Film / News
Unseen Brass Eye footage to be screened in Bristol
Christ’s fat cock! Can it really be 20 years since Brass Eye, Bristol University zoology graduate Chris Morris’s cult satire on TV current affairs sensationalism, provoked mirth and outrage in equal measure when it was broadcast on Channel 4? Indeed it can.
Morris, who was famously fired from BBC Radio Bristol in 1990 for filling a newsroom with helium during a broadcast, made his name on telly with BBC2’s The Day Today back in 1994. This introduced Alan Partridge to a grateful nation and was also the first programme to report John Major’s punch-up with the Queen, reveal the terrorist campaign using exploding dogs, and broadcast live footage of an American man being electrocuted while dressed as Elvis.
But it was with Brass Eye on C4 three years later that Morris (brother of Bristol Old Vic creative director, Tom) reached peak TV satire. In a masterful expose of idiocy, gullibility and media hysteria, the Drugs episode famously persuaded a bunch of celebs and politicians to record public information messages warning against the dangers of the non-existent drug Cake (“It’s a made-up drug”).
is needed now More than ever
Brass Eye created such a tabloid furore that then C4 chief executive Michael Grade intervened to demand cuts. Morris responded with a subliminal message in the last show which read simply: ‘Grade is a cunt’.
https://youtu.be/-GpzFgoPDn0
But he wasn’t done yet. The 2001 Brass Eye Paedogeddon! special skewered media obsession with the subject with such forensic precision that it made a lot of very stupid people very cross indeed. So cross in fact that this became one of the all-time most complained about programmes ever shown on British television. Good job it wasn’t broadcast in the social media-fuelled Age of Taking Offence.
Two decades on, the director who worked with Morris on the entire series has raided his personal archive, unearthing hundreds of hours of previously unseen material. Described as “part documentary, part artwork” and designed solely for live screenings, Michael Cumming’s Oxide Ghosts has been compiled with Morris’s blessing and will be shown at the Cube on September 26. Cumming will also be present for a Q&A after the screening, “spilling beans, shattering myths and letting a few cats out of the bag.”
Tickets for this one are certain to be snapped up quickly. To buy tickets, visit www.ticketsource.co.uk/event/194014
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