2008 - 2008
Dead Set is a five-episode British zombie horror miniseries that ran on E4 across Halloween week 2008. It is the earliest major TV drama written by Charlie Brooker, produced a full three years before he would launch Black Mirror and cement his name as the UK's most savage media satirist. Yann Demange directs, and you can see the future 71 and Lovecraft Country director already working out how to stage close-quarters chaos in tight spaces.
The premise is one of those ideas that sounds too clever by half until you watch it and realise it absolutely works. A zombie apocalypse erupts across Britain on live eviction night at Big Brother. The contestants, sealed inside the famous Big Brother UK compound at Elstree Studios and cut off from the outside world by production design, carry on bickering about nominations while the country collapses outside the walls. Kelly, a young production assistant played by Jaime Winstone, is the one person inside the studio who knows what is happening. She has to keep the housemates alive long enough to matter.
Five episodes. No filler. Shot on real Big Brother sets with real former contestants from that year's series playing themselves. Davina McCall turns up as Davina McCall. It is arguably the boldest thing British horror had done on TV in a decade.
Jaime Winstone anchors the whole thing as Kelly. She plays the role with a furious, grounded physicality that carries every scene she is in, and the rest of the cast orbit her. Andy Nyman is the other stand-out as Patrick, the show's bullying producer. Nyman takes what could have been a broad reality-TV villain and makes him genuinely, memorably awful. Patrick is the kind of character I still see quoted on forums years later.
The supporting cast is a who's who of British talent right on the cusp of breaking out:
Charlie Brooker makes a cameo as himself. The real former Big Brother housemates from the 2008 series appear as themselves too, which is one of the most committed bits of reality-TV weirdness in UK drama history. Iain Ball's zombie make-up holds up remarkably well given the budget.
Yann Demange
Director
Charlie Brooker
Creator / Writer (cameo)
Warren Brown
Marky
Beth Cordingly
Veronica
Kevin Eldon
Joplin
Shelley Conn
Claire
Chizzy Akudolu
Angelique
Davina McCall
Herself
On the surface Dead Set is a zombie show. A very good one. Brooker knows his 28 Days Later and his Dawn of the Dead, and the running, screaming ghouls here are clearly in the Danny Boyle tradition rather than the shuffling Romero kind. But the zombie stuff is the vehicle, not the point.
The point is reality television, and what it does to the people who make it and the people who watch it. Brooker spent years as a TV critic for The Guardian writing about exactly this kind of culture, and Dead Set is him putting his thesis into drama form. The housemates are so hollowed out by the format that even when the apocalypse breaks in, some of them struggle to process it as anything other than a twist. Patrick, the producer, treats the outbreak as a problem of format management almost until the last possible moment. The real zombies, the show argues with zero subtlety, were inside the studio all along.
You can see every piece of DNA that would later become Black Mirror sitting right here on the table. Media as cannibalism. The audience as a blank hungry mass. The hollow celebrity. The systems that keep us from noticing reality until it is kicking the door in. Dead Set is blunter than later Brooker and less formally inventive, but also more gleefully nasty. Some of us prefer it that way.
Yann Demange shoots the thing with genuine craft. The Big Brother set is a claustrophobia machine. Bright primary colours, cheap sofas, wipe-clean surfaces, an interior designed to be seen from thirty cameras at once and therefore to contain nowhere to hide. When the lights go, when the glass breaks, when the corridors turn into kill chutes, that set pays off beautifully. The editing moves at a proper horror pace, not a prestige-TV pace. It is gnarly, bloody, quick.
The gore deserves a specific mention. Dead Set is viciously violent for British TV even by post-watershed standards, and that choice feels deliberate rather than gratuitous. Brooker's thesis requires the horror to actually land. You cannot satirise the hollowness of televised spectacle and then flinch from showing blood.
It landed. BAFTA nominated the miniseries for Best Drama Serial in 2009, which for a zombie genre piece on E4 was basically unthinkable, and cemented Brooker as a dramatist rather than just a critic. Sight & Sound, Empire, and the broadsheets were kind. Dead Set is regularly cited in lists of the best British horror TV of the century, and it has aged into a key text for anyone tracing the pre-history of Black Mirror.
Before Brooker was telling us the phone in our pocket was going to eat us alive, he was telling us the reality TV show on our screen already had.
For a whole generation of UK TV writers, it was also a permission slip. Proof that you could take an E4 slot, a tight budget, and a ridiculous premise, and turn it into genuine drama that critics would take seriously. You can see its fingerprints on later British genre work from Inside No. 9 through to Utopia.
Dead Set works because Brooker meant it. There is no postmodern smirk in here about zombies in a Big Brother house. He is angry at the format and angry at the audience, and angrier still at what the two had done to each other by 2008, and he uses genre horror to make that anger land. Winstone gives the rage a human face. The direction keeps the whole thing at full tilt. The former housemates playing themselves add a layer of queasy verité that no purely scripted show could match.
Five episodes. One of the meanest pieces of satirical horror Britain has ever put on television, and I still rate it above most of Black Mirror's middle run. If you liked later Brooker, come back and start here.
Liz May Brice
Alex
Adam Deacon
Space
Kathleen McDermott
Pippa
Jaime Winstone
Kelly Stevens
Andy Nyman
Patrick