Authors: Lucian Randall
Brass Eye
was smart, subtle and innovative and tackled the big social issues that seemed to be natural New Labour areas. The party also understood the media and how to manipulate it. Watching
Brass Eye
it seemed as though not only would the Conservatives disapprove, but they probably wouldn’t even grasp what it was about. Tony Blair and his band of idealistic young hopefuls gave every impression they would be instinctively more in favour of the liberal arts and – something that, if nothing else, the controversy over the
Special
would prove to be wrong in almost every respect – would encourage such daring programming. Being a fan of
Brass Eye
in such heady times wasn’t quite a political gesture – but it did feel like being part of something momentous.
The sense of imminent change in the early months of 1997 was matched by a cultural renewal which even America noticed.
Vanity Fair
ran its ‘London swings again’ cover story that March. By the summer the phenomenon even had a name – Cool Britannia. Its glory shone on both the youthful incoming political establishment and the artistic community, the Young British Artists who understood the media and were outspoken and amusing and produced art that didn’t necessarily want to be liked or categorized, but demanded a response. Alongside them was the resurgent music industry, with Brit Pop artists playful and innovative and as hungry for success as the YBAs. Grouped together by the media, all those artists were inevitably disparate, but they shared a refreshing cynicism allied to genuine exuberance and creative energy.
Brass Eye
was as bold, looked as finely crafted and sounded as sharp as anything else that defined the times. You instinctively felt watching
Brass Eye
that like so much of the best that was happening at that time, it couldn’t have come from any other country and that it had a creator who was operating on full power. The country was waking up, and
Brass Eye
was in the middle of it.
The first episode, Animals, had an audience of about a million that January. Its impact had been muted by the extensive coverage of the postponement, and suspicion lingered that the series was more hype than anything else, but it was well received in the
Guardian
and the
Financial Times
. A letter in the
Daily Mail
protested about the filth of the show. Cosmo Landesman in the
Sunday Times
thought that Morris was part of the Jeremy Beadle generation, that his duping was smug humour that flattered an audience into thinking they wouldn’t fall for such media tricks.
What
Brass Eye
really needed more than anything, to paraphrase Ted Maul, was a shot in the arm from celebrities. And that was exactly what it got a week later, after the broadcast of Drugs. Noel Edmonds, having read out the ingredients of cake and explained how ‘it stimulates the part of the brain known as Shatner’s Bassoon’, realized he’d been set up and issued a furious 400-word denunciation. It was intended to damage the show but actually did more than anything else to convince journalists that
Brass Eye
wasn’t just full of stunts hatched by Talkback and Channel 4 with everyone in on the joke. Suddenly there was the proof that the near cancellation had been for real. Celebrities really had no idea that the campaigns weren’t authentic. And Noel Edmonds, the man behind the Gotcha! prank, hadn’t seen the funny side.
Chris Morris made no response to any of the stories in the press. He deliberately refrained from being drawn into justifying his shows which he wanted viewers to judge on their own merits. Channel 4 were left to draft statements in defence of his series.
Viewers were as polarized as the press. For fans, watching
Brass Eye
could be more like the feeling of passionate engagement you might get with a favourite and formative band. It was something to take to your heart for being its own entire world; it credited the viewer with intelligence and it was startling in its approach to celebrity.
Brass Eye
inspired a fierce devotion or an equally strong sense that comedy shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing – a view encapsulated by the
Daily Mail
, which launched its first attack on Morris on 7 February.
The hostile press searched for scandal without success and settled on claiming that he was a tyrant on set. The
Sunday Times
said it was clear that Morris ‘hated something’. His birthmark and acne were cited and compared with Dudley Moore’s club foot: ‘Morris, however, had a comfortable background,’
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they said, something that went to the heart of the moralizing. Morris’s real crime for many commentators was to betray his class. His parents, as country doctors, were the very people who kept Middle England alive, who had given him a privileged education. Here he was, letting light in on the media existence he should have been celebrating.
Libby Purves wrote that
Brass Eye
had gone too far and thought that the show lacked the art of a scripted and performed parody such as
Knowing Me, Knowing You
. She claimed that getting real celebrities in had to be easier and therefore less worthwhile. Writing in
The Times
in response the following week, Michael Grade said that if people ‘exercise proper caution in future before allowing themselves to be used in this way, then Chris Morris . . . has performed a public service’.
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He might have added that it wasn’t impossible for celebrities to guess the interviews were set-ups.
Astrologer Russell Grant immediately realized there was something amiss in Morris’s unwelcoming style, the weird little goatee he wore and the questions which sounded ridiculous. He went into what he calls ‘outré camp’ mode and the interview was never used.
‘They should really [spot that it’s a gag],’ said Morris years later, ‘because . . . there’s no fun really in so perfectly mimicking reality that you pass off something that’s made up that might as well be real. Whereas if all the labels on it are saying, “This is fucking nonsense,” then you’ve got a gap to play with.’
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Some
Brass Eye
interviewees said that they were too busy to check their appointments. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was booked on the
Special
by his office and was caught alone early one morning when the crew turned up. He had no idea who they were, but he knew who they weren’t – polite, suited and deferential, they were the opposite of the scruffy, overfamiliar campaign workers he was used to. They set up a monitor on which they showed what they claimed was police footage of paedophiles on Tottenham Court Road which was clearly ludicrous, and Llewelyn-Bowen guessed they were filming his reaction to it live so he couldn’t claim they later cut away to a different piece of film. He came up with some polite excuse to get rid of them.
But as
Brass Eye
was being broadcast, the only voices heard were from those who had been taken in and were angry about it. The production team had expected as much and knew there was little they could do about what people said outside the show. Internally, security remained very tight to the end of the run. Though when information did finally leak, it concerned the single most contentious sketch in the series –
Sutcliffe! The Musical
.
The life of the Yorkshire Ripper was brought to the stage in the last edition, Decline, with the claim that he was to appear as himself on day release from prison. The sketch featured a montage of songs from a rehearsal of the musical, concluding with him singing that he’s ‘very truly sorry’. Celebrity comment was elicited from racing commentator John McCririck, who seemed less angry at the concept of the musical than at a comment by Morris which reveals the killer has an agent, bellowing, ‘His agent! What a game!’
Grade had been unhappy about
Sutcliffe!
even when the series was initially postponed in November: ‘Because of victims’ families and so on, I just felt it crossed a line that I didn’t feel was defensible,’ he said.
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John Willis felt personally involved in that he had made an award-winning documentary about the relatives, but he, Prash Naik and Jan Tomalin knew it was one of Morris’s ring-fenced sketches and were resigned to having to defend it. Before the press got hold of the story, there was little public objection to the concept of
Sutcliffe!
The crew booked advertising space on one of the neon billboards of Piccadilly Lights without comment either on the name Peter Sutcliffe or the title of the musical flashing up in front of thousands of tourists and commuters. Andrew Newman tried to stir up reaction from the reliably outspoken phone-in audience of talk radio station LBC. He called in posing as a member of the public who had heard about the show and condemned it, but nobody else followed him up.
An audience was rounded up from the streets around Wimbledon Theatre to be filmed watching the rehearsal sequence of the sketch, and it was from one of those members of the public that the leak came. Someone tipped off
Daily Mail
media correspondent Alison Boshoff, who swiftly called Channel 4 to ask if it was true that they were making the life of the Yorkshire Ripper into a musical comedy.
Back in the Channel 4 press office, Greg Day had by then been totally won around to Morris’s way of doing PR. Having thought that Morris was sabotaging his own show, he’d seen how the seemingly counter-intuitive approach had if anything created more interest in the press. But he didn’t think he could handle the
Mail
’s story in the same way. ‘That was a stage where I had to deal with it with Michael Grade,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t go to Chris.’ A response was agreed within Channel 4. They would confirm what Boshoff already knew but give away nothing more. ‘But that affirmation was because it was good for the channel,’ says Day. ‘We couldn’t be seen as a channel to be so ignorant that we didn’t know about that.’
Discussing the show later in a PR trade magazine article, he referred to the Wimbledon leak as the only ‘blip’ in an otherwise successful campaign. But that particular blip came only halfway through
Brass Eye
’s run. There was a lot of
Mail
froth that could be brought up in the remaining few weeks before Decline was due to go out, and the paper was never knowingly underfrothed at the best of times.
Boshoff’s article included MPs and ‘television watchdogs’ – in the self-appointed shape of the Mary Whitehouse-founded National Viewers and Listeners Association – condemning
Sutcliffe!
as ‘sick and tasteless’. The article recounted the offending piece in that weirdly detailed way the
Mail
often used with Morris’s work – like someone disgusted by the antics of their neighbours, but poking their binoculars through the net curtains for fear of missing a second of the upset.
Ironically, Morris’s sketch wasn’t that far removed in tone from the
Mail
’s favoured editorial position.
Sutcliffe!
made a parallel with the ageing gangsters who appeared on chat shows to discuss their murderous careers, were celebrated in film and wrote best-selling autobiographies. Extraordinarily violent men such as Frankie Fraser became folk heroes, and this was still a year before the genre got a further shot of glamour in the shape of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
. Morris was only asking, as the
Mail
itself did on a daily basis, what British society was coming to. It was the media’s appetite for criminal tragedy which was the subject and the defence that Channel 4 had prepared in anticipation of an investigation by the ITC. But the
Mail
was not in the mood for arguing those kind of nuances. It was busy with the next day’s article, which coincided with Sex. ‘Is this the most hated man in Britain?’ it instead asked of Morris. The paper had become determined to get
Sutcliffe!
out of
Brass Eye
. Michael Grade flew to Los Angeles the following week, and the very next day Channel 4 reported a call from the paper threatening them with the ITC. As Grade feared, families of those murdered by Sutcliffe were brought into the protests, which put him in the position of having to say that it would be included against their wishes. The channel also started to receive calls from celebrities who said they wouldn’t work with them if it were to be broadcast. It began to feel as if Channel 4 were under siege, and by no means everyone sided with Chris Morris. ‘It was a general feeling that the channel was allowing one person to upset an awful lot of other people,’ says Greg Day.
Peter Fincham was called into the increasingly tense discussions between Morris, Prash Naik and Michael Grade. Just as in November, the channel’s nerve held until the last couple of days before transmission. And it was again Grade himself who made the final decision –
Sutcliffe! The Musical
was to be cut from Decline. Morris argued for it into the day of transmission and right through that afternoon, but to no effect. He had to acknowledge defeat but – as Channel 4 were nervously aware – he also still kept the programme itself.
During the run of Radio 1 shows, Morris had held on to his tapes until beyond the last possible moment that anyone might reasonably expect to get away with it before transmission, and he did the same with
Brass Eye
, delivering the masters for each show as little as two hours before broadcast. Channel 4 had become used to being on standby to give the programmes a thorough check, knowing that at the best of times he could be relied on to sneak in something forbidden. ‘He tinkers,’ says Prash Naik. ‘That’s what Chris does.’ Naik and commissioning editor Katie Taylor, having been instructed by John Willis to review the master, waited patiently and braced themselves for a major tinkering. It was Caroline Leddy who made the hand delivery from Morris in his post-production bunker. Naik and Taylor soon discovered what had been changed.
Sutcliffe!
had been replaced with a black hole in the middle of the tape. Thinking they had got away lightly, the pair had the section quickly removed and the show was passed for broadcast with minutes to spare.