Of all the people to be optimistic in the face of a global pandemic, the co-creator of Black Mirror would be low down on the list. Yet Charlie Brooker remains in uncharacteristically high spirits amid the outbreak of Covid-19.
His latest piece for television, Antiviral Wipe, a reimagination of his hit show Screen Wipe, broadcast last week, comprising of three quarters of an hour pointing out the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of government policy.
In a New York Times Interview, Brooker notes: “it feels like we’ve got a common purpose for the first time in five years.”
He continues: “It’s the most, on some levels, boring apocalypse you could imagine. You’d never think it was possible to get bored in the middle of a pandemic but it turns out it really is. And so there’s a cognitive dissonance between how quiet it can be versus how alarming it is.”
Brooker cites his childhood as a preparation for the outbreak, musing that: “The disconnect between the internal angst and terror I had, versus the bucolic English countryside, was constantly jarring to me. It’s informed a lot of the stuff that I write and my sense of humour.”
Yet Brooker wonders whether there is still a place for Black Mirror in a post-pandemic world. The current outbreak does not make for good television. Instead of his usual apocalyptic drama, the current situation is “very slow and it’s very quiet.”
He believes that the show might need a rethink once the pandemic is over, considering that: “I do think, though, that if you were to write now about society collapsing in five minutes after the pandemic breaks out, that cliché dog-eat-dog scenario, people would reject it.
“That would look like a falsehood and people would say, “Well, that wasn’t my experience of what went on.”
Brooker concludes that he hopes: “In the wake of this, it should be possible to galvanize people.”
