[This post discusses plot details from the debut episode of Black Mirror, which is currently streaming on Netflix, so maybe go watch that first.]
“The National Anthem,” the debut episode of Charlie Brooker’s “techno-dystopian” sci-fi series Black Mirror, is unforgettable TV, and not just because it features the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom being forced to have sex with a pig on live TV. But that is part of it, and watching the episode, viewers might shake their heads at Brooker’s audacity, wondering how on Earth he got away with depicting such a powerful individual doing something so obscene.
Could it be because he did do something that obscene?
Excerpts of a new biography of current British prime minister David Cameron are currently being serialized in the U.K’s Daily Mail newspaper, and among the scandalous anecdotes of Cameron’s hard-partying college days—hard drugs, casual sex, an ex-girlfriend who became a nun after he left her—is the assertion that Cameron allegedly put “a private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth as part of a hazing ritual. True or not, this bit of cosmic irony was quick to reach Brooker, who went on a bit of a Twitter tear about it:
That, in turn led to insinuations that Brooker somehow learned about Cameron’s, um, indiscretion before he wrote the episode, perhaps by way of a clandestine late-night meeting in a parking garage with a pig. Brooker, of course, denies this:
So either Charlie Brooker is psychic (possible), the whole pig story is completely made up (also possible), or there’s some sort of porcine Deep Throat going around revealing the bestiality secrets of the rich and powerful as part of a secret anti-human agenda designed to shake the foundations of civilization as we know it. (Heh. Deep throat.)
[h/t Vulture]