Charlie Brooker shuts the Big Brother house during a zombie outbreak and Yann Demange directs it like a proper horror film, fast and bloody and unsentimental. The satire is broader than it needs to be, but the fright is real.
Charlie Brooker’s first drama arrived three years before Black Mirror, and it is the same idea in rougher clothes: take the television we watch and ask what it would do under pressure. Here the television is Big Brother, the pressure is the walking dead, and the five episodes, first shown from 27 October 2008 and carrying an 18 certificate, are shorter and nastier than the premise suggests. It is a horror serial with a satirical streak, and most of it works.
Yann Demange directs all five, and his first decision is right: the dead run. Tat Radcliffe shoots the house in the flat, even light of the real programme, every corner visible and nowhere to hide, and the compound outside handheld, the camera lurching when the people holding it panic. Chris Wyatt cuts the outbreak in short grabs, the way the real show would cut a row in the kitchen, so for a minute it is hard to tell the drama from the programme inside it. He does it once and leaves it alone.
Andy Nyman has the best part. Patrick Goad is the producer, who hates the viewers, the housemates and most of his own staff, and keeps saying so after the end of the world. Nyman plays him without a flicker of apology, and the serial is sharpest whenever he is talking. Jaime Winstone’s Kelly, the runner who fetches the tea, is the only member of staff who is any use, and Winstone plays her tired rather than heroic, which is why we believe her. Riz Ahmed, outside the perimeter as her boyfriend Riq, carries the road half of the story with Liz May Brice’s Alex and makes a lot of a part that is mostly running and phoning.
Inside, Kevin Eldon’s Joplin is the housemate who thinks he is above the house and says so in long words, and Eldon lets us see the fear under the vocabulary. Kathleen McDermott’s Pippa, in the sequins Rebecca Hale put her in for eviction night, gets dirtier and sadder as the hours go by, and the frock does more storytelling than some of the dialogue. Warren Brown’s Marky, Adam Deacon’s Space and Beth Cordingly’s Veronica are types anyone who watched the real thing will know at a glance; it saves time, and none of them surprises us.
Here is what it did to us. The first episode’s eviction night, the crowd roaring behind the barriers, Davina McCall as herself working them up, had us grinning at how exactly it got the real thing. Then the roar changed. We stopped grinning, and the next time something ran at the camera we jumped, properly, and were slightly cross with ourselves for jumping at a programme about Big Brother. What Brooker does with McCall in that first episode we will not describe; it is the serial’s best joke, and it is also horrible.
The satire is the weak part. Patrick tells us the audience are no different from the things outside, after the pictures have already told us. The middle episodes settle into a pattern: someone leaves for supplies, makes a bad decision, comes back changed, and by the fourth we could see each turn coming a scene ahead. Dan Jones and Matthew Robert Cooper’s music, low drones and a thudding pulse, does the job under the chases and is forgotten the moment they stop. At half an hour an episode, some housemates are gone before they have been anyone in particular.
George A. Romero put the dead in a shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and let the joke sit there for two hours. Brooker puts them in a television studio and shouts it, which is less elegant but suits the subject; nobody involved in Big Brother ever whispered anything. Next to Black Mirror this is cruder, bloodier and more fun.
Watch it in one sitting, late, with the curtains drawn. The 18 certificate is earned several times over, mostly in the fourth episode. It is not for anyone who could never stand Big Brother; the joke needs you to have sat through some of it. Everyone else should find it does what a zombie story is for: it makes a familiar room frightening.
