Expecting the worst helped me prepare for it, says Charlie Brooker
The creator of the dystopian TV series Black Mirror has said a career of anticipating the worst meant he was better mentally prepared for the coronavirus pandemic.
Charlie Brooker’s scripts for the science fiction anthology series imagine scenarios from algorithms deciding who people are forced to date, to children being implanted with tracking chips, and robotic killer dogs roaming the countryside.
He told the Radio Times this had prepared him for an unprecedented global crisis of the magnitude of Covid-19. “Because I’ve really always expected something like this to come along, I think maybe I’m not going through quite the level of psychological adjustment as some other people,” he said.
“If you’ve spent years anticipating the worst, oddly, when the worst happens, you can stop worrying about that possibly happening because it has. So I’m dealing with this on a personal level far better than I would have anticipated.”
Brooker said he was not working on another Black Mirror, which first aired on Channel 4 before being bought by Netflix, as he did not think there was the appetite for it in the current climate.
But the writer said he was optimistic about the future. “If you look at what happens in classic dystopian fiction – where everyone turns on each other immediately – so far that hasn’t happened. It’s not to say it won’t. But I pivoted quite early to an optimistic view that this is terrible but, at the end of it, there’s a possibility that we’ll have the stomach to realign society a little.
“Is this forcing our hands to address financial inequality and climate change? You hope that’s the outcome, rather than that it makes psychotic strongman politicians more secure.”
Brooker will return to TV screens this month with a special lockdown version of his weekly news review show Screenwipe, titled Antiviral Wipe. The BBC said the first show on 14 May would feature the regular characters Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) and Barry Shitpeas (Al Campbell), offering their “own very special brand of indepth reporting”.
A press release announcing the show in April said other contributors would also be involved, but that they could not be named as they “haven’t been told they’re doing it yet, but have no good excuse not to”.
Brooker said: “The BBC asked me to supply a quote for the press release, which is what you’re reading now.”
Brooker has been congratulated for producing work that with hindsight seems impressively prescient. As Germany entered lockdown in March, the contestants of the country’s Big Brother were left unaware of what was happening in the outside world – drawing comparisons with Brooker’s 2008 series Dead Set, about reality TV show contestants who emerge to find a zombie apocalypse.
“Okay, fuck it,” tweeted Brooker when the parallels were pointed out. “This is happening so frequently I’m just going to have to accept that I’m a soothsayer or a mystic or whatever you want to call it.”
He added: “With that in mind, I will now make an optimistic prediction in the hope it also comes true: we’ll come out the other side of the coronavirus crisis a more empathetic, altruistic, and globally conscious society.”