Charlie Brooker: So, how did Annabel and I meet? This is like the scene in
When Harry Met Sally, when they interview those couples.
Annabel Jones: Yes. Old people who wish they’d never met.
Charlie Brooker: My first memory of Annabel is her mocking me. I was in the [TV production Company] Endemol building on Bedford Square in London, playing the video game
Counter-Strike with three other comedy writers, when Annabel came up and took the piss out of us all, for being grown men pretending to be counter-terrorists.
Annabel Jones: At Endemol, my job was to look after its smaller companies, including the comedy label Zeppotron. Sharing a love for counter-terrorism, we all got on and I became managing director. We were making it all up as we went along of course, and then Charlie and I started working together on the
Wipe shows that he presented for the BBC.
Charlie Brooker: While working on Channel 4’s
The 11 O’Clock Show, I met Shane Allen, who would eventually commission
Black Mirror.
Shane Allen (then Channel 4 Head of Comedy): Charlie was one of
The 11 O’Clock Show‘s topical writers and I was a producer on the topical footage team, so we’d cross paths. He was chosen for his work on the website
TV Go Home which enjoyed an early following. I got to know Annabel around this time as part of the same social group. Charlie and I worked together on Chris Morris’s 2001
Brass Eye special again after that and kept crossing paths. I got the job as Channel 4’s comedy commissioner in 2004.
Charlie Brooker: I wrote a 2005 Channel 4 sitcom called Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, which had a really long gestation period. It would also inspire a
Black Mirror episode, but we’ll cover that later…
Charlie and Annabel’s transition from comedy to drama began with 2008’s Dead Set
, which saw a fictional Big Brother
house invaded by zombies. Charlie Brooker: Conceptually,
Dead Set sounded like a comedy, with its preposterous conceit. But despite that, we were keen to impress on people that we were going to play it straight.
Annabel Jones: We wanted it to be an uncompromising and credible TV horror show
. Big Brother was Endemol’s biggest show and, being part of Endemol, we hoped we could make
Dead Set in an authentic way, with access to the presenter Davina McCall, the
Big Brother house, the branding…
Shane Allen: In about 2006, Charlie and Annabel had pitched
Dead Set to Channel 4 drama, who ultimately passed. So Charlie and Annabel brought it to my attention with a first episode script and series treatment. It was instantly gripping: the core concept was brilliantly irreverent in taking this huge Channel 4 pop culture brand and rooting a genre thriller at the heart of it. Beyond that, the writing was pin-sharp in how it set up the world, nailed the characters and rattled through a page-turning narrative.
I connected with it immediately and was beguiled with the notion of it as a smart contemporary satire on reality TV, as well as a zombie thriller in its own right. Charlie and Annabel had such a clear vision and went to great pains to explain that it wasn’t a comedy and it wouldn’t be funny. It had to work as a piece of credible and rooted real-life drama and they set me homework to get a sense of tone. I had to watch the 2004
Dawn of the Dead remake, read Cormac McCarthy’s novel
The Road and see [photographer] Gregory Crewdson’s profound stills. To this day
The Road remains the most affecting and haunting book I’ve read–thanks for f***ing up my world view so fundamentally.
Dead Set
became a piece of event television, stripped across a week on Channel 4’s younger-skewing offshoot E4. Annabel Jones: Shane said, “Okay, what next?” because it had gone down really well and was BAFTA-nominated. It was a real surprise hit for Channel 4.
Charlie Brooker: I’d been writing TV criticism for quite a while, and was still doing it then. So I’d see lots of shows that maybe otherwise I wouldn’t have watched, such as the
Battlestar Galactica reboot. But that show was actually really good and I wondered why we weren’t doing things like that here in Britain. I miss all those silly US shows like
Manimal, Automan and
Knight Rider. At the time, everything on British TV was a detective drama or a costume drama, and it felt like there wasn’t much in between. But
Doctor Who was huge, having come back and been an enormous hit, so you knew there was an appetite for something else.
Annabel Jones: Charlie wanted to do an anthology show. He was familiar with T
he Twilight Zone and I was familiar with
Tales of the Unexpected, and that all felt something that was really missing in the TV landscape at the time. There were no ideas-driven single dramas.
Charlie Brooker: I didn’t like the idea of doing something where it’s the same thing all the time, partly because I find it hard to work out how that would stay interesting over weeks and weeks and weeks. I also don’t tend to have ideas that last beyond an hour.
Shane Allen: Enter Charlie and Annabel’s
Black Mirror pitch, about doing modern parable stories around the theme of social media, technology and AI advances. By this point I’d been made head of comedy, so was drunk on ego and power.
Annabel Jones: We pitched
Black Mirror as the fears of the day. Things that hadn’t been dramatised. Things that people didn’t quite realise were unsettling them.
Copyright © 2018 by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones with Jason Arnopp. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
