Black Mirror, White Christmas. Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Jon Hamm, Rafe Spall, Oona Chaplin, Natalie Tena, Janet Montgomery, Rasmus Hardiker, Dan Li, Ken Drury, Zahra Ahmed, Verity Marshall, Ian Keir Attard, Grainne Keoah, Robin Weaver, Simon Noch, Diveen Lenny, Esther Smith, Beatrice Arkwright, Liz May Brice, Nicholas Agnew, Gavin een, Sukh Ojla, Leanne Li.

 

For all the bright lights ever offered Humanity of a future world, it somehow is never as intriguing a prospect to write about a society that has a dystopian angle to it.

The cold and unflinching heart that surrounds a social order is one that can turn a television audience into a mass of prospective, potential voyeurs whose crimes are locked away in the hearts and possibly thankful for the fact that they live in a time where things such imagined by the modern day Roald Dahl, Charlie Brooker, are at least fantasy…for now.

In what now seems the distant past, the television treat for a Christmas offering was normally so tightly regulated that it was the likes of Morecombe and Wise or any other of the comedic gems that sprinkled themselves wildly across the nation, as if to keep the nation’s spirits up during a week of enforced conversation and endless noise from children’s half battered toys.

The thought of a Christmas plunge into the mind of Charlie Brooker and his sensational Black Mirror series was perhaps a dystrophic jump too far, however the feature-length White Christmas is a piece of television gold that just kept giving, like an un-breakable snow globe in the hands of irate Father Christmas, the treat kept on enticing the viewer further down the bleak rabbit hole more than anything else on offer. It is the type of true meaning for Christmas that Eastender’s script writers should be show, the chance to wreck misery upon a soul uppermost on the episode’s mind.

The tie that bound all three stories together was the splendid interaction between Jon Hamm’s and Rafe Spall’s Matt Trent and Joe Potter, two men who have secrets and who seemingly are being punished for something they have done wrong. Time can be healer, it can be one in which reflections of actions can ease the pain, however, Time can also be the most severe of jailers and sit patiently outside of the cell and never get bored or interested in the feelings of those it is watching over.

White Christmas sees the use of technology taken to the point of a God’s view, the chance for Humanity to sit in judgement upon itself, to use the technology to ease the day for the real person but for the trapped subconscious, it is the kiss of eternal death, perhaps only physically being able to finally close its eyes and turn itself off. Like A God, a spirit of whichever religious choosing the viewer wishes to be jaded and have free will turned over to, White Christmas suggests that whatever actions, whatever choices you make the repercussions go far beyond your own body and mind; they have devastating effects on the psyche and soul also.

Charlie Brooker may offer the season greetings of the damned and the futuristic ill-fated to a society that believes itself of some Nirvana-like technological Utopia, but at least it is perhaps arguably the most sincere Christmas wish you will get this year.

Ian D. Hall