Charlie Brooker

Charlton Brooker (born 3 March 1971) is an English writer, television presenter, producer and satirist.

He is the creator and co-showrunner of the sci-fi drama anthology series Black Mirror, and has written for comedy series such as Brass Eye, The 11 O'Clock Show, and Nathan Barley.

Brooker started his career as a cartoonist; he produced adverts for the second-hand video game retailer CeX before becoming a journalist for PC Zone. He has presented a number of television shows, mostly consisting of satirical and biting criticism of modern society and the media, such as Screenwipe, Gameswipe, Newswipe, Weekly Wipe, and 10 O'Clock Live.

Charlie 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 were fans of the television sitcom Bewitched, and named him Charlton after a character in one episode and his sister Samantha after the series' main character.

As a teenager, he first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!, a comic produced in the late 1980s.

After attending Wallingford School, Brooker attended the Polytechnic of Central London (which became the University of Westminster during his final year there) to study for a BA in Media Studies.

He says that he did not graduate because his dissertation was written on video games, which was not considered an acceptable topic.

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, London.

When one of the employees left to found the second-hand retailer CeX, Brooker worked in their first shop and produced cartoon advertisements.

After some of Brooker's CeX cartoons were printed in the magazine PC Zone, he was invited to write for the magazine.

Brooker wrote for the magazine in the mid and 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.

His early reviews included System Shock (1994) and Fallout (1997).

From 1999 to 2003 he 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.

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.

A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001.

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:

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.

He also wrote the 2008 horror drama series Dead Set.

He has written social criticism pieces for The Guardian and is one of four creative directors of the production company Zeppotron.

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 left the "Screen Burn" column in 2010.

In the final column, he noted how increasingly difficult he found it to reconcile his role in mainstream media and TV production with his writing as a scabrous critic or to objectively criticise those he increasingly worked and socialised with.

Longtime covering contributor Grace Dent took over the column.

In 2012 he contributed to the book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who.

In 2014, an article he wrote for The Guardian—"Too much talk for one planet: why I'm reducing my word emissions"—was published in the A-Level anthology Voices in Speech and Writing: An Anthology.

He continued to contribute other articles to The Guardian on a regular basis, his most recent comment column appearing in May 2015.