Sublime

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 quit

Charlie Brooker: This was one of the hardest Black Mirrors to write, and at one point I completely gave up. It has a lot of elements which are exactly the sort of thing we parodied when we did this spoof TV detective show called A Touch of Cloth, a sort of British take on [the 1988 comedy film] Naked Gun, with that Zucker Brothers humour. Because I

Charlie Brooker: By January 2015, we were in a good position. Now it was like, “Which American network do we go with?” And this seemed to solve the problem with Channel 4, because they wanted us to find someone like HBO or AMC or Netflix to help fund Black Mirror. But that was when stage two of the Channel 4 discussions began. Annabel Jones: Netfli

Charlie Brooker:…which of course was worrying, given how they’d rejected ideas apparently outright in the past. Still, I desperately wanted it to work. I sent Channel 4’s chief exec David Abraham an email, saying, “Can we please make this work?” I would have loved it if everyone was happy and Black Mirror could still go out on Channel 4 and Netflix

Charlie Brooker: When people pitch us ideas, often they’ll over-think it. Or they’ll tell you what it’s about in the first paragraph, when you want the elevator pitch. Penn was one of the few people who actually just told a story that was refreshingly high-concept and a popcorn movie crowd-pleaser. We had to work on his story to make it fit. If you

William Bridges: The three ideas I pitched to Charlie and Annabel were shit and none of them stuck, but I think we got on enough for them to trust that my spec script wasn’t a fluke. A few days later, they sent me one of Charlie’s own ideas to flesh out: an embryonic version of Shut Up and Dance. The treatment was very different from the finished e

you can have the news as an fucking exposition delivery system. So it does allow you to do all kinds of shorthand things, but that was one story with a lot of spinning plates.

I went straight into the end-of-year Wipe show for the BBC, immersing myself in the edit. The Black Mirror situation was all very depressing. We’d had a really good thing going there, making these little mini movies with a lot of creative freedom, and we were doing quite well. And now we’d stumbled and stopped. We were absolutely convinced that thi

We chatted about the fun that could be had with your digital self trying to contact your real self, and how the best person to blackmail you is you. The first draft seemed to write itself. It’s probably the first and only time I’d ever written a script and knew it was good. Most times you hope – maybe even suspect – it’s good, but this one felt goo