Brass Eye

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Brass Eye
Image:Brass Eye logo.png
The Brass Eye logo
Genre Comedy
Creator(s) Chris Morris
Starring Chris Morris
Country of origin United Kingdom
No. of episodes 7
Production
Running time 25 min
Broadcast
Original channel Channel 4
Original run January 29, 1997 – July 26, 2001

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. There are rumours that Morris is planning another special for later in 2007. The theme will be terrorism.

Contents

[edit] 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 purportedly real-life drug dealer in London for various fictional drugs, including "Triple-sod", "Yellow Benteens" 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 couple day's 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 jessop", repeating the last words to make fun of drug slang.

"MP David Amess MP", the Conservative Member of Parliament for Basildon, 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" (a drug, they were told, not made from plants but made up from chemicals). 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-bone... What a fucking disgrace". Manning then informed anyone offered Cake to "chuck it back in their face and tell them to fuck off".

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 or drug abuse).

The "Grade is a cunt" subliminal message.
The "Grade is a cunt" subliminal message.

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. In a particularly infamous portrayal, Hindley was lauded in a song by a fictitious indie band called "Blouse", whose appearance and style closely resembled that of real world band Pulp. The lyrics to part of the song read: "Every time I see your picture, Myra/I have to phone my latest girlfriend up and fire her/And find a prostitute who looks like you and hire her/Oh, me oh Myra."

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.

[edit] 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 parts of the British media at the time following the death of Sarah Payne focused on the controversial 'name and shame' campaign of the News of the World. This included an incident in 2000, in which a paediatrician in Newport had the word 'PAEDO' daubed in yellow paint on her home. [2]

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 a sex offender), the latter going so far as to announce, "I'm talking Nonce Sense!" 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"); Blackwood also warned watching parents that exposure to the fumes would make their children "smell like hammers".

Sequence from the special episode on paedophilia, in 2001
Sequence from the special episode on paedophilia, in 2001

In one segment, the studio is "invaded" by members of a fictional pedophile activism 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 Morris's 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 [3] even though she hadn't watched the actual episode of the show. 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 furore among sections of the British tabloid press. 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"[4]. 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". Defenders of the show argued that the media reaction to the show reinforced its satire of the media's hysteria and hypocrisy on the subject of paedophilia. [5].

[edit] References to and appearances of celebrities by episode

[edit] Animals episode

[edit] Drugs episode

[edit] Science episode

[edit] Sex episode

[edit] Crime episode

[edit] Moral Decline episode

[edit] Brass Eye special

[edit] Trivia

  • The song "Depressed Beyond Tablets" by the band Half Man Half Biscuit (on the album Achtung Bono) takes its title from a line in the 'Crime' episode.
  • The song "Magic Monkey Juice" by Younger Brother (on the album A Flock of Bleeps) samples the 'Drugs' episode.
  • Another reference to the Drugs episode appears in the 13th edition of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, where the "how to use this book" example entry mentions a fictitious group called Shatner's Bassoon.
  • The Song 'Shatners Bassoon' by the British ska-punk band Lightyear is named after and features the Noel Edmonds quote "It stimulates part of the brain called shatners bassoon"

[edit] External links


 v • d • e Chris Morris
Radio Shows
No Known Cure • Chris Morris • Loose Ends • Up Yer News • The Chris Morris Christmas Show • On the Hour • Why Bother? • The Chris Morris Music Show • Blue Jam
Television Shows
The Day Today • Brass Eye • Jam/Jaaaaam • Brass Eye Special • Nathan Barley
Other Projects
Big Train • BEST BAR (NONE) • Second Class Male/Time To Go • The Smokehammer • Absolute Atrocity Special • Bushwhacked • My Wrongs 8245 - 8249 and 117 • The IT Crowd
Related articles
Charlie Brooker • Armando Iannucci • Peter Cook
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