After his unexpected involvement in the second episode of the sixth season, Loch Henry, Black Mirror star Samuel Blenkin has expressed his gratitude to Bergerac’s John Nettles.
In the true crime-style episode, the Scorpius Malfoy stage actor portrays Davis, who travels to his homeland in Scotland to make a nature documentary with his fiancée Pia (Myha’la Herrald).
When a dark mystery from years ago is revealed to be a horrific truth Davis’ parents have been hiding, they discover something considerably deeper.
After they’d allegedly been filming over old Bergerac footage, it was up to Nettles that Pia recognised what was actually going on.
As earlier episodes starring Nettles began to play on the VHS tapes, they abruptly morphed into old family films, showing Davis’ mother Janet (played by Monica Dolan) as a killer.
The British criminal drama TV series starred Nettles as the eponymous character Jim Bergerac and aired from 1981 to 1991.
Despite being the key to the surprising Loch Henry surprise, Myha’la said she had never heard of the hit show’s star.
Chatting she said: ‘I was about to look it up, but then I knew that Pia didn’t know what it was, so there’s no reason I should know what it is, so I never looked it up, being intentional about it.’
Samuel added: ‘Somewhere in my memory it sparked something. Davis had a vague awareness of it, I was the same, I had enough.
‘But you know what, John, if you’re out there, thank you, for letting us tell your story.’
Despite their lack of familiarity with the series, the team did conduct study on other crime documentaries as they prepared for their parts in the dark comedy.
Samuel said: ‘One thing that I did was that, the conversations I had with Sam Miller, the director and Charlie [Brooker] about Davis being an avid documentarian.
‘I watched a lot of documentaries that I had on my list, the kind of ones that I thought Davis would really admire, like Werner Herzog, you know, those kinds of things.
‘The really sort of artistic… I think he sees himself as a bit of an artistic sort of documentary guy.’
Black Mirror is available to watch on Netflix.