Charlie Brooker was born on 3 March 1971 in Reading, Berkshire, He grew up in a relaxed Quaker household in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire. His parents were fans of the television sitcom Bewitched, and named him Charlton after a character in one episode and his sister Samantha after the series’ main character. As a teenager, he first worked as a writer and cartoonist for Oink!, a comic produced in the late 1980s.

In February 1998, one of Brooker’s one-shot cartoons caused the magazine to be pulled from the shelves of many British newsagents. The cartoon was titled “Helmut Werstler’s Cruelty Zoo” and professed to be an advert for a theme park created by a Teutonic psychologist for children to take out their violent impulses on animals rather than humans. It was accompanied by photoshopped pictures of children smashing the skulls of monkeys with hammers, jumping on a badger with a pitchfork, and chainsawing an orang-utan, among other things. The original joke was supposed to be at the expense of the Tomb Raider games, known at the time for the number of animals killed, but the original title, “Lara Croft’s Cruelty Zoo”, was changed for legal reasons. In October 2008, Brooker and several other ex-writers were invited back to review a game for the 200th issue. Brooker reviewed Euro Truck Simulator.

From 1999 to 2003 he wrote the satirical TVGoHome website, a regular series of mock TV schedules published in a format similar to that of the Radio Times, consisting of a combination of savage satire and surreal humour and featured in technology newsletter Need To Know. A print adaptation of the site was published by Fourth Estate in 2001. A TV sketch show based on the site was broadcast on UK digital station E4 the same year.

From 1999 to 2000, Brooker played hooded expert ‘the Pundit’ in the short-lived show Games Republic, hosted by Trevor and Simon on BSkyB.

Brooker began writing a TV review column titled “Screen Burn” for The Guardian newspaper’s Saturday entertainment supplement The Guide in 2000, a role he continued through to October 2010.

In 2000, Brooker was one of the writers of the Channel 4 show The 11 O’Clock Show and a co-host (with Gia Milinovich) on BBC Knowledge’s The Kit, a low-budget programme dedicated to gadgets and technology (1999–2000). In 2001, he was one of several writers on Channel 4’s Brass Eye special on the subject of paedophilia.

In 2003, Brooker wrote an episode entitled “How to Watch Television” for Channel 4’s The Art Show. The episode was presented in the style of a public information film and was partly animated.

On 24 October 2004, he wrote a column on George W. Bush and the forthcoming 2004 US presidential election which concluded, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where are you now that we need you?” that was criticised for Brooker’s apparent encouragement of the assassination of the American president. The Guardian withdrew the article from its website and published and endorsed an apology by Brooker. He has since commented about the remark in the column stating:

From late 2005, he wrote a regular series of columns in The Guardian supplement “G2” on Fridays called “Supposing”, in which he free-associated on a set of vague what-if themes. From October 2006 this column was expanded into a full-page section on Mondays, including samples from TVGoHome and Ignopedia, an occasional series of pseudo-articles on topics mostly suggested by readers. The key theme behind Ignopedia was that, while Wikipedia is written and edited by thousands of users, Ignopedia would be written by a single sub-par person with little or no awareness of the facts.

Together with Brass Eye’s Chris Morris, Brooker co-wrote the sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a character from one of TVGoHome’s fictional programmes. The show was broadcast in 2005 and focused on the lives of a group of London media ‘trendies’. The same year, he was also on the writing team of the Channel 4 sketch show Spoons, produced by Zeppotron.

In 2006, Brooker began writing and presenting the television series Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe on BBC Four, a TV review programme in a similar style to his Screen Burn columns in The Guardian. After an initial pilot series of three editions in April, the programme returned later in the year for a second run of four episodes plus Christmas and Review of the Year specials in December 2006. A third series followed in February 2007 with a fourth broadcast in September 2007, followed by a Review of the Year in December 2007. The fifth series started in November 2008 and was followed by another Review of the Year special. This series was also the first to be given a primetime repeat on terrestrial television (BBC Two), in January 2009.

Brooker has appeared on three episodes and one webisode of the popular BBC current affairs news quiz Have I Got News for You. He appeared on an episode of the Channel 4 panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats, The Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2009, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Would I Lie To You?. In December 2006 he reviewed two games written by the presenters of VideoGaiden, on their show. He also made a brief appearance in the third and final instalment of the documentary series Games Britannia, discussing the rise and popularity of computer games.

Brooker wrote Dead Set, a five-part zombie horror thriller for E4 set in the Big Brother house. The show was broadcast in October 2008 to coincide with Halloween and was repeated on Channel 4 in January 2009 to coincide with Celebrity Big Brother, and again for Halloween later that year. It was produced by Zeppotron, which also produced Screenwipe.

A similar show called Newswipe, focusing on current affairs reportage by the international news media, began on BBC Four on 25 March 2009. A second series began on 19 January 2010. He has also written and presented the one-off special Gameswipe which focused on video games and aired on BBC Four on 29 September 2009.

In 2009, Brooker began hosting You Have Been Watching, a panel comedy TV quiz on Channel 4 which discusses television. A second series was broadcast the following year.

Brooker left the “Screen Burn” column in 2010. In the final column, he noted how increasingly difficult he found it to reconcile his role in mainstream media and TV production with his writing as a scabrous critic or to objectively criticise those he increasingly worked and socialised with. Longtime covering contributor Grace Dent took over the column. He continued to contribute other articles to The Guardian on a regular basis, his most recent comment column appearing in May 2015.

Brooker’s 2010 Wipe, a review of 2010, was broadcast in December 2010. The end-of-year Wipe specials continued annually, the last one to date broadcast on 29 December 2016. Due to Brooker’s commitments to Black Mirror and other projects, the annual Wipe went on hiatus from 2017 onwards.

On 6 May 2010, Brooker was a co-host of the Channel 4 alternative election night, along with David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne. The telethon was interspersed with contributions from Brooker, some live in the studio but mostly pre-recorded. Notably, these included an “Election Special” of You Have Been Watching and two smaller segments in an almost identical style to Screenwipe (the only noticeable difference being that Brooker was sitting in a different room). Brooker described the experience of live television as being so nerve-wracking he “did a piss” during the broadcast. A spin-off series, 10 O’Clock Live, started in January 2011 with the same four hosts.

Beginning on 11 May 2010, Brooker presented a 5-part BBC Radio 4 series celebrating failure titled So Wrong It’s Right, in which guests compete to pitch the worst possible ideas for new franchises and give the ‘most wrong’ answer to a question. Also featured are guests’ recollections about their own personal life failures and their complaints about life in general in a round called ‘This Putrid Modern Hell’. Guests have included David Mitchell, Lee Mack, Josie Long, Frank Skinner, Helen Zaltzman, Holly Walsh, Graham Linehan and Richard Herring. The second series began on 10 March 2011, and a third was broadcast in May 2012. In common with Screenwipe’s use of a Grandaddy track (A.M. 180) from the album Under the Western Freeway as its theme tune, So Wrong It’s Right uses another track from the same album, Summer Here Kids.

Brooker became engaged to former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq after dating for nine months, having met while filming an episode of Screenwipe. They married on 26 July 2010 at the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. They have two sons: Covey (born March 2012) and Huxley (born February 2014).

Brooker won the 2009 Columnist of the Year award at the British Press Awards for his Guardian column. Dead Set was nominated for the 2009 Best Drama Serial BAFTA. In 2010, he was given the Best Entertainment Programme Award for Newswipe from the Royal Television Society. He has received three British Comedy Awards: Best Newcomer in 2009, Best Comedy Entertainment Show Award for Newswipe in 2011 and Best Comedy Entertainment Personality in 2012. At the BAFTA TV Awards 2017, his show Charlie Brooker’s 2016 Wipe won for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme.

In December 2011, three episodes of Brooker’s Black Mirror, a science fiction anthology series, aired on Channel 4 to largely positive reviews. As well as creating the show, Brooker wrote the first episode and co-wrote the second with his wife Konnie Huq. He also wrote all three episodes of series two. In September 2015, Netflix commissioned a third season of 12 episodes, with Channel 4 losing the rights to the programme. A trailer for the third season was released in October 2016. This was later split into two series of six episodes. The third season was released on Netflix worldwide on 21 October 2016. Brooker has solely written four of the episodes in series three, and has co-written the remaining two.

In 2012 he contributed to the book Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who.

In May 2012, Brooker was interviewed for Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast series.

With Daniel Maier, he co-wrote a spoof crime drama for Sky1 called A Touch of Cloth, which first broadcast on 26 August 2012 and starred John Hannah and Suranne Jones, both notable for having starred in genuine crime dramas. Two further series were broadcast in 2013 and 2014, with the latter starring Karen Gillan.

Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe was first broadcast on BBC Two on 31 January 2013. It is an amalgam of Screenwipe and Newswipe, with sections focusing on recent news, television shows and films. Along with the regular cast, it also features guests who discuss recent events. Two more series followed in 2014 and 2015. A 60-minute special, Election Wipe, aired on 6 May 2015, focused on the events running up to the 2015 general election.

Several news reports, including one by Chris Cillizza, political reporter for The Washington Post, compared the 2016 Donald Trump political campaign to “The Waldo Moment”, a 2013 episode of the Black Mirror TV series; later, in September 2016, Brooker also compared the Trump campaign to the episode and rightly predicted Trump would win the 2016 election.

The fourth season was released in December 2017, followed by a full-length interactive film Bandersnatch in December 2018. The fifth season was released in June 2019.

In January 2018 he was the guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

A 45-minute BBC Two special, Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe, aired on 14 May 2020. It focused on life during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. It was produced during the UK lockdown, which had caused a series starring Wipe character Philomena Cunk to be postponed. Most of the crew from the series transferred to work on Antiviral Wipe. Brooker initially turned down the offer to make the special but accepted when it was clear that production would be largely unchanged, the format of the series—with few characters appearing on the same screen together and extensive use of archive footage—well-suited to the lockdown rules. The editing process was the most affected.