Summary
Set in London, England, Black Mirror: “The National Anthem” (season 1, episode 1) opens with the series title cracking, as if the glass TV screen has broken. The protagonist, British prime minister Michael Callow (played by Rory Kinnear), is asleep next to his wife, Jane (Anna Wilson-Jones).
The phone rings, waking them both. He switches on a light and speaks to someone on the other end. When he hangs up, he says that the call was about Princess Susannah, Duchess of Beaumont (Lydia Wilson). Jane asks if she is alright; he says he doesn’t know.
Callow sits in his dressing gown on the ground floor of the prime minister’s residence, No. 10 Downing Street. Blue pre-dawn light comes in from the windows. Surrounded by three staff and the home secretary, Callow watches footage of Susannah crying. She is bound in a room. She says, “Please don’t kill me.” The kidnapper speaks through an electronic medium to disguise his voice. He tells her to read a statement. She sobs as she says that her life depends on the prime minister doing exactly as instructed. If not, by 4 p.m. that afternoon, she will be executed.
An advisor pauses the video to explain that they are certain it is a genuine video of the princess. Her car was “intercepted” at midnight while she was returning from the wedding of a college friend. Her security detail, two PPOs (police protection orders), were found unconscious. Another aide explains that they were taken out with a heavy sedative shot into them at close range. The men are still unconscious.
Callow angrily demands to know what the kidnapper wants. His aides’ faces are grave. Home Secretary Alex Cairns (Lindsay Duncan) warns that what the princess says next “concerns you directly.” The video resumes. The princess says that the prime minister must appear live at 4 p.m. on all British networks to have “full un-simulated sexual intercourse with a pig.” Crying, she says, “I don’t understand.” An aide pauses the video to say the video ends with full technical specifications for the broadcast.
The prime minister grins and asks why they are doing it; he believes it must be a joke. An aide says it’s real. He confirms that she said “sex with a pig.” The aides confirm this to be the case. Callow is incredulous. In his posh accent, he says, “I’m not fucking a pig. Page one, that’s not happening.”
After a pause in which his aides are silent, Callow looks around the room for reactions. Hanging their heads, his aides say of course, and shake their heads, though they are not particularly convincing. The older male aide, Julian Hereford, says there is no channel of communication with the kidnapper.
Callow stands up and says they will focus on locating the princess. He tells the staff to keep the details only to the room. He says to put a bright red D-notice on it. They gravely inform him that the video is already on YouTube, uploaded from an encrypted IP address. It has already been downloaded, duplicated, and spread.
They say that as soon as they take the video down, another pops up. So far the media hasn’t published anything about it because of the D notice (DSMA-Notice) they’ve put on it, but the video is trending on Twitter. Callow asks what their play is. Julian says, “This is virgin territory, prime minister. There is no playbook.” A title card reads: End of Part One.
Analysis
Part One of “The National Anthem” introduces the inciting incident of the inaugural Black Mirror episode while establishing several major themes: coercion, humiliation, voyeurism, government incompetence, and the dark side of technological innovation.
After being woken at dawn, British Prime Minister Michael Callow, the episode’s protagonist, learns that an anonymous kidnapper wants him to have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television. In an instance of situational irony, the demand varies from routine kidnapping plots by seeming to give no benefit to the captor other than seeing the United Kingdom’s leader humiliated.
With this nightmarish premise, Brooker sets the tone not just for the standalone episode but for the Black Mirror series as a whole. Up to the point at which Princess Susannah reads out the demand, the mood of the episode is straightforwardly dramatic; with the preposterous request, the viewer’s and Callow’s expectations are thoroughly undermined, bringing in a pronounced element of black humor.
The major themes of government incompetence and the dark side of technological innovation emerge as Callow orders his staff to keep the story a secret with a D-notice, a government notice that advises media not to report on stories out of concern for national security or the safety of those involved. However, Callow’s government’s efforts have already been thwarted: because the kidnapper uploaded the ransom video to YouTube, members of the public have already downloaded their own copies and proliferated them online via Twitter. Despite having the British government and its intelligence agencies at his disposal, Callow is powerless to curb the spread of scandalous story. In this way, the kidnapper exposes the UK government’s inability to exercise power over the digital world in the way they have with traditional media outlets.
In a comic moment that foreshadows the episode’s grim climax, Callow’s claim that there is no way he is having sex with a pig is met with silence from his aides before they half-heartedly agree. Having already tried every trick they can think of, the prime minister’s staff are left without a strategy, and have already resigned themselves to the fact Callow may have to go through with it.
