"This world of technology isn’t being reflected on television. People aren’t using their phones to email or tweet as much as they should do.

“If EastEnders was really reflecting people’s lives there would be people in the pub sitting typing all the time.”

Charlie Brooker is a self-confessed lover of technology and gadgets – the sort of person who will go out and buy the latest games console on the day of its release.

But when it comes to casting a critical eye on the fast rise of technology in modern society, his dystopian nightmare Black Mirror has no equal.

Originally described by Brooker as “the way we might be living in ten minutes’ time if we’re clumsy”, Black Mirror has created alternative futures of perfectly reconstructed dead boyfriends, cartoon characters ruling political debate, inerasable memories, and the prime minister of an unpopular government getting intimate with a pig on national television.

Brooker will be the special guest at a screening of two episodes from his Emmy Award-winning first series, taking questions afterwards.

Although the running order hasn’t been confirmed, it looks set to include 15 Million Merits – the unforgettable tale of drones in a future world dominated by technology dreaming of getting away from their endless toil on gleaming exercise bikes by winning a talent contest.

This show – co-written with his wife, former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq – was the first Brooker delivered to Channel Four following the success of his 2008 zombie black comedy Dead Set, which used the Big Brother house as its backdrop.

“I had always wanted to do something like The Twilight Zone,” he says, fresh back from holiday.

“There was a long period where it was going to be eight half-hour episodes, which didn’t have that technology focus Black Mirror has. It was going to be wider than that – with supernatural elements.”

Lightbulb moment

It was rewatching the original Twilight Zone that provided the lightbulb moment.

“I noticed that basically The Twilight Zone was reflecting the worries of the day in the 1950s and early 1960s,” says Brooker.

“When I thought about what had changed the world recently, I only had to look at the footage unveiling the new Pope.

“There was a famous photo of the crowds in St Peter’s Square – but it was a sea of blinking lights from where the crowd were holding up their smartphones to record the moment.

“Technology is like an experiment being conducted on us which we've bought into.”

It was that idea which led to the creation of 15 Million Merits and another, as yet unfilmed, episode Inbound, which Brooker believes could appear in a future series in a reworked format.

“Channel Four weren’t entirely sold on the second one,” admits Brooker.

“The series was going to be in real jeopardy – we wanted a series of three episodes and we only had two, one of which they didn’t think was right.

“I went for a meeting with the head of Channel Four trying to put the case for this story they didn’t like, but in my back pocket I had the idea for The National Anthem.”

Anyone wishing to avoid spoilers should probably skip the next few paragraphs.

The National Anthem, which opened the first series of Black Mirror, saw the nation plunged into crisis as a Princess – eerily resembling the Duchess Of Cambridge – was kidnapped and ransomed.

The price for her release? Rory Kinnear’s prime minister has to have sex with a pig on live television.

“I had the idea back in the 1990s of a celebrity being forced to do it,” says Brooker, who first rose to cult fame with his blackly satirical Radio Times parody website TV Go Home.

“It was a surprisingly easy sell. The main bone of contention with Channel Four was whether it had to be a pig. The conversation went from a frozen supermarket chicken to a large wheel of cheese but it kept coming back to the pig.”

Brooker is proud that, as the opening show, The National Anthem wrong-footed people.

“The trailers for it made it look like there was some sort of national crisis going on,” he says. “We deliberately didn’t tell people what the reason was.

“There was a big WTF moment which you rarely get on television today – Game Of Thrones managed it recently, as did the early series of Spooks.”

Black Mirror is unusual in today’s television schedules – the only constant with the six episodes released so far is the role of Brooker as writer (of five in total) or executive producer.

The Argus:

Above: Black Mirror series 1, episode 2: 15 Million Merits

Each episode has a different director, location, timeline, storyline and cast – with the likes of Rupert Everett, Hayley Atwell, Psychoville’s Daniel Kaluuya, Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay, Lindsay Duncan, Julia Davis, Being Human’s Lenora Crichlow, Michael Smiley and Jason Flemyng all playing roles in the series.

“We approached each episode as like a little film,” says Brooker. “Normally if you’re doing a drama series you have returning cast members and set locations – even Jimmy McGovern’s The Street was set in the same geographical location – so this was the biggest hurdle.

“We wanted the episodes to be a real selection box, where you didn’t know what you would get next week. We had to blow it up at the end of each episode.”

It meant the actual shoots became more difficult and expensive, with whole worlds of fashions and technologies having to be created for each episode, only to be discarded at the end.

“When it goes right it’s very satisfying,” says Brooker, who admits to being obsessive about the different operating systems his future worlds use.

“There are lots of things you don’t have to flesh out – you can tell a different type of story than you could over a long-running series.

“The world of 15 Million Merits doesn’t really make sense – you couldn’t tell the story as a six-part series because you would have to flesh it out a lot to deal with the logic of the world. It would start to get frustrating. I prefer a level of ambiguity.”

New writing projects

He is now looking down the barrel of a lot of new writing projects, having spent the past couple of months since the satirical Channel Four show 10 O’Clock Live finished taking it easy. “I have lots of things coming up but I can’t really say anything about them,” he laughs. “It’s slightly daunting but I function best in a panic.”

Following the success of TV Go Home in the early 2000s, Brooker was recruited as a columnist for The Guardian writing both his television rant Screen Burn between 2000 and 2010 and a Monday column from 2006 – a role he recently relinquished to focus on his other projects.

With the columns he gained a reputation for a misanthropic vision of the world – attacking humanity at random for their obsessions, haircuts and general dopey herd mentality.

He carried on the attack on television, writing the acidic deconstruction of the hipster Nathan Barley with Chris Morris, having been part of the team behind the controversial Brass Eye paedophilia special.

He has also lent his critical eye to the worlds of gaming and news with his various, sporadic “Wipe” series, attacked the role television has had on society with the mini-series How Television Ruined Your Life, and attacked the cliches of the gritty detective serial in A Touch Of Cloth – the last episode of which will be broadcast on Sky One on Sunday.

Despite this, he is engaging and extremely self- deprecating in person – happy to ramble about his work and pop culture in general, slipping into gentle but considered rants about the modern world with little encouragement.

Modern annoyances

“Why do people go to gigs and film it on their phone? Who is ever going to watch this footage back? I fundamentally don’t understand it. You’re certainly not saving it for posterity – who is going to look at footage shot on a mobile phone five years ago? It’s going to look like pixelated dog s***.

“I remember years ago going to Las Vegas with a bunch of people for a video games trade fair and going on a small plane over the Grand Canyon. I’m not a good flyer, so the way I made it less terrifying was to film the whole thing. Peeking into the viewfinder got me through the ordeal. People seem to do that all the time – I don’t know what that’s about. It’s like collecting rather than experiencing – being able to prove you were there. This level of oddness has been introduced into people’s lives.

“In ten years we will look back at this time when we held devices in our hand – when we had to hold up these little rectangles. I wonder if the successors will even be visible?”

Despite having such an impressive CV – which also includes presenting Channel Four’s panel show You Have Been Watching and 10 O’Clock Live – he admits to finding writing difficult.

“I tend to have conflicting traits of laziness and terror,” he says. “I think any freelancer can relate to that mindset. I will put things off until they are crunchingly close to the deadline.

“I’m always reading about writers giving advice for being a writer. I hate it!

“Sometimes I break through into the zone and I’m not aware of time passing but it’s that bit before I hate which can be a real drudge. It’s the curse of the blank page – and the voice in your head going, ‘That’s rubbish. That sentence is rubbish and the next one is worse.’ “The columns tended to be a stream of consciousness, which was quite good, but with a script you can go back and be constantly reconstructing something. It’s almost like being a time traveller – changing parts around so the whole thing appears to have a structure.”

Problematic storylines

With Black Mirror, it was hard to tell which stories were going to be problematic.

“Be Right Back, about clone software bringing back a dead husband, I wrote very quickly. The National Anthem was structured a bit like an episode of 24, with a cliffhanger every 15 minutes.

“White Bear [from the second series, which saw a girl waking from a deep sleep and being chased by mobile phone-wielding tormentors] was written from scratch about five times – it ended up as a completely different story from where it started.”

He still retains a fascination with technology and, although he won’t be drawn on whether a third series of Black Mirror is forthcoming, he does say he’s not planning on stopping it.

“I look at social networking and I just don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think it’s harmful – I’m just not sure the technology has made us any happier.

“It’s definitely changed the way we do things and opened up all sorts of opportunities – good stuff and negative stuff. I’m not sure which way we are heading, which is what Black Mirror is all about.”

He doesn’t see his work on Black Mirror as a way of changing things.

“I don’t know if I have any solutions,” he says. “It’s not my job to say, ‘Hey world, wake up and have a look at this’. I hope Black Mirror reflects a general unease and spooks people out a bit.

“Ultimately, I want to entertain people. I don’t care if they think!”

  • Black Mirror With Charlie Brooker screens at Duke Of York’s Picturehouse, Preston Circus, Brighton, on Thursday, September 12, as part of Brighton Digital Festival. The film starts at 6.30pm and is now sold out. Call 0871 9025728 for returns.
  • For more information about Brighton Digital Festival, visit brightondigitalfestival.co.uk