Black Mirror's Pilot Was Actually Inspired By This Gross British Reality Show

"Black Mirror," Charlie Brooker's anthology series about the perils of technology that originally aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom before jumping ship to Netflix, is a deeply disturbing show by any metric. With that said, it starts on a really, really unsettling note with the episode "The National Anthem," in which Prime Minister Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear) learns that Princess Susannah (Lydia Wilson), a member of the British royal family, is being held hostage. Susannah's captor forces the princess to record a video where she outlines the condition for her survival and release: that Callow have sexual intercourse to completion with a pig on live television. Though Callow and his team try and outsmart the captor (by hiring an adult film star to stand in as Callow as they try and track down the princess), he ultimately performs the act — only to discover that the princess was released before he even began.

So where in the world did Brooker and his colleague, executive producer Annabel Jones, get the twisted idea for this? According to the book "Inside Black Mirror," released in 2018 and written by Brooker, Jones, and Jason Arnopp, it was inspired by the British reality series "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" On that show, British TV presenters Ant and Dec watch as celebrities perform deeply humiliating acts in the name of surviving a stint in the jungle, so it's easy to see how Brooker came up with the idea (sort of).

"I was watching somebody like Peter Andre – I can't remember who – but they were absolutely terrified, almost in tears, shaking, crying, sweating," Brooker recalled in the book. "They had to do something like eat an arsehole with an eyeball pushed into it, that's been rolled in dog sh*t while a spider crawled over the roof of their mouth. They were gagging, and there was something about seeing it live. I thought, 'I'm not enjoying this, what the f**k, this is awful!' At one point it cut to Ant and Dec and I thought Dec looked infinitely sad, like he had gazed into the abyss."

"'The National Anthem' was about humiliation and the public's appetite for humiliation," Jones added: 

"The public will celebrate anyone if they are prepared to humiliate themselves for the public's entertainment. Celebrities had begun to realise this: some were going on 'I'm A Celebrity ...' for redemption, and others to try and extend their careers. But it wasn't just celebrities – when ['Dead Set,' Brooker's previous series about a zombie apocalypse] was on air, Brian Paddick was in the jungle. The previous year he'd been Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police Service and standing to be the Mayor of London! How nuts is that?"

I am not a showrunner, nor am I in charge of anything to do with episode orders ... but if I'm being honest, I think that "The National Anthem" was a wild choice for the very first episode of "Black Mirror," particularly because it has little to do with technology, the main focus of much of the rest of the series. (Either of the two following episodes in the show's short first season, "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Entire History of You," would have been more representative of the show as a whole, in my very humble opinion.) Charlie Brooker, naturally, knows that, and he said in "Inside Black Mirror" that he sort of intended for viewers to be a bit put off by the choice of premiere.

"The fact that we start 'Black Mirror' with 'The National Anthem' does throw quite a lot of people, perhaps because it makes them feel quite sick, in a horrible, doomy way," Brooker mused. "There's a queasy inevitability about it. I know it makes it difficult for some people to recommend the show! Some people just do not get that one, but I see it as darkly funny. People say it's ridiculous, and of course we know it's ridiculous, but we play it straight. It's supposed to be ridiculous to start with and then it's not."

In fact, Brooker said that the impetus for the episode actually came from a different and wholly unrelated series, in a way. "I'd had the idea before that it would be a very funny episode of '24' if Jack Bauer [Kiefer Sutherland's lead character] was presented with a dilemma of having to f**k a pig," Brooker said. "And then I thought that if you played that totally straight it would be hilarious. But while working out the beats of the actual story, you realize that it wouldn't be very funny. And having done 'Dead Set,' I was more confident that you could take something preposterous but make the tone very straight."

With all that said, the weirdest twist of "The National Anthem" is that, four years after it aired, there was a real-life scandal involving a British prime minister and a pig. No, really.

Four years after "The National Anthem" premiered, in 2015, Charlie Brooker was approached by The Guardian for comment on recent headlines. Lord Ashcroft had penned a biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron, in which Ashcroft alleged that, during some sort of "initiation ceremony" at Oxford University, Cameron "inserted a private part of his anatomy" into a dead pig's mouth. Brooker, for his part, was understandably sort of horrified that he'd accidentally predicted this.

"The first question people were asking me was, Did I know anything about it? And the answer is no, absolutely not," Brooker told the outlet. "I probably wouldn't have bothered writing an episode of a fictional comedy-drama if I'd known. I'd have been running around screaming it into traffic. It's a complete coincidence, albeit a quite bizarre one."

"I did genuinely for a moment wonder if reality was a simulation, whether it exists only to trick me. Which isn't meant to sound narcissistic," he continued. "It's just a bit of a worry." As Brooker said in "Inside Black Mirror" in 2018, a big inspiration was "I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!" but in the interview with The Guardian, Brooker also name-checked a scandal involving former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a comic he read once, and Hunter S. Thompson's infamous (and alleged) suggestion to United States President Lyndon B. Johnson that he insult a political rival by "calling him a pig-f**ker" to "make the sonofab*tch deny it."

"In the episode itself," Brooker concluded, "it's worth pointing out that it doesn't actually damage the prime minister in the long run." Unfortunately for Cameron, that allegation did stick for a long time. 

"Black Mirror" is available to stream on Netflix now.