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They had ordered Alex MacQueen's wonderfully humourless and ruthless hatchet man to engage a porn star (named Rod, of course) to pretend to be the PM pleasuring the pig on film, but someone snapped him entering the studio, put it up on Facebook and the ruse was uncovered by the kidnapper.īut it wasn't all played for comedic effect. Normally, such an outrageous storyline would form the denouement to a story, but the reveal came very early, in order that Brooker could lay out before us the real villains of the piece – those of us who allow technology and the media (news and social) to inform and govern every aspect of our lives.Īt first Callow refused to participate in this vile business - “I'm not fucking a pig, page one, that's not happening” - but within minutes it was clear he was going to do just that, as Home Secretary Alex Cairns (Lindsay Duncan) and assistant Tom Blice's ( Tom Goodman-Hill) Plan B fell apart. The “bizarre demand” was, to put it bluntly, to fuck a pig in front of the watching world. The set-up to The National Anthem was that a fictional member of the British royal family, the popular Princess Susannah, has been kidnapped, and the ransom demanded was that the young, urbane Prime Minister Michael Callow ( Rory Kinnear) would, as the oh so dainty media had it, “perform an indecent act” on live television.
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The real villains of the piece were those of us who allow technology and the media to inform and govern every aspect of our lives The collective title represents the blank screens of those things that rule modern lives – plasma TVs, tablets, iPods and iPhones – for so many of us. He wrote The National Anthem (expertly directed by Otto Bathurst) and co-wrote, with his wife Konnie Huq, next week's futuristic nightmare 15 Million Merits, while Jesse Armstrong ( Peep Show and The Thick of It) wrote the last instalment, In Memoriam.
#THE BLACK MIRROR CHANNEL 4 SERIES#
It was only when the storyline took a ridiculous and hilariously obscene turn that one realised this was meant to be viewed as a comedy, a dark, dark, dark satire that we could laugh at loud and long.īlack Mirror is a portmanteau heading for a three-part series in which Brooker attempts to create a modern Tales of the Unexpected or The Twilight Zone, both of which crossed several genres of black comedy, thriller, zombie and crime drama. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller.