CHARLIE Brooker has compared watching the news during the coronavirus crisis to eating apples, saying it is “good for you in moderation, but consume too much and you’ll give yourself the shits”.
The Black Mirror creator casts his eye over the coverage of the crisis in Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe, his first Screenwipe since 2016.
He said he decided to return to the satirical format, which features archive news footage alongside his commentary and that of Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) and Barry Shitpeas (Al Campbell) when production was postponed on another show he was working on.
Brooker said: “We were supposed to be making a new Philomena Cunk show – we’ve done the scripts and everything – when this whole thing kicked off, and that got postponed. We wanted to keep as much of the team on as possible – the BBC asked if we’d make a new Wipe show instead, and I initially said no, before relenting when it became clear the format itself would still work under lockdown.”
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