The master of dystopian TV is returning for a coronavirus-themed Wipe. How has the current global catastrophe compared with those in his imagination?
In a past life, the satirist Charlie Brooker may have been one of those dogs with a sixth sense for imminent natural disaster, barking urgently at the humans who are blithely unaware their whole world is about to be smashed to smithereens. The preteen Brooker watched scary TV documentaries about nuclear war and assumed it would happen some day. As the co-creator of the Emmy-award-winning series Black Mirror, he has offered dystopian prophecies of the unintended consequences of technology, from robotic killer dogs to tracking chip implants in Matrix-like virtual worlds. So a microbe shaking civilisation to its core can’t have come as a complete surprise.
“It’s odd,” he says. “You know the film Contagion that lots of people have watched recently? When that came out and I read the description and everyone said this is really horrible and you should wash your hands a million times and use hand gel, I thought, there’s no way on earth I’m ever gonna watch that because that is exactly the sort of thing that terrifies me.
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