Warning: Contains spoilers. Read at own risk!
We've all got avatars. A little pixelated man on XBox Live, a little image on Facebook, a Mii on the Wii. But in Charlie Brooker's new biting dystopia, an avatar is all anyone's got. This brave new world is full of screens, the populace dulled into sitting passively and either watching porn ("WraithBabes") or talent contests. All anyone does for a living is pedal exercise bikes, which presumably generates the electricity that keeps the screens on in the first place. Everyone wears the same clothes, personal possessions are banned, and fat people are the underclass, "lemons".
Our protagonist is Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), a young man with nothing remotely real in his life until he hears the beautiful Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay) singing in the toilets. Hoping to provide her with a way out from the devastatingly boring lives they lead, he persuades her to audition for the top talent show, HotShots (any resemblance to Britain's Got Talent and its ilk is purely coincedental, of course). A relationship tentatively forming between Bing and Abi, they take the pitch-black lift to the HotShots studio...where Abi is drugged to ensure her compliance and led away to become a 'WraithBabe', a porn star. The next time we see her, she's on screen, her eyes blank, being touched and violated. Bleak stuff? We haven't even started yet.
15 Million Questions
Bing starts his rebellion against the system which destroyed Abi - he breaks a screen and retrieves a shard of glass, and then travels back to HotShots with the intention of destroying them all. Three creepy judges (not at all meant to represent Simon Cowell and co, not at all) are the ones who rule the place - they're Wraith (Ashley Thomas), Charity (Julia Davies) and Hope (Rupert Everett). You'd be right in thinking there's not an inch of actual charity or hope between them. Bing's great act of rebellion doesn't work out how he planned - with the glass held to his throat he screams at them, live on air, but this is a particularly insidious kind of dystopia. "That is, without a doubt...the most heart-felt thing I've ever seen on HotShots," announces Hope, and suddenly Bing is part of the system, another worthless commodity. His fellow citizens tune in every day to watch him ranting, and then they casually turn over to another show about humiliating fat people. It sounds so familiar, so horribly familiar...
This has more than a hint of 1984 about it, as well as a little of Ben Elton's Blind Faith (although this is superior to the latter). The hideous world Bing inhabits is left mysterious and low-key. How do these people breed? Why are there no windows? Is the human race maybe underground, or in space? Has the world we know been ruined forever - pollution, nuclear war? And where are all the children, old people and babies? Even the ending is left ambiguous - Bing, having moved up in the world, is left staring out at a panorama of trees. Is it the real world out there, or is it just another screen?
Be A Hotshot
It's such a relief to have a show that questions us so thoroughly. Interpretations have sprung up all over the web - is Bing meant to represent Brooker himself, a man who found his place on television by complaining about television? Is Bing meant to be sympathetic, when we consider that in the end he chooses to escape into a dubious fame and seemingly forgets all about Abi - who is still being used as a sex slave? Oh, and then there's the irony of this being aired right after the finale of Simon Cowell's tv-eating talent show beast, The X Factor...
Bleak and tragic this may have been, but it was a magnificent piece of television. Charlie Brooker and wife Kanak Huq (also known as Konnie Huq, long-time Blue Peter presenter) shared writing duties on this one, and I hope it's not the last time they work together. And Daniel Kaluuya completely hits it out of the park. He barely says anything until his hate-fueled attack at the end, and yet he perfectly puts across everything Bing is thinking and feeling. He deserves to be a massive star - then again, watching this show would put anyone off stardom. Abi's soul had been taken from her, but Bing willingly sold his out. In the end, he loved Big Brother. Or, in his case, Britain's Got Talent.
Sarah Barrett - Sarah Barrett is a relatively new writer, but looks forward to seeing where her writing takes her. She loves books, films, and British TV, ...
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