Brass Eye

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 satirist 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.

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. 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 bright yellow cake sized pill (or, in the case of Bernard Manning, table size), which many featured celebrities held as they talked, purportedly affected an area of the brain called Shatner's Bassoon.)

Other episodes dealt with the topics of science, animals, and infamously, sex. In one scene of the "Sex" episode, Morris categorised AIDS sufferers as those that have "Good AIDS" (from a contaminated blood transfusion), and those with "Bad AIDS" (through homosexuality).

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 one episode a subliminal message denigrating Grade in strong terms. As another insult to Grade, Morris supposedly 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.

2001 paedophilia special

File:BrassEye-MilitPede.jpg

Sequence from the special episode on paedophilia, in 2001

Brass Eye was not deemed suitable for repeat until 2001, when a new one-off show was added to the run - this special episode dealt with the highly sensitive subject of paedophilia, and more specifically, moral panic in the media. Celebrities including Gary Lineker and Phil Collins were fooled into declaring their support for a charity called "Nonce Sense" ("nonce" is a British slang term for paedophile), and the show contained scenes which suggested child abuse onscreen. In one scene, 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 placed in stocks, and asks him whether he wants to have sex with a six-year-old child. Hesitantly, the spokesman responds that "I don't fancy him", driving Morris to further indignation. The child was actually matted into the final cut of the episode.

Around 2000 complaints (and approximately 3000 calls of support) were received regarding the show, and several politicians spoke out against Morris, although David Blunkett, Tessa Jowell and Beverley Hughes all later admitted that they had not seen it. 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 media went through a major moral panic over the affair, with the stridently right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail leading the fray, and one newspaper printing an article about the outrage directly next to a pictorial about the young singer Charlotte Church's breasts. It is apparent that the media was either ignorant as to the true intention of the programme (to satirise media reactions to paedophilia and moral panics in general) or was aware of the meaning and hence trying to divert attention away from the message as a twisted form of PR.