Black Mirror: White Christmas review – sentimentality offset with wicked wit

For its first series in 2011, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror set itself up as a bracing tot of firewater against the eggnoggy comforts of the Christmas schedule – and he’s repeating the trick for 2014’s festive season, with a feature-length special starring Rafe Spall and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm. “It’s a Christmas jamboree!”, Brooker says at last night’s premiere, before pausing. “I use the word jamboree flippantly there.”

Black Mirror’s mildly dystopian stories have been grotesque comic satire – imagine Jonathan Swift engulfed in a Twitter flame war – or melancholic sci-fi. For White Christmas he expertly twines the two styles in an ambitious multi-stranded tale. It’s topically satirical, riffing on pick-up artists and third-world labour. But it modulates into classic Black Mirror themes: Sisyphean struggle and a desperate yearning for human connection, all the hands of AI and social networking.

Hamm and Spall play a pair of men trading yarns in a weird snowbound hut on Christmas Day. Hamm, typecast slightly but with an anti-Draper twinkle, is a smooth scumbag who provides affluent clients with the perfect virtual assistant: their own consciousness, downloaded and enslaved in an egg (skewering Amazon’s new Echo smart-home device). Spall meanwhile is in a pickle, where after a domestic squabble, his girlfriend has ‘blocked’ him. Not on Facebook, but rather with Z-Eye optical implants – block someone, and they appear as greyed-out blurs in real life.

“As we move into wearable tech, Google Glass is going to morph into something you put in your eyes or your brain,” asserts Brooker. “Hopefully thats, oh, at least six months off. I watch the news, and I soak up what’s happening; I think of the worst thing that can happen, and I write it down.” This sense of impeding reality is what drew Hamm to Black Mirror, where “things are close enough to touch, and yet maintain a sense of science fiction. It’s unlike anything I had read, or seen”.

Being Brooker, it swerves down some gloomy passageways, but there’s laughter in the dark – including a diabolically funny use of Wizzard. “We all laugh at funerals,” shrugs Spall, with Hamm adding: “There’s moments to laugh, and freak out and cry and scream.” When his wife read the script, “she came back in, blanched. ‘Jesus, that’s a little dark.’ Merry Christmas!” However, Brooker quips that “there’s nothing in it as bleak as what EastEnders is going to do”.

His film comes during a backlash against ubiquitous tech: take Gary Turk’s hugely popular Look Up film which recently encouraged us, with thunderous sentimentality, to stop gazing at screens and instead drink in real life.

Brooker is more sophisticated than Turk, and he is right to not be a blinkered techno-utopian. But like the episodes before it, these are the thrashings of a man trying to grapple with a digital realm that tells him how old he’s grown – it’s Brooker’s mid-life crisis, and at its worst Black Mirror has been merely the televisual equivalent of a grandparent tutting confusedly at an iPad. Much of the technology that so worries him is becoming naturalised in a younger generation, who elide digital and analogue to make a new real. His fear can feel fussy, and so the satire gets defanged. I would love to see him tackle a more immediate technological problem, like the potential for ever-improving AI to replace whole tranches of the labour market, from accounting to call centres.

But only Black Mirror along with a handful of films – like Her, Ex Machina and Men, Women and Children – is even engaging with these knotty contemporary themes. Sentimentality is offset with wicked wit, and Brooker’s brio and imagination paper over any gaps in logic. His anxiety as he lumbers from one paradigm to another is creating funny, imaginative, and keenly felt television, even if he is just being paranoid.

Black Mirrors airs on Channel 4, 9pm, 16 December.