Charlton Brooker (born 3 March 1971) is an English screenwriter, producer, presenter, author, cartoonist, and social critic. He first became known for creating and presenting satirical television shows that featured criticism of modern society and the media, such as Screenwipe, Gameswipe, Newswipe, and Weekly Wipe.
Brooker came to wider prominence as the creator, writer, and executive producer of the dystopian anthology series Black Mirror. His other work includes writing for comedy series such as Brass Eye, Cunk on Earth, The 11 O'Clock Show, and Nathan Barley, creating the horror drama series Dead Set, writing social criticism pieces for The Guardian, co-founding and designing the logo for second-hand retailer CeX, and serving as a creative director for the production company Zeppotron.
Contents
Early life
Charlton Brooker was born on 3 March 1971 in Reading, Berkshire. He grew up in a "relaxed" Quaker household in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire. His parents, who were fans of the sitcom Bewitched, named him Charlton after a character featured in one episode and his sister Samantha after the show's main character. As a teenager, he first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!
After attending Wallingford School, Brooker attended the University of Westminster (known as the Polytechnic of Central London until his final year there) to study for a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies; he later revealed that he did not graduate because he wrote his dissertation on video games, considered an unacceptable topic for a dissertation. He has listed his comedic influences as Monty Python, The Young Ones, Blackadder, Chris Morris, and Vic Reeves.
Brooker did some early work as a cartoonist and worked in the video game department of Music and Video Exchange, a retailer in Notting Hill Gate. He and some other employees left to co-found the second-hand retailer CeX. Brooker worked in their first shop and produced cartoon advertisements, and designed their logo.
Career
After some of Brooker's CeX cartoons were printed in the magazine PC Zone, he was invited to write for the magazine. His early reviews included System Shock (1994) and Fallout (1997). Brooker wrote for the magazine throughout the mid- to late-1990s. Aside from games reviews, his output included the comic strip "Cybertwats" and a column titled "Sick Notes", where Brooker would insult anyone who wrote in to the magazine – and offered a £50 prize to the best letter.
One of Brooker's one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was titled "Helmut Werstler's Cruelty Zoo" and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orang-utan, among other things. The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the number of animals killed, but the original title, "Lara Croft's Cruelty Zoo", was changed for legal reasons. In October 2008, Brooker and several other ex-writers were invited back to review a game for the 200th issue. Brooker reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.
Brooker began writing a TV review column titled "Screen Burn" for The Guardian newspaper's Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide in 2000, a role he continued until October 2010.
From late 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in The Guardian supplement "G2" on Fridays called "Supposing", in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. From October 2006 this column was expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome and Ignopedia, an occasional series of pseudo-articles on topics mostly suggested by readers. The key theme behind Ignopedia was that, while Wikipedia is written and edited by thousands of users, Ignopedia would be written by a single sub-par person with little or no awareness of the facts.
On 24 October 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US presidential election which concluded, "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. – where are you now that we need you?" that was criticised for Brooker's apparent encouragement of the assassination of the American president. The Guardian withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed an apology by Brooker. He has since commented about the remark in the column stating: I ended a Screen Burn column by recycling a very old tasteless joke (a variant of a graffiti I first saw during the Thatcher years), and within minutes half the internet seemed convinced The Guardian was officially calling for assassination. My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats, and it was all very unfunny indeed – a bit like recounting a rude joke at a dinner party, only to be told you hadn't recounted a joke at all, but molested the host's children, and suddenly everyone was punching you and you weren't going to get any pudding. I've had better weekends.
Online
From 1999 to 2003, Brooker wrote the satirical TVGoHome website, a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and featured in technology newsletter Need To Know. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.
In May 2012, Brooker was interviewed for Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast series. In 2019, he made a second appearance on the podcast, which was released during March 2020.
Television
Brooker's television presenting debut was with Gia Milinovich on BBC Knowledge's The Kit (1999–2000), a programme that reviewed gadgets and technology. From 1999 to 2000, Brooker played the hooded expert 'the Pundit' in the short-lived show Games Republic, hosted by Trevor and Simon on BSkyB.
In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The 11 O'Clock Show. In 2001, he was one of several writers on "Paedogeddon", Channel 4's Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia. In 2003, Brooker wrote an episode entitled "How to Watch Television" for Channel 4's The Art Show. The episode was presented in the style of a public information film and was partly animated.
Together with Brass Eye's Chris Morris, Brooker co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a character from one of TVGoHome's fictional programmes. The show was broadcast in 2005 and focused on the lives of a group of London media 'trendies'. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.
In 2006, Brooker began writing and presenting the television series Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV review programme in a similar style to his Screen Burn columns in The Guardian. After an initial pilot series of three editions in April, the programme returned later in the year for a second run of four episodes plus Christmas and Review of the Year specials in December 2006. A third series followed in February 2007 with a fourth broadcast in September 2007, followed by a Review of the Year in December 2007. The fifth series started in November 2008 and was followed by another Review of the Year special. This series was also the first to be given a primetime repeat on terrestrial television (BBC Two), in January 2009.
Screenwipe editions have had themes including American television, TV news, advertising and children's programmes. The last of these involved a segment where Brooker joined the cast of Toonattik for one week, playing the character of "Angry News Guy". An episode on scriptwriting saw several of British television's most prominent writers interviewed by Brooker.
Newswipe with Charlie Brooker, a similar show concerned with current affairs reporting by the international news media, began on BBC Four on 25 March 2009. A second series began on 19 January 2010. He has also written and presented the one-off special Gameswipe on video games and aired on BBC Four on 29 September 2009.
Radio
From 2010 to 2012, Brooker presented a BBC Radio 4 series celebrating failure titled So Wrong It's Right, in which guests compete to pitch the worst possible ideas for new franchises and give the "most wrong" answer to a question. It aired 17 episodes across three series. In common with Screenwipe's use of a Grandaddy track (A.M. 180) from the album Under the Western Freeway as its theme tune, So Wrong It's Right uses another track from the same album, Summer Here Kids.
In January 2018, he was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
Personal life
Brooker became engaged to television presenter Konnie Huq after dating for nine months, having met while filming an episode of Screenwipe. They married on 26 July 2010 at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. They have two sons. Huq's sister is Labour Party politician Rupa Huq.
Brooker is an atheist and contributed to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas. Due to his family's background, he has also described himself as a Quaker.
Awards and nominations
For his work as creator and screenwriter of Black Mirror, Brooker won three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Television Movie and two consecutive for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special.
Brooker won the 2009 Columnist of the Year award at the British Press Awards for his Guardian column. Dead Set was nominated for the 2009 Best Drama Serial BAFTA. In 2010, he was given the Best Entertainment Programme Award for Newswipe from the Royal Television Society. He has received three British Comedy Awards: Best Newcomer in 2009, Best Comedy Entertainment Show Award for Newswipe in 2011 and Best Comedy Entertainment Personality in 2012. At the BAFTA TV Awards 2017, his show Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe won for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme.
Publications
TV Go Home, 2001 (rescanned reprint in 2010) (ISBN 1-84115-675-2)
Unnovations, 2002 (rescanned reprint in 2011) (ISBN 1-84115-730-9)
Screen Burn, 2004 (ISBN 0-571-22755-4)
Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline, 2007 (ISBN 9780571238415)
The Hell of it All, 2009 (ISBN 9780571229574)
I Can Make You Hate, 2012 (ISBN 0-571-295-029)
Article from the Guardian featuring in Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology, 2014 (ISBN 978-1-4479-8176-3)
