He inhales sharply.