Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe, review: Brilliant, topical comedy that burns with a necessary rage

If comedy is tragedy plus time, then Charlie Brooker is way off the mark with his coronavirus special. A Covid-19 spin on his topical commentary series Screenwipe, Antiviral Wipe (BBC Two) has been unveiled smack-dab in the middle of England’s gradual reopening, despite warnings that we are nowhere near out of the woods yet. A big part of Screenwipe’s traditional appeal lies in the beauty of hindsight, and the comic power of giggling over recent media absurdities while comfortably ensconced in the here and now. With the here and now still enraging and terrifying, though, it makes Antiviral Wipe uneasy viewing.

Much like Brooker’s smash anthology series Black Mirror, which he recently admitted has become too prescient to be fun to write anymore, it’s overflowing with eerie profundity. Time has lost all meaning in quarantine – with weekdays blurring into one another and weekends colossal non-events – so it is easy to forget the twists and detours of how we got here. Likewise, how devastating much of it is when condensed into a 45-minute television programme.

We breeze past the broken promises, the claims that we already possessed the resources needed to combat the virus, and the worrying fluctuation of what we needed to do to stop it. The speed with which Boris Johnson went from claiming he was proudly shaking hands with everyone to breaking news reports of his hospitalisation would be jarring were it not completely true.

There are laughs, of course. Screenwipe regulars Diane Morgan and Al Campbell, playing commentators Philomena Cunk and Barry Shitpeas, respectively, are back and brilliant. There’s a wonderful dissection of 5G conspiracy theorists (“Some people say coronavirus was manufactured in a factory, like Pringles but evil”), and the ludicrousness of the now-forgotten moment in time wherein celebrities (including “uninteresting car inhabitant Lewis Hamilton”) used their social media to tell us how to wash our hands.

There’s also something quietly tender about the moment in which Brooker tells of his surprise at how communal and supportive many of us have been in the wake of the pandemic. Unlike much of the dystopian fiction he has written, we haven’t (yet) resorted to looting and social carnage. Instead, we’re putting rainbows in our windows and, at least outside of Twitter, being generally nice to one another.

Make no mistake, though: this isn’t gentle television. Brooker seamlessly weaves our current woes with the corruptions and exceptionalist nonsense of the Brexit campaign (the repeated shots of the infamous Vote Leave £350m-a-week-to-the-NHS bus appear like ghouls), balancing poo jokes with a simmering and necessary rage.

Antiviral Wipe leaves you pining for a recent past where all we cared about was Phillip Schofield’s sexuality, and aghast at what has occurred in such a short space of time. It would be strange if it left you any other way.