Dead Set (Review)
Thursday, 15th October 2009, 19:00

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Charlie Brooker is, depending on your view, either an obnoxious git or a satirical genius through his TV shows Gameswipe, Newswipe and Screenwipe and Guardian column Screen Burn. As a writer and presenter he is scathing of celebrity culture and the vacuous nature of the entertainment industry that ironically he is part of.
 
With Dead set he turns his scatological gun on reality television, with the contestants on Big Brother being perfectly placed to survive a zombie outbreak, cocooned as they are in a safe house which is purposely designed to keep intruders out.
 
Dead set begins on eviction night where Big Brother producer, Patrick, is concerned that their ratings may be affected by riots across Britain and that the show may even be ‘bumped’ for the news. Whilst evictee Pippa is being interviewed by Davina, the signal goes dead, along with the telephones. Blissfully unaware that the **** has hit the fan and a zombie outbreak is beginning to overrun the country are the six remaining contestants, who assume that Big Brother’s silence is some sort of challenge.
 

With Pippa and Patrick trapped in a room by the zombie Davina and production runner Kelly trying to avoid the walking dead and reach her boyfriend, Riq, who is at an abandoned station trying to get to her. As time goes by, the zombie hordes assemble at the house gates because of ‘a primitive instinct’ and the infection gets inside the house, pitting contestant against contestant in a battle for survival.
 
Brooker is clearly a man who has watched far too much Big Brother, as the characters are fantastically well observed. They perfectly mirror a real BB from the vacuous tart with big tits after a Heat front cover to the Northern wide boy, the flamboyant homosexual and the semi-compulsory boring intellectual who takes it all far too seriously and considers his presence a comment on the show itself! The actors are perfect in their roles and if I didn’t recognise Kevin Eldon as the pretentious Joplin, then I’d have thought they were real contestants. Best of all is Andy Nyman as Patrick, whose acerbic put-downs are just superb and it’s Charlie Brooker’s words coming out of his mouth.
 
This isn’t just a satirical sideswipe at BB, but an outright horror with plenty of blood, gore and gut-munching. There are obvious nods to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead when one of the characters mimics a zombie and says “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” and Joplin observes that the living dead are standing at the gates because it was an important place when they were alive. It doesn’t scrimp on the brutal, graphic violence and there’s as much here as in any horror film that I’ve seen recently.
 

As a five-part mini-series, you can skip through the recaps at the beginning of each episode and watch it as a long horror film – there are no credits until the very end as each episode finishes with deadsetcredits.com instead.
 
I absolutely loved this and watched it in one go, unable to stop as I had to go on to the next episode. This will satisfy horror fans and Brooker fans alike.
 
 

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