I’ve never really liked zombies and I’m not keen on Big Brother, so when I heard that Charlie Brooker, of all people, was to make a zombie thing set in the Big Brother house I sighed a big couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s kind of sigh. What was the point? To make an allegorical statement about the state of reality TV and its viewers? To celebrate the trashy nature of 15-minutes-of-fame culture? To be willfully post-modern and mix up both genres to create some new, 21st-century mutant? I had no idea. Charlie Brooker is indeed a clever and funny man, but why tackle something that Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright did so well in Shaun Of The Dead (a highly enjoyable updating of the zombie genre)? Isn’t making something like Dead Set re-treading old and (in my opinion) quite dull ground? That really isn’t Charlie Brooker’s style, so I went to the press launch last night to find out whether it was any good…

Related: Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set launches viral site

So last night at The Courthouse in central London, various people were gathered in a room drinking white wine and chatting innocuously. Man, I’ve been doing this for a long time but all I see now is skinny jeans and side-parted hair. What has the world of TV journalism come to?

Anyway, chatting to a friend at Endemol (who have a, ahem, hand in the making of this), she told me the show was great and Davina McCall, who had just walked into the room, would surprise me. In what way, I asked. By being good? I didn’t really say that, but I was thinking it.

Then the banging started. A slow, deep rumble that evolved into a relentless banging thundered over the speakers. Nice touch, I thought – we’re being treated to a psychological barrage akin to zombies banging into doors trying to eat everyone’s guts out.

We were lead into the screening room. Now, before I actually tell you about the series (a five-parter, no less), Channel 4 big people got up to say a few words. One of them told us that E4′s viewing figures had risen by 25 per cent over the past year and then, Andrew Newman, Head Of Entertainment at Channel 4, got up to say a few words.

Andrew Newman is an extraordinary man. He had his hair slicked back, wore an enormous cravate and a pair of the biggest, roundest glasses I’ve ever seen. He rocked that early 1970s light entertainment look like a mutha. He was like a cross between Hughie Green, Bob Monkhouse, and Edward Tattsyrup from The League Of Gentlemen. I was quite taken with him.

Anyway, he was great and had some entertaining digs at BBC Three, E4′s direct competitor (the gist being: BBC Three commission loads of things and the overall quality isn’t very good, while E4 doesn’t commission that much but when it does we make sure it’s quality).

Charlie Brooker then got up to say a few words (looking a bit like Ed Sullivan with his hand on his hips as he spoke), and said that he was mainly influenced by 24. Interesting.

So, to Dead Set. CB also said that he had spent some time behind the scenes on the real Big Brother show to get an idea of how it all works. You could see this detail all over the place, from seeing how the voice of Big Brother intervenes when something kicks off, to how the camera people work in the cramped and dark little runs that circle the house. The first 20 minutes of Dead Set also introduced the housemates – there was one laddish contestant, a contestant who was tall and blonde, one ‘urban’ guy, one camp bloke in high heels and one boring, older contestant (Kevin Eldon… a real treat!)… basically your basic BB stereotypes.

Behind the scenes we were then introduced to bile-spouting producer Patrick (Andy Nyman) who was just foul-mouthed, arrogant and very funny indeed. Then there was Kelly, played by Jaime Winstone (she was in attendance last night, and was sporting purple hair… crazy!). She’s a runner, taking coffee to people and basically a gopher running about the place. She had boyfriend problems.

Things were all leading up to eviction night in the studio and the pressure was well and truly on – Patrick was sweating and swearing, not least because there’s rioting in the streets and the show might be pulled for the news at any moment.

This behind-the-scenes footage was brilliant, and it felt more like a TV comedy satire. In fact, I think there’s probably huge mileage in making a show like that. They did it with Drop The Dead Donkey.

As we were settling into chuckling at Patrick’s outbursts, things slowly started going all zombie and gory. Whenever a zombie entered the fray, the camera went all jerky and silly, and when the the undead attacked the BB compound (which included a contestant reunion featuring people like Makosi, Bubble, Brian, that one who had her boobs done and the one who said she liked blinking) it all went a bit insane.

That’s when Dead Set turned into more of a conventional zombie horror. Basically Jaime Winstone’s character found that the safest place, for now, was actually inside the BB house, while the zombies patrolled the camera runs and studios. And yes, Davina became a zombie.

So there you have it. To reveal anymore would take away your enjoyment. I certainly enjoyed it, much more than I thought I would. It’s beautifully filmed, there was a good cast and there were a few real jump-out-of-your-seat moments.

As for Charlie Brooker and the ‘what is he playing at?’ question, I’m still not sure. The first bit seems to be an area where he makes his comments about reality TV and the world, but after that it just becomes an enjoyable, gory zombie horror. Nothing more, nothing less.