Six years ago this month, Charlie Brooker took leave of his weekly TV column at The Guardian with a blistering final entry that was half mea culpa, half montage of his best bits. In it, he explained that after a decade, the fun had seeped out of writing cruel but honkingly funny caricatures of small screen personalities. It no longer felt okay to earn a living by describing David Dickinson as an “ageing Thundercat” or Anne Widdecombe as having “a face like a haunted cave in Poland”.

Brooker’s growing TV writing and presenting career had turned him from poacher to gamekeeper. You couldn’t sustain that act while mixing in showbiz circles, he explained. It wasn’t just the awkwardness, it was the guilt.

“Suddenly you’re standing in a room full of people you’ve slagged off in print,” he wrote “and they’re not 2D screen-wraiths any more, but living, breathing, fallible humanoids.”

Brooker’s been paying for his former sins ever since with Black Mirror, his acclaimed Channel 4 future tech anthology drama now at Netflix. Through its staging of nightmarish what-if scenarios (what if you could ‘block’ people in real life, what if criminals could be forced to experience their victims’ feelings, what if a copy of your consciousness could be used as a high-tech household appliance…), Black Mirror repeatedly reminds us that whatever technology enables us to do, real people are on the receiving end of our actions.