Black Mirror season 5 is "imminent-ish" says Charlie Brooker

“It's all imminent-ish. It'll be out soon,” Brooker told RadioTimes.com, adding that the new season would be “a mix” of Black Mirror’s trademark nihilistic tone and some slightly lighter episodes.

“Doing Bandersnatch was like doing several episodes at once,” he said, “so in one respect the other season five episodes are more straightforward, though they all come with their own challenges.”

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“They're all different tones, so [doing the full series] is quite similar to Bandersnatch in that respect,” added co-showrunner Annabel Jones.

“We deliberately went for different endings, albeit ones that made sense for Stefan, in Bandersnatch.”

Apparently, one episode of season five had already been made when work began on Bandersnatch (which was filmed in spring 2018).

While Brooker and Jones wouldn’t be drawn on exactly how many episodes would be part of the upcoming series, they did reveal the difficulty they had in fitting their new choose-your-own-adventure tale within it.

“We'd already shot like, one of the episodes of season five before we did Bandersnatch,” Brooker explained.

“At one point we weren't sure whether we were going to make Bandersnatch part of season five.

“It was Netflix's suggestion as well: 'let's do it as its own thing'. As it expanded and got bigger and bigger and bigger it became apparent that the way to do this was to do it as a standalone thing.”

“I think it would have destabilised the series a little bit,” Jones explained. “To have this big huge interactive film among other films.”

The content of those other films remains, of course, a closely-guarded secret – about the only thing we DO know is that singer/actor Miley Cyrus may play a character in one of them – though Brooker did suggest that earlier comments he’d made about the series being more politically-focussed may have been misconstrued.

“It's slightly out of context,” Brooker told us.

“Last time I kept getting asked, ‘How do you do Black Mirror in a dystopian present?’ and I was saying, 'Well I deliberately haven't written an episode about Brexit, because you don't know how that's going to play out, so you'd have to wait and see, in a way.’

“Because of the turnaround time that we have, we don't want to be completely outmoded. We don't tend to do things where we go, 'Oh what's happening today?' and then write about that. So I don't know that that's true.

“Also, weirdly we've done a lot of those things already,” he noted. “We've sort of done Trump [in series two episode The Waldo Moment].”

“It’s probably not more political this year, really, except maybe when it is,” he concluded.

“Sorry – I can never give any concrete information about anything.”

Oh well – even if we don’t know what to expect, Brooker assures us we won’t be left in the dark for too long.

“I don't know what you think, or I’d say it’s out ‘sooner than you think,’” he said.

“It’s either that, or as soon as you think, or later!”

Glad we cleared that up.

Black Mirror season five returns to Netflix later this year