The opening episode of Black Mirror’s seventh series, Common People, is described by its director, Ally Pankiw, as a “couch sitter”. Rather than the mindless entertainment served up to a couch potato, a couch sitter delivers a gut punch so devastating that the viewer is forced to sit and take stock of their life after the closing credits.
Big Brother welcomed his first celebrity guests to the ITV house last year, and now he’s ready to put a whole new set of famous faces through their paces.
Comedian Nick Helm shone in the titular role of this BBC Three fan favourite. In the show’s only Halloween episode, Andy King and nephew Errol don the iconic hat, suit and glasses from 1980s classic The Blues Brothers.
At one point in his book Inside Black Mirror, when discussing the inspiration for his global dystopian sci-fi phenomenon, Charlie Brooker credits the “shiny adverts for Apple” that were appearing at the time. He says: “Being a paranoid person, as soon as I see any advert where everyone’s really happy and smiley, I immediately think it’s a bit like a sinister advert in a dystopian movie.… The fact that it looked so happy meant that it couldn’t last.”
The sixth series, says Netflix, will be "the most unpredictable, unclassifiable and unexpected yet."
Speaking to Tudum, Brooker, who has once again written, created and executive produced the series, explained: "Partly as a challenge, and partly to keep things fresh for both me and the viewer, I began this season by deliberately upending some of my own core assumptions about what to expect.
Because what better way to celebrate Halloween than to scare the living daylights out of yourself for hours on end?
The mockumentary will have an all-star cast playing fictitious ‘renowned’ historians, looking back at the landmark year of 2020 with real-life archival footage from the past twelve months.
Hugh Grant (The Undoing) will be playing one such historian and will be joined by Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction), Lisa Kudrow (Friends), comedian Leslie Jones (Saturday Night Live) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Lovebirds).
Speaking at the RTS London Christmas Lecture, he predicted that despite the growth of streaming services a lot of people would still be watching live, scheduled TV in a decade.
He said: “In ten years’ time linear TV will be distributed by IPTV, but scheduled TV will still be important, that more passive way of consuming curated content will have a very important role, not least in news and entertainment.”
We take a look at some of the weirdest holiday specials, from killer snowmen to passive aggressive relatives.
Writer Charlie Brooker sets a tranquil scene in the beginning of the Black Mirror Christmas episode, before dragging viewers along a twisted story of loneliness and ostracisation.
