"Please do not swear!"
Long before Black Mirror, in 2008, when Charlie Brooker was still giving us his excellent Screen Wipe on BBC4, we had this, what is at first glance a high concept bit of fun about the Big Brother house during the zombie apocapypse. But it's so much more than that and, indeed, so much more fun than that.
I first watched this as it aired. Watching it today reveals starkly how long ago 2008 feels- the "edgy" vibe, the toxic workplaces and bad bosses, the pre-#MeToo mores, Heat magazine, the phones, trashy pop culture on mass market telly as opposed to the online ghettos to which it is now rightly consigned. Reality TV is well made, and there's an art to it, but in the same way that there's an art to Sun journalists managing to present the news in words of one syllable. It's genuine talent, wasted.
And the zombies are the most bleeding obvious of metaphors. They first attack the screaming crowd after a Big Brother eviction. Are the ensuing ravenous zombie hordes really much different from what they replaced? There's a glorious shot of a dead eyed zombie watching the feed from the Big Brother house. It says it all.
The script is wonderful. Charlie Brooker gives us a fun and real-seeming set of housemates and, in Jaime Winstone's Kelly, a star we can identify with: a runner, probably an unpaid, exploited intern, The satire of the TV industry and its working is splendid too, from a writer who knows his stuff. And, of course, zombie Davina McCall. Need I say more?
First class stuff.
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