The creepy real-life inspiration behind Amanda running adverts in Black Mirror episode one

Black Mirror has finally returned to Netflix with season seven and the creator has revealed his scary inspiration behind the adverts in the first episode, Common People.

The opener is about a man who saves his wife’s life after she falls into a coma with a new technology called Rivermind, which restores her cognitive function.

It seems great at first and the teacher can resume her normal life, but things soon turn bad as they have to pay an extortionate subscription service to keep her alive.

After a while, Rivermind starts running adverts through Amanda and they have to pay for the evil tech giant’s more expensive subscription to stop it from happening.

The show’s creator Charlie Brooker has revealed that the inspiration behind this was podcasts, which suddenly jump to an advert while you’re listening.

“I’d been thinking about, what if someone needs a subscription service to stay alive? And then what if somebody was running adverts?” he told Netflix’s Tudum.

Credit: Netflix

“The adverts came from a funny place because I’d been listening to a lot of podcasts where the hosts would suddenly break off and start pitching products and then go back to the rest of the podcast.”

“So I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a funny one’,” he continued, but the episode actually ended up taking a far darker turn than he initially anticipated.

If you think about it, the adverts Amanda delivers in Common People are eerily similar to listening to a podcast, when it suddenly goes into a commercial when you least expect it.

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That’s why the sci-fi thriller is so great, because each episode has hidden messages that we can all relate to, which makes the whole thing seem creepily real.

Next time you listen to a podcast, you won’t be able to stop thinking about the Black Mirror episode now.

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Featured image by: Netflix