Donald Clarke: Can you save Charlie Brooker’s cat from a shocking death?

My first attempt to watch (play?) Charlie Brooker's Cat Burglar ends in failure. When the interactive cartoon reaches its first narrative fork – the point at which you have to make a decision – Netflix has a nervous breakdown and crashes me back to the beginning. I switch from the browser version to the app on my Sony PlayStation. This proves eerily appropriate. Grasping the controller as I attempt to save Rowdy Cat from repeated annihilation, I realise that I am playing a video game. I am, to be more precise, playing a class of video game that first emerged close to 40 years ago.

Emerging in 1983, when those entertainments still dealt in crude, blocky graphics, Dragon’s Lair looked like a miracle within a cabinet. Featuring lush animation from Don Bluth, who later founded a studio in Dublin, the fantasy diversion, brought to us via laser disc, turned out to be a relative of those gamebooks that – “now turn to page 48” – invited readers to edit their own story from short, linked episodes. There was none of the sweaty action you got from contemporaneous games such as Pole Position or Arkanoid. Though Dragon’s Lair was a hit, the future lay in other directions. Might the future now belong to its descendants? And to those of an experimental Czechoslovakian film-maker?

It takes only a few moments to realise that you are "playing" as Rowdy Cat

Well, for the moment, Cat Burglar will do very nicely. Brooker and his team have conceived the show as a tribute to the immortal cartoons produced by Warner Brothers and MGM in the middle third of the last century. Rowdy Cat, as stubborn as Warners’ Sylvester, must get past Peanut, a canine security guard with the (ahem) doggedness of MGM’s Droopy, to acquire an artwork that will secure him enough money to claw a fresh three-piece suite to ribbons 10 times a day. The music has that delightful boingy swing we remember from Tom and Jerry. The puns are endless. When Rowdy empties his bottomless bag, he pulls out, among other things, a warbling, horn-hatted Brunhilde similar to those who once sang at Bugs Bunny.

Save the feline

It takes only a few moments to realise that you are “playing” as Rowdy Cat. Your decisions may alter the narrative, but they are primarily concerned with saving the larcenous feline from death. If you fail to correctly answer all questions within the allotted time, he loses one of his three lives – the traditional number in video games – and ultimately gets spirited up to cat heaven. Though nowhere near so violent as Ren & Stimpy, the classic cartoon pastiche from the early 1990s, the series is clearly not intended primarily for children. Nothing has prepared the contemporary consumer for the bizarre experience of identifying dead UK prime ministers to save a cartoon cat from violent electrocution. Was it Thomas Pelham-Holles, First Duke of Newcastle, that I missed? It sped by so quickly I had no time to take a note.

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Those interacting with Cat Burglar will, from time to time, find themselves swearing at the screen as they do after missing an open goal in Fifa 22

Brooker has been in similar territory before. Bandersnatch, perhaps the best known episode of his science fiction anthology Black Mirror, invited viewers to tweak and nudge the life of a programmer working on a video-game version of the gamebooks discussed above. The dynamics are, however, quite different. In Bandersnatch the first concern really is with directing the narrative. Those interacting with Cat Burglar will, from time to time, find themselves swearing at the screen as they do after missing an open goal in Fifa 22. The Dragon’s Lair journey has been reversed. Back then you played a video game and ended up watching a cartoon. Now you watch a cartoon and end up playing a video game.

Prescient genius

Netflix has gone big on this disinterment of a cancelled future. Eighteen titles employing the technique are available on the service. Fifty-five years after Radúz Cincera presented Kinoautomat, the world’s first interactive movie, at Expo 67 in Montreal, that late Czech experimentalist can belatedly be anointed a prescient genius. He may not appreciate where the innovations led. Cincera gave us a satire on determinism that invited viewers to vote on the narrative direction while always damning them to the same bleak denouement. Netflix gives us Johnny Test’s Ultimate Meatloaf Quest and The Boss Baby: Get That Baby!

It's hard to relax when you're jumping up every second to decide whether the lady in the anorak should murder the man in the kilt

It seems likely such children’s entertainment will continue to profit from the interactive approach. Delightful oddities such as Cat Burglar will come along once in a while. The question here is whether grown-up interactive comedy and drama can thrive. Bandersnatch is an outlier. The whole series is concerned with techno-fear, and that episode winds the meta-medium in with its own specific themes. The interactive mode is surely too gimmicky, too distracting, too clumsy for most mainstream narrative entertainment.

“Netflix and chill” you say? It’s hard to relax when you’re jumping up every second to decide whether the lady in the anorak should murder the man in the kilt. It’s harder still to make those choices when you’re doing that thing for which “chill” was apparently a euphemism.

Give us a moment’s peace, will you.