Brooker Prize guy - Charlie Brooker interview

Published on Friday 24 October 2008 18:10

He once likened Davina McCall to a shrieking Harvester's barmaid on her hen night – so how has Charlie Brooker now managed to persuade her to star in his zombie send-up of Big Brother? Aidan Smith finds out

IT SURELY doesn't take the most cynical of minds to imagine that when Davina McCall was offered the part of a zombie in a send-up of Big Brother, her advisers decided that self-mockery was the way forward for their star and so treated her to lunch in her favourite restaurant in the hope of persuading her to say yes.

McCall (nibbling on a rocket leaf): "So let me get this right: I have to eat human flesh?"

Adviser No 1: "Yes, you rip out a contestant's stomach and chew on his large intestine."

McCall: "But I'm best-known outside Big Brother for skincare commercials! I'm surface, not innards – that's why the public love me!

Adviser No 2: "Well, they didn't love you the last time you stepped outside the BB comfort zone."

McCall: "I've told you: never mention my chat show again."

Adviser No 1: "Listen, Davina, the BB ratings are down and the public are getting tired of being portrayed as zombies for watching it. They want you to play a member of the undead and we really think you'd be brilliant at it."

I am in the canteen of Endemol, perpetrators of Big Brother, and am explaining my theory to guerrilla TV critic Charlie Brooker who has written the spoof Dead Set, and he laughs – but only out of politeness. It seems my mind is far more cynical than his.

"I was dreading Davina saying no because I've been rude about her in print," he says. Not half he has. "Is there a more annoying racket than Davina's nasal craw?" he once opined. Another time he likened her to a "shrieking Harvester's barmaid on her hen night". If she'd said no, his production was in trouble. "But even before the introductions were finished she was jumping up and down and shouting: "I love it, I want to do it, I love it, I want to be a zombie!"

Didn't such keenness make him suspicious? "Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't think this was a calculated move on her part – she just thought it'd be fun. On set she was fantastic. Some of the actors would leer at the camera and go 'Yeurrrch!' and we'd have to do 30-odd takes because they didn't understand that zombies don't care if we're scared of them. But we told Davina, 'Go in that room and kill', and she went absolutely mental. I don't know if she was working out some personal issues but we were all pretty frightened."

Brooker, 37, seems like a perfect fit for Dead Set, a romp about a zombie armageddon which leaves only the Big Brother House intact. He made his name satirising idiotic media types on his spoof telly listings website TVGoHome and continued in this vein with the Channel 4 comedy Nathan Barley, co-scripted with Chris Morris. He began slagging off the small screen for his Screen Burn column – which later became Screen Wipe on BBC4 – when the brand new BB landed right in his lap.

The housemate they called Craig was, in Brooker's eyes, "a man born with a knee where his brain should be" while Marco was "a homosexual ghost-train skeleton" and Bubble was "a yobbanoidal Club 18-30 sperm generator" (though apparently he's now a playwright). But maybe it was Scotland's very own Federico who provided the inspiration for Dead Set: Brooker used to fantasise about killing him with 15,000 mallet blows.

Dead Set isn't the satire you might have expected, however, or indeed wanted. Of its two key elements – the housemates and the zombies – Brooker is far more interested in the latter. The BB House only came into play after an over-the-wall escape got him thinking about the occupants missing world-shattering events while they were picking their noses – "I've always wanted the entire eviction night audience to dress up as Nazis." For him, the zombies came first.

"I've always loved zombie movies," he says, and rather endearingly, his corrosive critical faculties desert him here and he turns into a schlock-video-store drongo. Why does he love them? "When you see zombies shuffle through a shopping mall, it's just great. I don't think 'What a brilliant comment on consumerist society!', it's just… great."

Dead Set is produced by an Endemol subsidiary and as well as McCall there are appearances from ex-housemates, giving the impression of an "approved" lampoon. Brooker admits: "It sounds too cosy, I agree. But I think if we'd done it on BBC we couldn't have said it was Big Brother. It would have to have been called Camera House or something and maybe I'd have ended up going: 'Look, everyone – satire!' My involvement seems to have confused some people. The satire is there but at no point do I say: 'You see what reality TV has done? It's turned us into mindless zombies!'"

If Brooker loves to love zombie films does he then love to hate BB? "I'm ambivalent about it. A lot of people get very John Humphrys on the subject and the contestants are regarded as desperate wannabes – but if I was 22 and had a boring call-centre job, reality TV would appeal to me."

Brooker also points out, for the benefit of those who think Dead Set is a softer show than his reputation suggested, that he's always been a mainstream kind of guy. "I wrote TVGoHome anonymously and there were people wondering: 'Who is this dark crusader?' What they didn't know was that at the same time I was the co-presenter of a gadgets show on BBC Knowledge." He's always been a TV nerd, fascinated in subversion of the medium. Growing up in Oxfordshire, his social-worker father encouraged him to watch Monty Python, and even aged seven he understood the surrealism of closing credits which didn't actually mean the end. Nothing is what it seems in Brooker's world, including the man himself, though the hovel featured in Screen Wipe really is his flat. "It's actually messier than that; I tidy up for the recordings. I even have a cleaner and I'm sure she must think the camera ominously trained on the sofa is for porn movies."

Does he share his life, and his grand obsession, with a significant other? "Well, I've got someone staying at the moment but she's in hiding, ha ha. My relationships seem to get shorter each time. I'm like the archetypal TV cop who comes home to a note. It's really quite depressing."

His working relationship with Chris Morris has been a fruitful one. Though Morris is currently trying to get a suicide-bomber comedy off the ground, Brooker hopes to team up again with the dangerous genius who, while intimidating enough, appears to have a fondness for goofy japes.

Chris Morris a clown? Davina McCall a good sport and, what's more, "incredibly nice"? Brooker is definitely losing it.

• Dead Set (E4) starts tomorrow at 10pm, running for five consecutive nights. Screen Wipe (BBC4) returns on November 18