Think Cameron has it tough? This prime minister has to have sex with a pig on live television
Touching and funny … Rory Kinnear (centre) as Prime Minister Michael Callow.
In his preview of Black Mirror (Channel 4), Charlie Brooker offered The Twilight Zone as one of the key influences for his new Sunday night dramas. To the untrained eye, the first of them, National Anthem, looked suspiciously like political satire – and a very superior one – rather than a sci-fi vision of technology's power to distort the world. All the gadgetry seemed only too familiar and the voyeurism all too credible: there's more dystopia in an episode of Spooks.
Rather less credible was the premise in which we were asked to believe, that Princess Susannah – think Kate Middleton – had been abducted and that the kidnappers had threatened to kill her unless the prime minister – think David Cameron: really, please do, as you'll never be able to take him at all seriously again – had sex with a pig live on television. As it emerged right at the end that the kidnap was a piece of performance art by a Turner prize-winner, plausibility was further stretched to breaking point. Could you picture Tracey Emin holding up a police escort and abducting Kate? Or that no one would notice that the severed finger came from a man, not a woman?
Yet none of this really seemed to matter, as good satire often lies as much in the fun you have along the way as in the absurdity of the set-up. And where this scored heavily was in the way everything was played as near-straight drama. There was an inexorability about Rory Kinnear as a PM tortured by focus groups and Twitter stats, whose decision to fall on his pork sword is ultimately driven by how he will be perceived in the ratings, that was both touching and funny. And Lindsay Duncan's understated press secretary – no Malcolm Tucker she – was just a delight. "Don't get it over too quickly, sir," she advised, as the PM prepared for the performance of his life. "Otherwise, the public will think you are enjoying it rather too much." Brilliant.
Brooker is no shrinking violet – though he did rather skate around the bio-mechanics of getting a hard-on in the presence of a pig, so either he has some taste boundaries after all or inside knowledge of politicians' attraction to the trough – so naturally the PM was not spared closing his eyes and thinking of the polls. In so doing, he lost the love of his wife and gained the sympathy of the nation. So no getting any bright copycat ideas, anyone. Imagine having to feel sorry for Cameron.
If Dark Mirror was nine parts satire to one part dystopia, Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook (BBC2, Sunday) was precisely the opposite. The programme started off as yet another all too familiar portrait of the Harvard geek turned Silicon Valley billionaire: I had already heard more than enough about Zuckerberg five years ago and nothing I've learned since has added to my sense of wellbeing. All that's changed is that every month you have to add another nought on to his net worth.
Yet about halfway through, things picked up considerably when presenter Emily Maitlis stopped changing into a new outfit for every shot and started asking serious questions. The Facebook she exposed was truly the Heart of Darkness: not least because everyone associated with the company is under the impression they are performing a massive social good. "We don't want you to spend more time on Facebook; we want the time you spend on Facebook to be so valuable you come back every day," said Zuckerberg, apparently unaware these two statements are contradictory.
But as there are now 800 million people signed up to Facebook, with nearly half that number logging on for between 30 minutes and four hours per day, then Zuckerberg has clearly won the argument, though it looks as if whatever it is Facebook users actually do on the site is rather more valuable to Zuckerberg than anyone else. There's a Facebook icon that enables you to say you like Coca-Cola. Personally I can't see why anyone would waste a moment clicking on it, but there are 35 million Facebook users who have proved me wrong. What reward do you get for clicking the like button? A life time of Coca-Cola adverts on your Facebook page? Whoopee. If this is the future, count me out.
Not that there necessarily will be much of a one, according to Robert Peston in The Party's Over: How the West Went Bust (BBC2, Sunday). There's been a rash of these economic disaster docs this year and I've found them all oddly comforting. Not because so many people are out of work or the boss class is still raking it in, but because it restores my faith in my own sanity. As every presenter before him, Peston dug up any number of experts to say: "Nobody saw the downturn coming." Just for the record, I did. Being a depressive sometimes has its upsides.
