Dead Set (2008) Starring Chizzy Akudolu, Shelley Conn & Raj Ghatak Directed by Yann Demange Written by Charlie Brooker

Big Brother. Big fucking Brother. The sprawling mutant leviathan that shat forth the plague of reality television. Whatever genuine intentions of social experimentation the show may originally have had, it has long since degenerated into a festering septic tank of water cooler gossip, tabloid headlines and, year upon year, more vacuous attention seeking contestants: clueless, talentless, dolled-up clotheshorses seeking celebrity for its own sake, inspiring the majority of British schoolchildren to believe that the most important thing you could be as an adult was 'famous,' making a generation of kids studying 1984 think that Orwell nicked the idea from the telly...

Grunt. Sigh. Grunt.

And worst of all, I'm as guilty as the rest of the United Kingdom of getting hooked on it. Like any evil, it's insidious. It's televisual crack.

Who wouldn't want to see the whole repugnant enterprise ripped into tiny bloody pieces at the hands of marauding zombies?

And that is the tantalising premise of Dead Set.

When the action commences, it's the weekly brouhaha of eviction night. I'm not sure how much the show ever caught on internationally - didn't it get axed in the US after a housemate went nuts with a knife? - so in case (lucky you) you're not familiar with the format, I'd better explain: the show runs for an interminably long few months, over which time the number of housemates is reduced week by week from about a dozen to an eventual winner. Cut off completely from the outside world, the housemates are given various tasks to do by the anonymous voice of Big Brother, designed specifically to mess with their heads, which is never difficult considering the bulk of the housemates are picked based on their lack of intelligence and social grace. Each week the housemates privately vote for who they want out of the house, and the two or three housemates with the most votes go up for a public vote, viewers calling or texting premium rate numbers that line Channel 4's pockets, for the privilege of having their voice heard on this oh-so crucial topic. (The show regularly gets more voters than the general election.) And when the evictee is announced and unleashed on the public at prime time on Friday night, it's a media circus.

However, on this particular eviction night, as we follow production runner Kelly (Jaime Winstone) doing the rounds backstage with the coffee, it becomes evident that something else is going on outside the sheltered studio walls; talk of some kind of trouble in all the major cities, which seems to be escalating. Egomaniacal producer Patrick (a wonderfully repulsive Andy Nyman) is shitting bricks: after all, this might mean his show gets bumped for the news. Meanwhile, the sheltered housemates have no idea what’s happening on their doorstep; but once the living dead storm the studio, and the terrified Kelly realises the safest place to hide is inside the Big Brother house, there's a rude awakening in store.

And, of course, the greatest concern of the housemates is: "Does this mean we're not on the telly anymore?"

Dead Set is a very promising idea. Horror TV shows are a rarity, particularly the kind of full-on horror being served up here, with oodles of graphic violence and expletive-littered dialogue. Hopes are further raised by this being the brainchild of Charlie Brooker, one of the foremost writers of satire on British television today, most notorious for the massively controversial paedophilia episode of the iron-balled spoof news show Brass Eye. And with zombies having become so ubiquitous in film, fiction and comics in recent years, perhaps TV was the best place they could go to breathe a little new life into what is becoming a tired subgenre.

Sadly, as both a skit on the BB phenomenon and a shot up the arse of the living dead, Dead Set falls a little short. It gets the adrenaline pumping, no doubt, but, given the pedigree of talent involved, it leaves a bit to be desired on the cerebral front.

First off - it stretches the concept too far. It's at its best and most unique in the claustrophobia of the studio and the BB house, where the focus is on the mental turmoil of those trapped within, clueless as to what is going on outside, or what might be trying to get in at them. However, Saw-like, the tension is broken by frequent cuts to the outside world, following a number of tedious survivor subplots that we've seen innumerable times elsewhere. It’s hard enough these days to do much new with the traditional Romero zombie format at 90 minutes (as recently demonstrated by the bitterly disappointing Diary of the Dead), so trying to make the same old shit seem fresh when stretching it out over a 3 hour mini-series is akin to, as Wesley Snipes might put it, motherfuckers trying to ice-skate uphill. Add a few rooftop musings on the nature of the zombies that sound like they're lifted almost word for word from Dawn of the Dead, and you'd be forgiven for feeling a bit of déjà vu.

This is not to say that Dead Set does a bad job at the zombie action, however. With fast zombies and frequent use of handheld shakey-cam, it's very reminiscent of 28 Days Later - and even though I thought Danny Boyle's film was quite overrated, there's no denying it had some thrilling sequences. Dead Set's zombie attacks are every bit as effective, upping the ante with an impressive amount of carnage, plenty of meaty, juicy close ups as flesh is torn and innards spilled: watch out for a head-smashing Irreversible homage. Director Yann Demange may be worth keeping an eye on. (I see he also did a few episodes of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, for which I am also highly appreciative. Nearly-naked Billie Piper; yes please.)

Given Brooker's track record, though, things seem a little subdued on the satire front. There's plenty of vitriol spat at the fatuous celebrity phenomenon that Big Brother is at the heart of - much of it from the mouths of Nyman’s Patrick, very much the Captain Rhodes of the piece, and Kevin (Hot Fuzz) Eldon's Joplin, the middle-aged intellectual of the group (there's always one of those in the BB house) - but social commentary is never allowed to detract from the action for too long. This may be a deliberate creative decision; clearly Dead Set is not intended as a spoof, and the satirical elements of the best zombie movies have always been implicit (as opposed to, say, Joe Dante's enjoyable but overbearingly didactic Homecoming). However, I can't help wondering if these elements were toned down a little to appease the money men; after all, this is a production of the very same company that make the real Big Brother, hence it was filmed in the actual house and studio locations, with actual BB presenter Davina McCall in tow. And oh, how long I have waited to see that unbearable woman suffer as she does here... but, as annoying as I find her as a presenter, I can't deny she makes for a pretty damn good zombie.

I doubt anyone expects to be too surprised by a zombie tale these days, so it's no surprise that Dead Set isn't all that... surprising. Ahem. But still, it serves up a decent slice of living dead action. It might not be quite the critical dissection of the reality TV generation that some of us would have liked, but it's impressively tense, brutal and atmospheric. How well it will travel outside of the UK, or how well it will stand the test of time when, God willing, the Big Brother franchise finally dies out; that of course remains to be seen. As it stands, it will always have a special place in my heart for showing me Davina McCall bleeding to death through a gaping wound in her throat. I'm only sad that the zombie who bit the hag's windpipe out wasn't me.