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Brass Eye
1997 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Chris Morris
Investigative reporter Chris Morris puts modern Britain under the spotlight, and smacks the issues of the day till they bleed. He tackles weighty issues including animals, drugs, sex and skewered celebrities and politicians alike - and in a later episode in 2001, paedophiles.
8 positive4 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like
- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)
- The Goodies
- The Kenny Everett Television Show
- Absolutely!
- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy
- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer
- Big Train
- The League of Gentlemen
- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye
- Jam / Blue Jam
- The Armando Iannucci Shows
- Limmy's Show
Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
I too have watched Brass Eye, and they literally had MPs telling people about the dangers of "cake" in a previous episode. It showed that MPs and TV celebrities would literally say anything Anchorman style if it was put on a teleprompter / script in front of them. They are nothing other than paid actors.
While I don't believe everyone in Parliament is a moron. I think more than enough of them are moronic, out of touch, malicious or home combination of the three for it to be a problem.
Generally the only solution presented for any issue in the UK is banning something. There is no other course of action that they can envisage. So you end up in a false dichotomy, discussing whether something should be banned or not. There is no discussion why the issue is happening in the first place, only whether <thing> should be banned or not.
Off the cuff the closest example to mind is the Paedogeddon!! special episode of the Brass Eye series created by Chris Morris.
Admittedly that didn't satirize CSAM material, rather it cut hard into the reflexive reaction people have at the very thought of CSAM and peodophiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedogeddon
Moreover, that took a human to thread that needle, it'll be a while before AI generation can pass through that strange valley.
> You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved,
I still hold that special up as one of the best pieces of satire to ever air on TV, but at the same time I'm shocked it was ever able to be produced and shown since it satirizes the one topic above all others you aren't "allowed" to joke about.
For those interested I highly recommend watching it: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6shgvw
> At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge.
Same for all the big name movies these days, everyone is too scared to take a chance on something truly new. If you want a novel movie experience you basically have to look towards foreign films, often the more arty types (which I love
On the topic of TV though just consider this for a moment, we lived in a world where someone was daring enough to air "Paedogeddon!" (a Brass Eye special that imo is an excellent work of satire) on TV. Something so controversial couldn't be made and aired today and it was barely able to be even back then.
Slightly offtopic but anyone with a dark sense of humour would do well to check out Chris Morris's stuff - I get a feeling most younger Brits haven't heard of it. Day Today and Brass Eye, both still funny, are wonderful time capsules satirising Britain as it was thirty years ago.
But IMO his finest work was Blue Jam - the radio comedy not the TV incarnation, hour-long episodes of low-key music and surreal sketches. Absolutely brilliant even today. Archive.org has a copy at https://archive.org/details/chrismorris_bluejam.
Trigger alert: basically everything. The BBC would never get away with broadcasting it now.
Long thread, anyone posted the brass eye episode yet?
That's a pity. It's from Brass Eye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye), a piss-take on panicky documentaries, it's the drugs one and totally brilliant. And they got a mandrill on it.
Most of them are well worth a watch, get them if you can.
It was created specifically under Thatcher to serve otherwise under-served audiences, and that inevitably means it's controversial, because if what it showed was not controversial it'd be on one of the channels all those well-served audiences are watching.
It's most reasonably criticised for making too "easy" controversial choices, not really challenging for an audience, not really telling anybody anything they didn't know, just going for outrage - something like let's show people having sexual intercourse on TV but with medics explaining what's going on, rather than satire like Brass Eye that demands a bit more of the audience.
So for example Queer As Folk, now considered a pretty tame TV series (and indeed since rebooted for a wider audience) about young gay characters in Manchester was sufficiently controversial when Channel 4 first aired it that right wing newspapers of course insisted it should be banned. Arguably this was "too safe" but on the other hand it's not as though other broadcasters were doing this at the time.
It also reminds me of "Pantou the dog" [0] from Brass Eye [1] (created by the same person as Four Lions), which successfully duped several British celebrities and politicians. That particular episode caused media hysteria when it came out.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=RcU7FaEEzNU&t=20m15s
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/brass-eye-at-20-still-chris-morris-at-his-hysterical-gobsmacking-best
There was this really good episode of Brass Eye, "Paedogeddon", lampooning media's portrayal of the threat (the tone they use, the sensationalism, lack of critical thinking etc.). It's hilarious - well if you like British humour - and available on YouTube.
Chris Morris got under some heavy criticism for it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye#Response
EDIT: this was the Daily Star not the Daily Mail.
This is the Daily Mail though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKzgDBumCr0
That was one of the great ironies of the Brass Eye special. One one page of the Daily Star a criticism of the episode. On the other page a sexualised picture of a child.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/303258/news/leveson-inquiry-charlotte-churchs-15-year-old-breasts-and-chris-jefferies-hair.html/
There's tonnes of stuff like this. They're quite open about it.
>I'm sure there's plenty of people out there who are not career druggies or sluts
That reminds me a lot of Good AIDS vs Bad AIDS from the British documentary satire Brass Eye (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc)