Like a lump of coal chucked among the chintz of Christmas, Charlie Brooker is bringing back his dark, dystopian satire Black Mirror for a festive special on Channel 4.
The special is a single feature-length tale with three intertwined storylines. “I always enjoy a good ghost story at Christmas, and I’m a sucker for the Amicus compendium horror movies of the 70s,” Brooker told the Radio Times. “Our aim is to create the Black Mirror equivalent of that.”
Channel 4’s head of comedy, Phil Clarke, described it as “a dystopian future festive tale, that intertwines three stories to deliver a dramatic and thrilling twist. It’s satirical, comic, disturbing, and thought provoking.”
Black Mirror has had two series of three separate episodes each, exploring a variety of vivid possible futures, featuring robot boyfriends, replayable memories and – perhaps less feasibly – the prime minister in coitus with a pig.
Elsewhere in Channel 4’s lineup of autumn and winter shows, there’s a major cross-platform project from Russell T Davies, exploring gay life in Britain. Cucumber and Banana are two dramas, one on Channel 4 and one on E4 but with characters crossing between each; Tofu, meanwhile, is an online documentary exploring modern sex lives.
There’s more sex in Scrotal Recall, a romantic comedy perhaps reverse-engineered from its fabulous title – it focuses on a man who has to contact his previous sexual partners to let them know he has an STD. And following on from Sex Box last year, the channel continues its car-crash approach to the complexities of human relationships with Married at First Sight, where strangers marry each other having been matched with “a range of scientific and sociological criteria”.
Drugs and rock’n’roll meanwhile also get a look in, with Drugs Live monitoring people getting high on cannabis, and documentary series Don’t Stop the Music campaigning to get kids to take up instruments. Grayson Perry is another big culture name, with a look at the development of a bizarre Essex holiday home he designed, as well as Who Are You?, in which he makes portraits of people at crossroads in their lives.
New crime drama includes Glue from This Is England writer Jack Thorne, and Paul Abbott’s previously announced No Offence, while real-life crime gets examined in 24 Hours in Police Custody, riffing on the format that made 24 Hours in A&E such a success. The channel’s controversial hit Benefits Street has a sequel in Immigrant Street; other returning shows include Babylon and Googlebox, while Gordon Ramsay’s Nightmares series hits the European tourist circuit.
Finally, the jewel in its drama lineup is 10-parter Indian Summer, starring Julie Walters, which promises to be an epic look at the dying days of the British empire in India.
