Charlie Brooker, author of the TV series 'Black Mirror' including an episode in which the Prime Minister had sex with a pig, has been hired by ITV to predict the outcomes of rugby matches.
Brooker will replace Paul the Octopus, who came to prominence during the 2010 World Cup for his apparent ability to predict which team would win by choosing one box of food over another. The octopus's agent said he was not at all disappointed by the decision, partly because football rather than rugby was Paul's area of expertise, but mainly because he was chopped into calamari years ago.
For his own part, Brooker played down his supposed psychic abilities. "After all, I wrote a piece in which the Prime Minister was forced to have sex with a pig, not chose to voluntarily. That's darker than anything I could ever come up with."
"Also, I'm not sure I'm alone in having this gift. You got to admit, Ed Miliband's reluctance to eat that bacon sandwich looks pretty prescient in hindsight."
Brooker also drew attention to George Orwell's apparent foreknowledge in writing the final sentence of Animal Farm.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”