“Just to clear it up: nope, I’d never heard anything about Cameron and a pig when coming up with that story. So this weirds me out.”
English satirist and broadcaster Charlie Brooker has taken to twitter today to comment on the sensational claims about Prime Minister David Cameron #piggate. For those who have missed #piggate!
- While at Oxford, the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was a member of the élite student dining society, the Bullingdon Club, which has a reputation for an outlandish drinking culture associated with boisterous behaviour and damaging property. Cameron’s period in the Bullingdon Club was examined in a Channel 4 docu-drama, When Boris Met Dave (Channel4) (VIMEO). In 2015, a biography of Cameron by former friend Lord Ashcroft made claims that Cameron took drugs and took part in an unusual initiation ceremony to the Piers Gaveston Society, the public discussion of this becoming known as Piggate. Cameron graduated in 1988 with a first-class honours degree. (Wiki)
On January 23rd 2013 Charlie Brooker released the brilliant dystopian TV series Black Mirror (TRAILER). In the pilot episode one of the imagined storylines was where the prime minister gets intimate with a pig. And It’s not the first time Brooker has appeared to be clairvoyant.
- NEWS: Black Mirror – Season 3 — A Netflix Original! (TRAILER) Coming soon. All new episodes, only on Netflix.
Brooker made very clear on twitter that:
- “Just to clear it up: nope, I’d never heard anything about Cameron and a pig when coming up with that story. So this weirds me out.”
and even posted a photo of the original script: “Perhaps the least prescient line from the script” – Twitter.
Leo Benedictus from the Guardian on Brookers vision:
- Even so, Brooker has quite a record of at least seeming to be clairvoyant. Nathan Barley, the sitcom he made with Chris Morris in 2005, now looks like a straight-faced preview of iPhones, selfies, YouTube and hipsters. Just a week ago, G Clay Whittaker made similar claims of prophecy for various Black Mirror episodes in the Daily Beast – with the exception of the pig episode. “I’m not going to compare any political event to this,” he wrote, wrongly, it now seems. For his part, Brooker says that he never seeks to make predictions in his scripts, even if he ends up doing so. What makes this case so strange however, is that he actually tried to do the opposite in the National Anthem – to think up, as he puts it, “an absurd and ridiculous notion”. Today, he insists he actually feels quite sorry for Cameron. “In the episode itself,” he says, “it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t actually damage the prime minister in the long run.” At least Downing Street’s communications team can cling on to that.
Regardless even Brooker knew it or not it, and truly is clairvoyant, it shows us again that why it is that we need the artists to speak, and create in all times…Are we really living in a Mike Judge’s Idiocracy folks?
- “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when everyday is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.”
Read more here about the “Artists are the gate keepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice, “ article I wrote 6 months ago about this topic – AskTheRightQuestion.
Photo credit: Charlie Brooker/Channel 4/Zeppotron/Endemol UK.