Charlie Brooker

 ( 1971 Births ) 

After attending Wallingford School, Brooker attended the University of Westminster (known as the Polytechnic of Central London until his final year there) to study for a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies; he later revealed that he did not graduate because he wrote his dissertation on video games, considered an unacceptable topic for a dissertation. He has listed his comedic influences as Monty Python, The Young Ones, Blackadder, Chris Morris, and Vic Reeves.Desert Island Discs, Charlie Brooker, BBC Radio 4, 7 Jan 2018

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. He and some other employees left to co-found the second-hand retailer CeX. Brooker worked in their first shop and produced cartoon advertisements, and designed their logo.

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 Teutons 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. 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.

On 24 October 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US presidential election 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. He has since commented about the remark in the column stating:

Brooker left the "Screen Burn" column in 2010. In the final column, 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.

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.

In May 2012, Brooker was interviewed for Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast series. In 2019, he made a second appearance on the podcast, which was released during March 2020.

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 "Paedogeddon", Channel 4's Brass Eye special on the subject of pedophilia. In 2003, Brooker wrote an episode entitled "How to Watch Television" for Channel 4's The Art Show. 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 show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.

Screenwipe editions have had 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 on scriptwriting saw several of British television's most prominent writers interviewed by Brooker.

Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, a similar show concerned with 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 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, the last one to date broadcast on 29 December 2016. Due to Brooker's commitments to Black Mirror and other projects, the annual Wipe went on hiatus beginning in 2017.

Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe was first broadcast on BBC Two on 31 January 2013. It was an amalgam of Screenwipe and Newswipe, with sections that dealt with recent news, television shows and films. Along with the regular cast, it also featured guests who discuss recent events. Two more series followed in 2014 and 2015. A 60-minute special, Election Wipe, aired on 6 May 2015, examined events running up to the 2015 general election.

A 45-minute BBC Two special, Charlie Brooker's Antiviral Wipe, aired on 14 May 2020. It concerned life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. 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, as the format of the series required few characters to appear on screen together and made extensive use of archive footage. The editing process was the most affected aspect of production.

Brooker often signs off his programmes by saying "Thank you for watching. Now go away."

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. TV review: Dead Set , Leicester Mercury, 28 October 2008 Dead Set received a BAFTA nomination for Best Drama Serial. Bafta TV Awards 2009: The winners , BBC, 26 April 2009

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."

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. Channel 4 describes the first episode as "a twisted parable for the Twitter age".

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."

Several news reports, including one by Chris Cillizza, political reporter for The Washington Post, compared the 2016 Donald Trump political campaign to "The Waldo Moment", a 2013 episode of the Black Mirror TV series; later, in September 2016, Brooker also compared the Trump campaign to the episode and rightly predicted Trump would win the 2016 election.

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.

Brooker wrote for the BBC Three sketch show Rush Hour.

In 2009, Brooker began hosting You Have Been Watching, a panel game 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. 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. A spin-off series, 10 O'Clock Live, started in January 2011 with the same four hosts.

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." The mockumentary, titled Death to 2020, was released on Netflix on 27 December 2020.

In 2022, the animated interactive fiction Cat Burglar was released. Brooker was credited as creator.

In January 2018, he was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

Brooker is an atheist and contributed to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas. Due to his family's background, he has also described himself as a Quaker.

Brooker won the 2009 Columnist of the Year award at the British Press Awards for his Guardian column. Dead Set was nominated for the 2009 Best Drama Serial BAFTA. In 2010, he was given the Best Entertainment Programme Award for Newswipe from the Royal Television Society. He has received three British Comedy Awards: Best Newcomer in 2009, Best Comedy Entertainment Show Award for Newswipe in 2011 and Best Comedy Entertainment Personality in 2012. At the BAFTA TV Awards 2017, his show Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe won for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme.

• TV Go Home, 2001 (rescanned reprint in 2010) ()
• Unnovations, 2002 (rescanned reprint in 2011) ()
• Screen Burn, 2004 ()
• Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline, 2007 ()
• The Hell of it All, 2009 ()
• I Can Make You Hate, 2012 ()
• Article from the Guardian featuring in Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology, 2014 ()

• Charlie Brooker's Guardian columns