Black Mirror's Pilot Accidentally Foreshadowed A Real Life Political Scandal
"Black Mirror" came to our lives as quickly and confidently as "The Office" and "Sherlock" (remember "Sherlock?"), becoming a global sensation. This is a series that echoed the style of "The Twilight Zone," but was about modern problems and worries about technology and its place in our lives, as the internet and social media were beginning to become as key to our daily lives as having dinner or watching TV.
Many episodes of "Black Mirror" feel prescient the same way "The Simpsons" seems to be the TV equivalent of Nostradamus, predicting dozens of events in the past couple of decades. "Black Mirror" has given us weird entertainers becoming leaders of cynical political movements, social media where you could rank other people, stationary bikes that could generate power for currency, AI programs to replicate human memories and dead loved ones, and so much more that has already become or is on the verge of becoming a reality. No matter how much the series satirizes our reality, however, no episode has been as prescient as its pilot, "The National Anthem."
In the very first episode of the show, a member of the British royal family is kidnapped, and the kidnappers demand that the Prime Minister have sex with a pig live on national television, or the princess gets murdered. It's a bizarre, thrilling episode that satirizes the British government, the public's obsession with scandal, and more. More importantly, the episode also predicted a big and very real scandal. Before the arrival of season 6, let's revisit the twist that started it all.
A prescient nightmare
Back in 2015, an unofficial biography alleged that former Prime Minister David Cameron's university days were full of debauchery. More specifically, he was involved in an initiation ceremony at Oxford that involved Cameron inserting his penis in a dead pig's head, which is somehow worse than what Charlie Brooker came up with for "Black Mirror."
Speaking with Empire for its July 2023 issue, Brooker reflected on the episode. "That actually sent me a bit bonkers for a short period, because I thought, 'That can't be real! Surely that can't have happened? It's too eerily close,'" Brooker said. "It makes you feel like you're living in a simulation."
The thing is, Brooker is wrong. Something so dumb as a guy who puts his penis in a dead pig's head for some dumb frat initiation going on to become Prime Minister is so unbelievably dumb that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt we are not in a simulation. There's no way someone or something would deliberately write a storyline this silly.
Part of the reason the episode still holds up is that it is from the early days of the show, before "Black Mirror" went global. Back then, the issues and the stories and satires were uniquely British, more biting, more specific. As mentioned, "The National Anthem" works not because it's about a Prime Minister having sex with a pig, but because of how it framed it from a British point of view, satirizing the media, the culture, and the traditions of the country. Even if newer episodes are more ambitious or look more visually impressive, it is that first episode that made this show what it is, and the episode with the most bizarre real-life connection.