Mick Hartley

The first of Charlie Brooker's series of three "blackly humorous" TV satires, The National Anthem, showed last night on Channel 4. I watched it because I like Charlie Brooker's writing, and because it was hyped in advance as the programme to see:

It is likely to elicit howls of indignation from people who would like television to produce a constant diet of Sherlock and Doctor Who….it compels the viewer to engage with the programme and to think about what they’re watching. 

The story, as everyone must know by now, was that a Princess Di-type figure was kidnapped. A video soon appeared on YouTube, with her reading out her captor's demands in between sobs: if the Prime Minister didn't appear on live TV, having sex with a pig, she'd be killed.

You can see why it must have seemed a clever idea at the time, and it might possibly have worked if played for laughs – like The Comic Strip, perhaps (though I thought their last Tony Blair effort was fairly dire). But no, whatever humour there was (and yes, the basic idea is quite funny) was crushed out of it by the decision to take itself so seriously. It was played straight, as an hour long drama with quality production values and a cast of top actors (Lindsay Duncan, for God's sake). And – it seemed to me – the whole thing was a horrible, ghastly misjudgement.

Was there no one around to point out that this wasn't going to work? It wasn't funny – not even darkly funny – and it came nowhere near the satire on the Twitter generation which it aspired to. It was ridiculous, with just that touch of smugness that you get when actors think they're being cutting-edge. And the longer it went on, the deeper became the hole that they were all digging for themselves.

I seem to be in a minority here. The couple of reviews I've seen are both very positive. Andrew Billen in this morning's Times (can't find a link) absolutely loved it, awarding the maximum 5 stars. But then this is the kind of cartoon fantasy the media tend to go for: politicians as headless chickens with not a shred of morals, who'd even fuck a pig live on TV if they thought there was something in it for them, governed behind the scenes by a sinister cabal of power freaks. Unlike the media themselves, of course, who – what a surprise – came fairly well out of it. And it's not the kind of show you really want to criticise for fear of seeming too strait-laced, insufficiently hip, too much of a Dr-Who-and-Sherlock-Holmes-type person, probably living in Tunbridge Wells. The name of Chris Morris is bandied around: never a good sign.

I'm reminded that Charlie Brooker was behind the Nathan Barley series, a "scathing indictment of media tossers ". As a scathing indictment of media tossers you couldn't do much better than this.