Charlie Brooker
You sort of perform your personality, I guess, to everyone on some level.Collection: Personality
People gravitate towards their own era, nostalgia therapy is a real thing that's being tinkered with.Collection: Real
In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.Collection: Hands
I am neurotic, and I'm a worrier.Collection: Neurotic
What we were also trying to do is vary the tone slightly across the season of Black Mirror, because there are six stories this time around, so you don't want it to just be the devastating, bleak-em-up.Collection: Mirrors
Generally I know that we've hit on a good idea if there's a moment where I'm going "HA HA HA!" because that's usually my starting point, me laughing.Collection: Ideas
In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.Collection: Writing
Men Against Jive is a brilliant title! That's a military story, that's a difficult one to explain really because that's sort of a war... it's not just a war story.Collection: Military
It's interesting, in the U.K., I'm known for doing comedy things, which often doesn't translate to the U.S.Collection: Interesting
In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.Collection: Writing
Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.Collection: People
If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.Collection: Glasses
There's something I find very satisfying about a nice ironic twist.Collection: Nice
I pitched Jay Hunt the opening scene (prime minister, middle of the night, he's woken up...). She paused, and then she laughed. She was very intrigued and all that, and then she said, "Does it have to be a pig?" So we went through various options: Could it be a supermarket frozen chicken? A giant wheel of cheese? A pig seemed just the right level of absurd, but then when he walks in and there's actually a pig there, it's awful.Collection: Night
[Black Mirror] is always about unforeseen consequences and unforeseen problems, it's not usually that someone's created a machine that they want to enslave mankind with, it's someone's invented a new kind of... paperweight that enslaves mankind.Collection: Mirrors
What happens often is the script is written and once the director comes on board you have lots of conversations and it mutates again.Collection: Often Is
Am I living in a simulation?Collection: Simulation
Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.Collection: Wish
A sort of angry populism here in the UK and across Europe, a sort of anti-political mood and what then steps into that place? In one episode [of Black Mirror] you won't have seen, there's a very simple gaming gadget that turns out to be a monstrous idea, which I suspect we will end up doing for real.Collection: Real
In many ways, Big Brother is the present day equivalent of a 1980s Club 18-30 Holiday - flirting, sunbathing, silly little organised games, and lots of people you'd like to remove from the genepool with a cricket bat.Collection: Brother
I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.Collection: Thinking
The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.Collection: Fall
I've instinctively hated the Tories since birth.Collection: Birth
Being slagged off is good for you. It thickens the skin and strengthens the backbone.Collection: Skins
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity because this week the National Association of Beholders wrote to tell me that I've got a face like a rucksack full of dented bells.Collection: Eye
I really don't want to sound like overly negative or critical of the Internet in general because I'm actually really quite pro-technology.Collection: Technology
I was more aware initially of shows like Tales of the Unexpected. And the BBC used to put on a lot of one-off, bizarre television plays.Collection: Play
I'll just immediately automatically, without even thinking, check my phone. And it feels like the same little bit of my brain is being - the synapses are lighting up when I do that.Collection: Thinking
I mean, sometimes we do do that, The National Anthem was a caustic satire and sometimes that's the way to go with the story rather than me being particularly misanthropic.Collection: Mean
Often the ideas in the show start out as ideas that make you laugh - outrageous "what if" ideas. I wanted an outlet for doing those.Collection: Ideas
My continuum? Blimey! For me,Black Mirror is all part of the whole.Collection: Mirrors
I'm more pro-technology than people probably realize.Collection: Technology
I'm quite geeky and I'm very much into video games and technology and stuff like that.Collection: Technology
I'm a worrier. In the UK, if I'm known for anything, it's sort of for being cynical.Collection: Cynical
It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.Collection: Thinking
I saw The Twilight Zone for the first time when I was 12 or 13. I used to stay up late to watch.Collection: Twilight
While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.Collection: Military
I've always had a bad attention span.Collection: Attention
I'm terrible at reading fiction. I don't have the attention span - it's awful.Collection: Reading
I could worry about pretty much anything you put in front of me, so I'm not actually sort of anti-technology. So it doesn't sort of come out of that. It's not like a fear of the future. It's a fear of everything.Collection: Technology
'Waldo' was one episode I always felt I didn't quite crack. And weirdly, now that feels like one of the more prescient ones.Collection: Cracks
[One of my kids ]is not named after Aldous Huxley. I haven't even read Brave New World!Collection: Kids
[My parents when I was a kid] would go, "It's a nice hot day. Why are you inside watching the TV?" And you go, "Well, 'cause it's better?"Collection: Nice
I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!Collection: Kids
"National Anthem" was just a funny idea I'd been knocking about. I initially thought about a beloved celebrity having to do that - and then I watched an episode of 24. In my head, I was writing almost a parody of a 24-style president woken in the middle of the night with a crisis. It seemed more interesting to play it ultrastraight and to have the viewer's initial reaction be one of laughter and disbelief - and just have the whole thing become progressively more uncomfortable.Collection: Laughter
I actually had that conversation with [Channel 4 Chief Creative Officer] Jay Hunt. We were at a bit of a crisis point. I'd written a totally different script - about war, basically - that got rejected at the last minute for various reasons. The whole of the series was in doubt. I said, "Well, there is one other idea ["National Anthem"]."Collection: War
My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.Collection: Powerful
I think somebody's marketing a thing that Hoovers up your Twitter and it will continue tweeting for you after you're dead. I have no idea whether they saw "Be Right Back" or not.Collection: Thinking
I can worry about anything.Collection: Worry