Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A satirist best known for creating the dark tech anthology series Black Mirror and for skewering modern life.
On the island
Eight records
I think it's probably the high point for me of where pop meets experimentation. And I could listen to this endlessly.
I used to listen to it again and again and again, and I was fascinated by it, but also utterly terrified of it.
This is representing all of computer game music in my head. … a piece of music that I think is better than it had to be for a Game Boy game.
I remember hearing Monkey Gone to Heaven on the ITV chart show and just having a moment of going, What on earth is that? I've got to know what that is.
a very beautiful piece of music. And we use this as a motif throughout Black Mirror.
I listen to this album literally either every night… to go to sleep.
The New PotatoesFavourite
a willfully ridiculous song that amuses me greatly… I played it to my kids, and they fell about laughing.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:46What in the world particularly is making you weep right now?
Come! Quite a lot of things, I think. I mean, I can vacillate between being despairing about the state of the world and being contrarily optimistic. I think there's something in me that I tend to worry about the state of the world. Then, when everyone is worrying about the state of the world, I sort of think I can put my feet up.
Presenter asks
5:44Are you intrinsically a worrier? Are you somebody who does sort of spin out thinking this'll all end badly?
Yes, you could pretty much show me any object. You could show me a cotton wool ball and I would extrapolate from that to how that would ruin my life or kill me or destroy the world. Somehow I could pretty much catastrophize anything. I mean the weird thing is that I find it hilarious to think of these scenarios. I've always been quite fascinated by both comedy and sort of horror. It feels to me like there's similar bits of your brain can be used for thinking up scenarios. Because often comedy you're sort of extrapolating from some sort of twisted logic. And that is often what happens in Black Mirror and and shows of that ill.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Kurt Vonnegut
It's a very slim book, which is good. I like a short book. And 'cause it's about people stranded on a desert island and they evolve.
The luxury
It's a time sponge and I could lose myself for hours and forget that I was stranded on this terrible place.
For many years in your television shows and also in your columns for The Guardian, you spent a good deal of time saying cruel things about public figures for comic effect. As you became better known, did you bump into any of the people that you'd been cruel about?
I did. I was at the end of Edinburgh T V Festival and somebody who had written some horrible thing about a show they'd been in. came over and just said, Oh, you wrote the and I was immediately like massively embarrassed and they were being fine about it. I remember quite clearly thinking, This person is just trying their best to present a show. And when I was writing those TV columns, I would say all sorts of things. And then, probably, as I got older, you think, well, someone has picked that up and read it, and it's ruined their day. And for what? Really? I'm commenting on a TV show. I'm not commenting on something of great import. And so I can see that it's a valid form of humor, but I lost my appetite for just doing that.
Presenter asks
19:30And so looking back at that period in your life, how did you avoid becoming just another embittered, gormless stoner to whom it never really happened?
I was lucky. Two things sort of happened at the same time. I did some silly sort of phone call things for the magazine, and that got me hired in a roundabout way to work on a Radio 1 10 minutes a week technology show, which was quite anarchic. I guess I was learning, oh, right, you can do stuff in broadcast, and I was enjoying that. … I started doing this thing that was like a parody of the Radio Times, and it was called TV Go Home. … I panicked and got these guys called Dave Green and Danny O'Brien, who ran this geeky newsletter, to host it anonymously. And that weirdly gave it a sort of cachet and it became a little cult thing. And that sort of opened the door to me being offered jobs. And so, whenever people say to me, How'd you get into things? I always say, Now, we'll just try and create something small.
Presenter asks
23:27And so being happy and having two little children and finding the thing that you thought might not be for you. It must have fundamentally changed you.
I used to write columns where I was like, I hate kids. I will never have children. … But my biggest fear was that I'd heard about people who like dads who the baby is born and they just don't connect. … What if I feel nothing? And then, in the event, there was an emergency C-section, there was a bit of drama going on, which I was weirdly calm for. … And they bring out this little screaming baby and hand it to me. … it was like an upgrade was being installed in my head. … I felt like I had been reprogrammed in an instant and I had a new mission. … Having kids ruins your life in the best way possible because suddenly you can't ever relax again. You can't just do what you want. So it wrecks everything, but at the same time, it gave me a sense of purpose that must have been profoundly lacking before, and I wasn't aware of it.
“I can vacillate between being despairing about the state of the world and being contrarily optimistic.”
“You could pretty much show me any object. You could show me a cotton wool ball and I would extrapolate from that to how that would ruin my life or kill me or destroy the world.”
“Having kids ruins your life in the best way possible because suddenly you can't ever relax again. You can't just do what you want. So it wrecks everything, but at the same time, it gave me a sense of purpose that must have been profoundly lacking before, and I wasn't aware of it.”
“There's a constant voice that's saying, oh stop it. Oh just give up. Rubbish. And if you did something well, it sort of says, well, you got away with that. That was lucky. Wait till next time.”