Brooker started his career as a cartoonist; he produced adverts for the second-hand video game retailer CeX before becoming a journalist for PC Zone. He has presented a number of television shows, mostly consisting of satirical and biting criticism of modern society and the media, such as Screenwipe, Gameswipe, Newswipe, Weekly Wipe, and 10 O'Clock Live. He also wrote the 2008 horror drama series Dead Set. He has written social criticism pieces for The Guardian and is one of four creative directors of the production company Zeppotron.
Early life and education
Charlie Brooker was born on 3 March 1971 in Reading, Berkshire.[1][2][3] He grew up in a relaxed Quaker household in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire.[4] His parents were fans of the television sitcom Bewitched, and named him Charlton after a character in one episode and his sister Samantha after the series' main character.[5] As a teenager, he first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!, a comic produced in the late 1980s.[6]
Brooker did some early work as a cartoonist, and worked in the video game department of Music and Video Exchange, a retailer in Notting Hill Gate, London. When one of the employees left to found the second-hand retailer CeX, Brooker worked in their first shop and produced cartoon advertisements.[9]
Career
Print
After some of Brooker's CeX cartoons were printed in the magazine PC Zone, he was invited to write for the magazine. His early reviews included System Shock (1994)[10] and Fallout (1997). Brooker wrote for the magazine in the mid and late 1990s.[11] Aside from games reviews, his output included the comic strip "Cybertwats" and a column titled "Sick Notes", where Brooker would insult anyone who wrote in to the magazine – and offered a £50 prize to the best letter. One of Brooker's one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was titled "Helmut Werstler's Cruelty Zoo" and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orang-utan, among other things.[12] The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the number of animals killed, but the original title, "Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo", was changed for legal reasons. In October 2008, Brooker and several other ex-writers were invited back to review a game for the 200th issue. Brooker reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.
Brooker began writing a TV review column titled "Screen Burn" for The Guardian newspaper's Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide in 2000, a role he continued until October 2010.
From late 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in The Guardian supplement "G2" on Fridays called "Supposing", in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. From October 2006 this column was expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome and Ignopedia, an occasional series of pseudo-articles on topics mostly suggested by readers. The key theme behind Ignopedia was that, while Wikipedia is written and edited by thousands of users, Ignopedia would be written by a single sub-par person with little or no awareness of the facts.[13]
On 24 October 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US presidential election[14] which concluded, "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where are you now that we need you?" that was criticised for Brooker's apparent encouragement of the assassination of the American president. The Guardian withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed an apology by Brooker.[15] He has since commented about the remark in the column stating:
I ended a Screen Burn column by recycling a very old tasteless joke (a variant of a graffiti I first saw during the Thatcher years), and within minutes half the internet seemed convinced The Guardian was officially calling for assassination. My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats, and it was all very unfunny indeed – a bit like recounting a rude joke at a dinner party, only to be told you hadn't recounted a joke at all, but molested the host's children, and suddenly everyone was punching you and you weren't going to get any pudding. I've had better weekends.[16]
Brooker left the "Screen Burn" column in 2010. In the final column,[17] he noted how increasingly difficult he found it to reconcile his role in mainstream media and TV production with his writing as a scabrous critic or to objectively criticise those he increasingly worked and socialised with. Longtime covering contributor Grace Dent took over the column. He continued to contribute other articles to The Guardian on a regular basis, his most recent comment column appearing in May 2015.
In 2012 he contributed to the book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who.[18]
In 2014, an article he wrote for The Guardian—"Too much talk for one planet: why I'm reducing my word emissions"—was published in the A-Level anthology Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology.[19]
Online
From 1999 to 2003 he wrote the satirical TVGoHome website,[20][21] a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and featured in technology newsletter Need To Know. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.[22]
Brooker's television presenting debut was with Gia Milinovich on BBC Knowledge's The Kit (1999–2000), a programme that reviewed gadgets and technology.[1] From 1999 to 2000, Brooker played the hooded expert 'the Pundit' in the short-lived show Games Republic, hosted by Trevor and Simon on BSkyB.
In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The 11 O'Clock Show. In 2001, he was one of several writers on Channel 4's Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia. In 2003, Brooker wrote an episode entitled "How to Watch Television" for Channel 4's The Art Show.[24] The episode was presented in the style of a public information film and was partly animated.
Together with Brass Eye's Chris Morris, Brooker co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a character from one of TVGoHome's fictional programmes. The show was broadcast in 2005 and focused on the lives of a group of London media 'trendies'. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch showSpoons, produced by Zeppotron.
In 2006, Brooker began writing and presenting the television series Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV review programme in a similar style to his Screen Burn columns in The Guardian. After an initial pilot series of three editions in April, the programme returned later in the year for a second run of four episodes plus Christmas and Review of the Year specials in December 2006. A third series followed in February 2007 with a fourth broadcast in September 2007, followed by a Review of the Year in December 2007. The fifth series started in November 2008 and was followed by another Review of the Year special. This series was also the first to be given a primetime repeat on terrestrial television (BBC Two), in January 2009.
Screenwipe editions have focused on a themes including American television, TV news, advertising and children's programmes. The last of these involved a segment where Brooker joined the cast of Toonattik for one week, playing the character of "Angry News Guy". An episode focused on scriptwriting, which saw several of British television's most prominent writers interviewed by Brooker.
Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, a similar show focusing on current affairs reporting by the international news media, began on BBC Four on 25 March 2009. A second series began on 19 January 2010. He has also written and presented the one-off special Gameswipe which focused on video games and aired on BBC Four on 29 September 2009.
Brooker's 2010 Wipe, a review of 2010, was broadcast in December 2010. The end-of-year Wipe specials continued annually,[25][26][27][28][29] the last one to date broadcast on 29 December 2016.[30] Due to Brooker's commitments to Black Mirror and other projects, the annual Wipe went on hiatus from 2017 onwards.[31]
Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe was first broadcast on BBC Two on 31 January 2013.[32] It is an amalgam of Screenwipe and Newswipe, with sections focusing on recent news, television shows and films. Along with the regular cast, it also features guests who discuss recent events.[33] Two more series followed in 2014 and 2015.[34][35][36][37] A 60-minute special, Election Wipe, aired on 6 May 2015, focused on the events running up to the 2015 general election.[38]
A 45-minute BBC Two special, Charlie Brooker's Antiviral Wipe, aired on 14 May 2020. It focused on life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.[39][40] It was produced during the UK lockdown, which had caused a series starring Wipe character Philomena Cunk to be postponed. Most of the crew from the series transferred to work on Antiviral Wipe. Brooker initially turned down the offer to make the special but accepted when it was clear that production would be largely unchanged, the format of the series—with few characters appearing on the same screen together and extensive use of archive footage—well-suited to the lockdown rules. The editing process was the most affected.[41][42]
He often signs off his programmes by saying "Thank you for watching. Now go away."[43]
Brooker wrote Dead Set, a five-part zombie horror thriller for E4 set in the Big Brother house.[44] The show was broadcast in October 2008 to coincide with Halloween and was repeated on Channel 4 in January 2009 to coincide with Celebrity Big Brother, and again for Halloween later that year.[45] It was produced by Zeppotron, which also produced Screenwipe.
Brooker told MediaGuardian.co.uk it comprised a "mixture of known and less well known faces" and "Dead Set is very different to anything I've done before, and I hope the end result will surprise, entertain and appall people in equal measure." He added that he has long been a fan of horror films and that his new series "could not be described as a comedy". "I couldn't really describe what it is but it will probably surprise people," Brooker said, adding that he plans to "continue as normal" with his print journalism.
Jaime Winstone starred as a runner on the TV programme, and Big Brother presenter Davina McCall guest starred as herself.[46] Dead Set received a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Serial.[47]
In December 2011, three episodes of Brooker's Black Mirror, a science fiction anthology series, aired on Channel 4 to largely positive reviews.[48][49][50] As well as creating the show, Brooker wrote the first episode and co-wrote the second with his wife Konnie Huq. He also wrote all three episodes of series two. In September 2015, Netflix commissioned a third season of 12 episodes, with Channel 4 losing the rights to the programme.[51][52] A trailer for the third season was released in October 2016.[53] This was later split into two series of six episodes.[54] The third season was released on Netflix worldwide on 21 October 2016.[55] Brooker has solely written four of the episodes in series three, and has co-written the remaining two.
The fourth season was released in December 2017, followed by a full-length interactive film Bandersnatch in December 2018. The fifth season was released in June 2019.
The series is produced by Zeppotron for Endemol. Regarding the programme's content and structure, Brooker noted, "each episode has a different cast, a different setting, even a different reality. But they're all about the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy."[56]
An Endemol press release describes the series as "a hybrid of The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected which taps into our contemporary unease about our modern world", with the stories having a "techno-paranoia" feel.[57]Channel 4 describes the first episode as "a twisted parable for the Twitter age".[58]
Brooker explained the series' title to The Guardian, noting: "If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects? This area – between delight and discomfort – is where Black Mirror, my new drama series, is set. The 'black mirror' of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone."[56]
With Daniel Maier, he co-wrote a spoof crime drama for Sky1 called A Touch of Cloth, which first broadcast on 26 August 2012 and starred John Hannah and Suranne Jones, both notable for having starred in genuine crime dramas.[63] Two further series were broadcast in 2013 and 2014, with the latter starring Karen Gillan.
Brooker has appeared on three episodes and one webisode of the popular BBC current affairs news quiz Have I Got News for You. He appeared on an episode of the Channel 4 panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats, The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2009, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Would I Lie To You?. In December 2006 he reviewed two games written by the presenters of VideoGaiden, on their show. He also made a brief appearance in the third and final instalment of the documentary series Games Britannia, discussing the rise and popularity of computer games.
In 2009, Brooker began hosting You Have Been Watching, a panel comedy TV quiz on Channel 4 which discusses television. A second series was broadcast the following year.
On 6 May 2010, Brooker was a co-host of the Channel 4 alternative election night, along with David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne.[64] The telethon was interspersed with contributions from Brooker, some live in the studio but mostly pre-recorded. Notably, these included an "Election Special" of You Have Been Watching and two smaller segments in an almost identical style to Screenwipe (the only noticeable difference being that Brooker was sitting in a different room). Brooker described the experience of live television as being so nerve-wracking he "did a piss" during the broadcast.[65] A spin-off series, 10 O'Clock Live, started in January 2011 with the same four hosts.[66]
Brooker hosted How TV Ruined Your Life, which aired on BBC Two between January and March 2011.
In November 2020, Hugh Grant reported that Brooker was producing a mockumentary with Netflix "about 2020". Grant stated that he would star as "a historian who is being interviewed about the year."[67] The mockumentary, titled Death to 2020, was released on Netflix on 27 December 2020.[68]
In 2022, the animated interactive fiction Cat Burglar was released. Brooker was credited as creator.[69][70]
Radio
From 2010 to 2012, Brooker presented a BBC Radio 4 series celebrating failure titled So Wrong It's Right, in which guests compete to pitch the worst possible ideas for new franchises and give the "most wrong" answer to a question. It aired 17 episodes across three series.[71] In common with Screenwipe's use of a Grandaddy track (A.M. 180) from the album Under the Western Freeway as its theme tune, So Wrong It's Right uses another track from the same album, Summer Here Kids.
Article from the Guardian featuring in Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology, 2014 ( ISBN978-1-4479-8176-3)[19]
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