Charlie Brooker reveals what would cause him to end Black Mirror
Don't worry, he's not planning to pull the plug anytime soon...
The past four series of Black Mirror have given us a variety of nightmare scenarios, often too close to home, from real-life block buttons, to cartoon politicians and webcam blackmailers.
And with the fifth season just around the corner, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker has revealed when he might call time on the award-winning series.
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Speaking to RadioTimes.com, he explained: “If we totally ran out of ideas and someone came and knocked it out of our hands with a big stick, we might stop doing it.
“I kind of get bored easily. That’s the thing about Black Mirror, because it’s constantly different, it means it never gets boring. It’s frequently terrifying and often difficult but I can hand on heart say I’ve never been bored.
“When you start getting bored and feel like you’re going through the motions, that’s when you need to stop doing something for a while or just pause it. But that seems way off [for Black Mirror].”
Brooker added in new book, Inside Black Mirror, “I’m usually worried that I’ve got no more ideas, or I’ve got ideas but I can’t make them work. But Black Mirror is really only limited by the number of dilemmas you can think of.
“There doesn’t seem to be a shortage of dilemmas but it’s different to know where the next idea is coming from because they just pop up when you rub various things together.”
The 47-year-old said that if he did ever get “bored” of Black Mirror, even then he may not cut the show completely, and may just put it on pause to revisit at a later date.
“If we ever got tired of Black Mirror, we’d just put it on hold, do something else, then go back to it.
“Although the joy of it is, you can reinvent it all the time. We can keep endlessly redefining what Black Mirror is. Which I suppose means we can never stop. We can never leave. We’re trapped here forever.”
The fifth series of Black Mirror looks set to be the most terrifying so far – with Brooker confessing they’re trying the most “complicated idea yet” for the new season, with episodes set to reflect “f***ing lunacy” being the new political norm.
Season 5 of Black Mirror comes to Netflix later this year
Inside Black Mirror, published by Ebury Press, is out on 1st November