Charlie Brooker – celebrated Guardian columnist, creator of E4’s Dead Set and all-round misanthropic griper – chats about zombies, twats and sliding moral standards.
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After reading or watching anything penned by Charlie Brooker, you’d be excused for expecting him in the flesh to be an overbearing figure with a machinegun wit, mercilessly shooting down all around him who dare to exhibit a mere suggestion of stupidity or imperfection.
So it’s hard to know whether to react with relief or disappointment when confronted with a polite bundle of buoyant charm who carries himself with the kind of humility that would make Gandhi gaze at his sandals in shame. This contrast in personality between the scathing critic and the chatty fellow sat next to me is not just puzzling for those that encounter him, but also, it appears, for Charlie himself.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a TV critic: I was working in TV along time before I started doing stuff for The Guardian,” he begins. “I wanted to be a comedy writer, and when The Guardian gave me the Screen Burn column I thought, ‘Oh good: I get to be funny each week; my subject matter is TV; off you go.’ As a person I’m quite wishy-washy and say things like, ‘Oh, I suppose you could see it like that.’ I never set out to write a treatise on what’s right and wrong as I think that would be extremely dull. It turned out that I’m quite opinionated though, and I didn’t really realise it. But put me in front of a television and give me a deadline and I get really angry about anything.”
As he reminds us, Screen Burn was by no means the beginning of his foray into TV wonderland. Even before the ‘well Jackson’ Nathan Barley was conceived, or its precursor, the TV Go Home website uploaded, Charlie Brooker was busying himself with a variety of on-screen and behind-the-scenes roles.
“It’s weird because I’ve been working in TV for longer than I’ve been writing about it, and I think that gets lost sometimes,” he reflects. “I was working as a computer games reviewer, and then I got a job presenting a radio show, and then started presenting a technology show in about 1998. Then I started doing the TV Go Home website, which led to a job on The 11 O’Clock Show. I was working on that when The Guardian approached me.”
So, was this television writing stuff always the ultimate ambition? Were these other projects merely craftily trod stepping stones that would always lead to the happy shores of script writing?
“I always wanted to write things, but originally I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he says with a shimmer of nostalgia. “From the age of about eight, I used to do comics to amuse myself. I started out by sending some comic strips to the letters page of a kids’ magazine called Oink. It was kind of like a kids’ version of Viz, and had some of the Viz artists working on it.”
Understandably, he was a bit taken aback when they asked him to bypass the letters page and do some proper comics. “It was my first proper job, which is great when you’re 15: it meant I suddenly had an income. So at the time I thought I’d become a cartoonist.”
Even from this early age there’s evidence of a slightly twisted sense of humour, as well as a penchant for darker subject matter. Two characters he particularly beams over whilst reminiscing are Freddy Flop, a kid with some form of leprosy causing various parts of him to fall off, and the Adventures Of Death, a cartoon whose punch-line would always be that someone gets decapitated with a scythe.
It’s not surprising that a kid sketching about flaking skin and gory beheadings would go on to spawn a show like Dead Set, which had its first airing on E4 in October. The basic premise is simple and well-trodden: an outbreak causes people to die and return as zombies, in order to eat other people. But the twist is that it’s set against the backdrop of modern cultural landmark the Big Brother house, which sits well with the writer’s anti-fame-seeking sensibility when besieged and spattered with guts and gore.
When speaking about the inspiration behind the show, in place of lightning bolts and profound visions there’s the image of a somewhat apathetic god nonchalantly slapping the sleeping writer round the face.
“I’ve always loved the Romero zombie films,” he admits. “I wanted to see zombies on TV, and was surprised that it had never been done. In terms of monsters, they’re quite cheap really. A vampire’s got prosthetic teeth, and has to turn into a bat. Werewolves are expensive: you’ve got to get a full body suit for everybody. But a zombie is basically like a pissed person, so they’re relatively cheap; certainly cheaper than Daleks must be.”
“I was convinced that the Americans were about to unveil a series like 24 but with the living dead in it,” Charlie goes on. “I kept waiting for that to happen, and it didn’t, so I sort of felt compelled. I thought, ‘Now I have to do it.’ It was a bit like being commanded to do a chore.”
When talking about writing he speaks with an endearing modesty that’s completely unexpected from someone with such a self-assured writing style. “The thing that gets me going is a deadline,” he declares. “I’m an absolute Olympian procrastinator. I’m incapable of doing anything until right at the last minute when the voice in my head that’s screaming, ‘You’re rubbish, stop writing, this is shit…’ is drowned out by another voice that just says, ‘Write it, you’ve got to fucking do it, you’ve got to get it done.’”
“I approached Dead Set like an exercise. Can I write a zombie 24? Can I do it? And in a way that I’d want to watch it, with enough unexpected things, florid dialogue, and things that make you go, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t believe that happened’? Hopefully we’ve pulled that off.”
Even when having his photo taken for these pages he doesn’t pose like a man brimming with confidence or smug self-satisfaction. His awkward posturing and puzzled expression are more like that of a tribesman untouched by the modern world who at any moment expects a fanged demon to fly out of the camera.
“Most of the viewers who watch it won’t know or care who I am,” he shrugs when asked about the public anticipation of Dead Set. But given the tone of Screen Burn and his other work, he admits that people were always going to expect something particular from a Brooker-penned zom-com-drama based around the daddy of all fame-hunting reality shows.
“They expected half-an-hour of ‘I hate Big Brother.’ I also think people expected me to write something where they’re all total shit-bags and fuckers,” he says, aureately articulating the general consensus.
“If people expect to hear my voice in it, they’ll hear it coming out of Patrick’s mouth,” he reveals. “As the series goes on, he gets more florid speeches.” Patrick is the callous producer of Big Brother on Dead Set, played by Andy Nyman. “There’s bits when you’ll be thinking he’s just read a Screen Burn column aloud. He’s a panto villain in a lot of ways. It’s not a nuanced portrayal of a modern TV producer: he’s a fucker, and all the better for that I think.”
Of course, it’s somewhat simple-minded to expect that on the grounds of his involvement with Nathan Barley and the mordacious tone that characterises his Screen Burn column, that Dead Set would serve only as a scathing analytic on social licentiousness and obsession with celebrity culture.
“Primarily we wanted this to be nasty; a horror thriller. It’s a populist show, in no way was I thinking that I’d tell it how it is. It’s straightforward enough, it’s obviously comic, but we were always going for something like the original Dawn Of The Dead. Everyone bangs on now about that film being a great satire about consumerism, but ultimately it’s a romp. You don’t have to be sitting there thinking, ‘I know what he’s saying about capitalist society.’ You can just go, ‘Oh, here come the zombies. Brilliant!’”
This obvious enthusiasm for guts and gore was another motivation to write the show in the first place: “It was an opportunity to do a series that has popular appeal, and also is unpleasant,” as Charlie puts it. “It’s fantastical and I like the idea of doing something populist and stupid. One thing I liked about shows like The Twilight Zone is that they’re unbearably cruel.”
If nothing else this talk of cruelty fills me with the warming glow of familiarity as the Charlie Brooker next to me, at least for a minute or two, flickers with a resemblance to the caricature Charlie Brooker that’s grown out of Screen Burn, and currently resides in my head.
I push him on why anyone would intentionally create cruel television. “Most programmes are inherently reassuring,” he reasons. “24 is a really hardnosed show in that they sometimes kill off a well-loved character in a gruesome and unpleasant way. But they have to throw in all the scenes where people say, ‘I love you Dad.’ I wanted all those bits jettisoned, leaving just the hardnosed nasty bits and people running around frightened.”
Does this emphasis on gut-wrenching, spleen-chewing savagery mean there’s no moral to Dead Set? “Well, primarily it’s a romp, but there were things in my head that I was thinking about. We live in times where we’re constantly aware of some sort of looming threat – terrorism, bird flu, global warming, the economy – but at the same time we’re completely obsessed with trivia and celebrity. I get sucked into I’m A Celebrity more than what’s going on in my street. I thought it’d be great to clash the two: invent some terror, and have it colliding headlong with TV fluff.”
Even when speaking about reality TV ‘stars’, there’s a subtle whiff of compassion masked under the sharp tone. “There’s a lot of hatred that gets thrown at Big Brother contestants, deservingly if they’re nasty people, but they often seem to be nasty people because it’s a giant twat amplifier. It makes someone who’s a bit of a wanker seem like the biggest wanker you’ve ever seen.”
“There’s also a lot of hatred thrown at them for seeking fame, but I think why not? If you’re 22 and working at McDonalds, and the Big Brother or X-Factor auditions come along, who’s to say you shouldn’t try out? I’d say do it. It’s a catch-22: you’re a twat if you do, and a twat if you don’t.”
Though there are smatterings of humour throughout Dead Set, it obviously signals a broadening of his writing repertoire. “The original scripts were very straight, there were no jokes in them at all. And we wanted to differentiate it from things like Shaun Of The Dead. I thought that was fantastic, but it’s a different type of humour in that they’re aware they’re in a fiction. There’s that very funny scene where the zombies are coming and they’re throwing their record collection; our characters would never do that, because they’re too scared.”
However, whereas films like Shaun Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead can draw audiences into a bubble and build tension over an hour-and-a-half, were considerations given as to how to maintain that same tension over five episodes? “Yes, and hopefully we’ve pulled it off. Because of the nature of it, it’s fast-paced and there are a lot of characters. 24 was the model in my head. It’s a plate-spinning exercise; it’s constant egg timers. It was like solving a puzzle all the time, working out what could go wrong next.”
“It’s also been ruthlessly structured around commercial breaks. 24 is laid out like a series of pistachio nuts: you’ve got to have one, then you see another one. The idea was to make it like that. Hopefully the first episode builds to a climax every eleven minutes or so: the other episodes were 22 minutes, which is really quite short, but hopefully there’s enough variety to keep you going.”
Having applied his pen to various forms of writing, including a recent dabble in travel journalism for The Guardian, what unique challenge does screenwriting present? “The trickiest thing was working out what the next bit of peril is,” he reveals. “It’s like solving a Sudoku, and it really is that dry in a lot of ways. But Dead Set was easier in that, unlike something like The Wire, everyone’s motivations are pretty basic: ‘Help, we’ve got to survive!’”
Charlie’s first major screenwriting project was cult classic Nathan Barley, which follows the antics of an affluent media type living off his parents’ wealth, whose cringing naivety and absolute commitment to all things ‘street’ managed to create both a monster and a legend out of the same character.
The series originally spawned from his TV Go Home website, which displayed spoof listings for fictional programmes. “When we came to do the series we looked at the listings and realised that Nathan Barley himself wasn’t a character, but an object of scorn. We had no real description of what he thought, so that was our first problem. I think people who read TV Go Home were used to seeing him as a Patrick Bateman American Psycho character who was very cold and aloof, which we actually thought about. We used to say that in the listings he was a cunt, whereas in the series he was a cock.”
Though going from TV Go Home to Nathan Barley may not always have been quite as simple as switching the genitalial form of the main character, were there any lessons to be learnt that made penning Dead Set a little easier?
“Well the process of working out a plot is very similar, in that it’s a nightmare,” says Charlie. “The hardest bit was working out things like why does Dan get a haircut? Why is Nathan rapping when he’s going down on Claire? One of the lessons I learnt from Nathan Barley is that you don’t have to explain. If you watch Friends, it’ll open with Joey or someone walking in and announcing, ‘I’ve just been giving a part in a Polish soap opera, so I’ve got 24 hours to learn Polish.’ That sets up the story for the rest of the show. You don’t ask, ‘But why is it Polish?’ You just think, ‘Oh, this’ll be fun,’ and go with it.”
When it was first aired neither critics nor viewers seemed to know what to make of it, but the gradual rise in popularity of Nathan Barley since its release on DVD surely justifies calls for a second series. “We were planning one in quite some detail about two years ago, but then Dead Set got started.”
The planning process was in quite an advanced stage, with workshops being held in 2007 with various cast members including Julian Barratt (of Mighty Boosh fame) and Nicholas Burns (who played Nathan in the first series). Episode structures had been worked out, and even bits of scripts written.
Whereas most of us might be happy with more of the same hedonistic japes and floral swearing that coloured the original series, Shoreditch is a very different world from the one of 2005 – the sacking of Spitalfields for one will not be forgotten. So what are we to expect from a future series?
“The second series would be slightly different in that everything would have moved on a few years. Nathan’s approaching 30, he’s put on a bit of weight, his hair’s thinning a bit, and his parents have cut off his limitless supply of cash. He’s facing the fact that he’s basically never achieved anything. He has to move out of his flat and in with his brother, who’s currently going through a bitter breakup. His brother’s comparatively square – a GP who before his bitter breakup was painfully ‘Observer Lifestyle magazine’. He’s very conventional, tucks his shirt in every morning and has nice things in his kitchen. Nathan finds himself in an un-cool part of town and doesn’t know what’s going on.”
The fish-out-of-water shtick is always a safe comedy bed, although for many part of the satisfaction of chuckling at Nathan Barley derived from sneering despisingly at that whole Shoreditch ‘new meeja’ element. So why take it out? “We haven’t entirely taken it out, but we wanted to flip everything around so that Nathan was not master of his little kingdom,” Charlie explains.
“We always thought that cocks like Nathan Barley have existed from the dawn of time. If you work in a lighthouse, chances are there are Nathans in the lighthouse community. We never thought of this as a satire on Shoreditch, but as a comedy about a dickhead, a complete cock. Shoreditch was just the backdrop; it could ostensibly have been set in 1925 with different costumes. It’s about a successful twat and a bitter onlooker. In his new setting he’s completely awash in what he perceives as Squaresville, where he thinks everyone is a fucking granddad conformist idiot. So he becomes a bit more Dan Ashcrofty in that respect, whereas actually he’s acting like a fucking child.”
Is there room in this new setting for any of the other original characters? “Dan is working as a minicab driver because he’s quit his freelance job and has decided to write a novel, but actually he’s just driving a minicab and not really writing anything. Also, Nathan’s ex-lackey, Pingu, has become massively successful in some other field. That was basically the setup.”
Charlie talks excitedly about script ideas that are in various stages of plotting. “There was this whole episode that revolved around an incident in which Dan walks across the road and somebody calls him fat, so he decides to go and join a gym. But I was particularly pleased with one in which Nathan finds a gun and he ends up accidentally firing it out of the window.”
“All that happens is that it goes across the road, straight through the window of a house that Nathan’s brother promised a painfully middle-class couple that he’d look after. It’s gone slap-bang in the middle of a giant plasma screen TV. The rest of the episode revolves around their attempts to rectify the problem. They can’t work out whether to replace the TV or smash the place up and make it look like it was a burglary.”
And his writing partnership with Chris Morris appears to have a future, even if Nathan Barley doesn’t. “We’ve actually been discussing something else – not the Jihad comedy that he’s going ahead with,” he clarifies, referring to the fabled suicide-bomb-com that his controversy-courting colleague is working on. “We’ve been discussing something so amorphous that I don’t know how to describe it. It’s about television, basically.”
Theirs is surely an ideal, albeit slightly concerning, pairing. Some of the concepts he reels off for future shows could sit comfortably within an episode of Brass Eye. “I wanted to do a game show in which contestants are shown the faces of young children, and have to guess whether they are being shown hardcore pornography or uncensored war footage,” he chuckles.
British television might not be quite ready for that, but as the media ceaselessly contort our notions of acceptability, this is certainly one man who’ll be catching a ride on the back of sliding moral standards. And all the better our televisions will be for it.
