Guest Author - Lauren Evans

To help us get into the Halloween spirit last week, E4 kindly treated us to Charlie Brooker's bleak zombie series Dead Set. It's currently available to view for free on 4OD's catch-up service, so if you didn't manage to see it (despite me nagging you about it for months on end), I highly recommend you take advantage of this!

Charlie Brooker is the journalist who gained international notoriety in 2004 when he joked in a column about the assassination of George W. Bush. To those of us familiar with his vicious commentary on television, published weekly in his ScreenBurn column for The Guardian, it was no surprise that Brooker was ranting about yet another famous figure (although this was a fairly restrained one by comparison), but when the Drudge Report picked up the article and it went worldwide, the death threats became pouring in from patriotic Americans.

He apologised and was duly forgiven, but it was always clear that Charlie Brooker wasn't quite finished eviscerating famous folk left, right and centre. Happily, in 'Dead Set' Brooker has put down his pen and picked up a sword, and by combining my two greatest loves in the entire world – Big Brother and zombies – has created a survival horror masterpiece.

The action begins on Big Brother eviction night, and UKBB fans can spend a fun 15 minutes excitedly name-checking all of the cameos – Davina McCall, Ziggy Lichman, Brian Belo, Imogen Thomas, Helen Adams (I like blinkin' I do!), Saskia Howard-Clarke, Makosi Musambasi, Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace (who is, incidentally, Brooker's bezzie holiday mate – bizarre!), Paul "Bubble" Ferguson, Eugene Sully and Kinga Karolczak – before the zombie apocalypse hits and then it's good old brains for tea.

I'll try not to give away too much, but this is genuinely inspired television. Designed as a series and running at 3 hours-ish (although there's a feature-length version available, which I would personally skip), there's plenty of time to build the creeping feeling that any place of safety is only temporary as the tenacious zombie hordes encroach the boundaries reeeeeally slowly. The gore is top-notch, and certainly compared to recent releases like 'Zombie Strippers', the body count is more than respectable and there's not a boring death among them.

We're treated to a great cast - comedy favourite Kevin Eldon, plays Joplin, the Big Brother contestant everyone loves to hate and Andy Nyman (of Severance fame) appears as repulsive producer Patrick. Jaime Winstone stars as Kelly, a production assistant who survives the initial onslaught, and she manages to make the transition from screaming girlie to leather-jacketed, gun-toting survivor in a surprisingly convincing manner. I was extremely surprised to see that Davina (she who requires no surname) appears beyond the first star-studded episode, and puts in a spirited performance that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

This is bleak fare indeed and the ending will leave you open-mouthed. In fact it'll be a full fifteen minutes until you think to ask the eternal question – why do characters in zombie movies never ever call them zombies?