Brass Eye

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Brass Eye is a UK television series of satirical spoof documentaries which aired on Channel 4 in 1997 and was re-run in 2001.

The series was created by Chris Morris, and written by, amongst others, Morris, David Quantick, Peter Baynham, Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. It was conceived as a sequel to Morris's earlier spoof news programmes On The Hour and The Day Today, and satirised the media's portrayal of various social ills.

1 Original 1997 series
2 2001 paedophilia special
3 References to and appearances of celebrities by episode
4 External links

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Original 1997 series

Brass Eye aroused considerable controversy when it was first broadcast, primarily because prominent public figures were fooled into pledging onscreen support for fictional, and often plainly absurd, charities and causes.

The second episode was called "Drugs", and is considered by many to be the most successful of the series. In the opening scene, a voiceover tells viewers that there are so many drugs on the streets of Britain, "not even the dealers know them all". An undercover reporter (Morris) asks a drug dealer in London for various fictional drugs, including "Triple - sod", "Yellow Bentines" and "Clarky Cat", leaving the dealer puzzled and increasingly irritated until he tells the reporter to leave. He also asks the dealer if he is the "Boz-Boz", and claims that he doesn't want his arm to feel "like a fortnight in a bad balloon". Later on in the episode, in the same area, Morris dresses as a baby with a nappy on, and a red balloon like hat on his head, and again asks for "triple - sod", and then says that "He had a friend once that got triple - jacked with a steeplehammer, and jessop jessop jessop", repeating the last words to make fun of "drug slang".

David Amess, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Southend West, was fooled into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European drug called Cake, and went as far as to ask a question about it in Parliament [1]. The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon" and was frequently referred to as "a made-up drug". Other celebrities such as Sir Bernard Ingham, Noel Edmonds and Rolf Harris were shown holding the bright-yellow cake-sized pill as they talked, with Bernard Manning telling viewers that "One kiddy on Cake, cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It's a fucking disgrace." and that "...you can puke yourself to death on this stuff - one girl threw up her own pelvis. What a fucking disgrace."

Other episodes dealt with the topics of science, animals, and infamously, sex. In one scene of the "Sex" episode, Morris posed as a talk-show host who took a starkly discriminatory attitude in favour of those with "Good AIDS" (e.g. from a contaminated blood transfusion) over those with "Bad AIDS" (caught through homosexual activity). Image:Grade.gif The screening of the 1997 series was postponed for nearly six months as it made comic reference to murderer Myra Hindley, who was back in the news at the time after her portrait was vandalised in the Royal Academy exhibition Sensation.

Michael Grade, then chief executive of Channel 4, repeatedly intervened to demand edits to episodes of Brass Eye, and rescheduled some shows for sensitivity. This interference outraged Morris, who responded by inserting into the Decline episode the single-frame subliminal message "Grade is a cunt". This was removed for the DVD release, which also reinstated all of the extant material.

As another insult to Grade, Morris allegedly wrote to Nelson Mandela telling him that Grade campaigned for him to be kept in prison, and protested upon his release. He also wrote to musician Paul Simon, claiming that Grade always considered Art Garfunkel the more talented of the duo.

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2001 paedophilia special

In 2001, the series was repeated, along with a new and entirely original extra show, which tackled the tricky subject of paedophilia and the associated moral panic prevalent in the media at the time.

Celebrities including Gary Lineker and Phil Collins appeared in videotaped interviews, in which they endorsed a spoof charity "Nonce Sense" ("nonce" is a common British slang term for paedophile). Tomorrow's World presenter Philippa Forrester and ITN reporter Nicholas Owen amongst others were tricked into explaining the details of "HOECS" (pronounced "hoax") computer games, which online paedophiles were supposed to be using to abuse children via the Internet. These fairly simple plays on words were opaque enough that none of the guest celebrities understood that they were being lampooned until the show was aired, in spite of what often seems to the viewer like plainly absurd subject matter. The Capital Radio DJ "Doctor" Neil Fox, for example, informed viewers that "paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me", before qualifying his remarks with "Now that is scientific fact - there's no real evidence for it - but it is scientific fact". Viewers were also told by MP Syd Rapson that paedophiles were using "an area of Internet the size of Ireland", and by Richard Blackwood that internet paedophiles can make computer keyboards emit noxious fumes in order to subdue children (Blackwood even sniffed a keyboard and claimed to be able to smell the fumes, which he said made him feel "suggestible").

Image:BrassEye-MilitPede.jpg

In one segment, the studio is "invaded" by members of a fictional paedophilia advocacy organization called MILIT-PEDE and the programme appears to suffer a short technical disturbance. When the show returns, presenter Chris Morris confronts a supposed spokesman, Gerard Chote (played by Simon Pegg) who has been captured and placed in a pillory, and asks him whether he wants to have sex with his six-year-old son. Hesitantly, the spokesman looks at the boy and refuses, explaining, "I don't fancy him", which then drives Morris to further indignation that his son is found unattractive. Morris later claimed that the child actor was not present during filming, and was incorporated digitally in post-production, but this scene was one of the key causes of the media backlash which followed its first broadcast.

Around 2000 complaints (and approximately 3000 calls of support) were received regarding the show, and some politicians hastily spoke out against Morris. David Blunkett said he was "dismayed" by the show, and Beverley Hughes described it as "unspeakably sick" (while admitting that she had not seen the programme). Although she did not criticise the show, Tessa Jowell was reported as asking the Independent Television Commission to revise its rules to allow such a controversial show to be prevented from broadcast [2]. There was also a vociferous tabloid campaign against Morris, who refused to discuss the issue. The episode went on to win a Broadcast magazine award in 2002 and the complete series, including the 2001 special, was released as a bestselling DVD later that year.

The show caused a furor among sections of the British tabloid press, with the Daily Mail leading the fray. Some have pointed out the ironic fact that The Daily Star printed an article decrying Morris and the show next to a piece about the then 15-year-old singer Charlotte Church's breasts under the headline "She's a big girl now". Additionally, the Daily Mail featured pictures of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, who were 13 and 11 at the time respectively, in their bikinis next to a headline describing Brass Eye as "Unspeakably Sick"[3], [4]. Defenders of the show argued that its satire of the media's articifial hysteria and hypocrisy on the subject of paedophilia was proved accurate by the ensuing moral panic towards the very programme itself.

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