‘I can say to you it was the right time for that series,’ says Day. ‘There is no way that the Channel 4 press office would ever do now what I did then.’ Day had to consciously stop himself from giving more information. ‘As an in-house PR there is a part of you that is trained to be corporate, and I got very upset about it, but I found myself being a much better liar and manipulator than I thought I could be,’ he says.
It took three weeks to get a press release for the overall series that both he and Morris could agree on. When he was forbidden to release a couple of pages of the show’s highlights, Day said issuing only the couple of paragraphs that Morris wanted would look strange coming as an official release from Channel 4. Morris retorted that in that case he should issue it without the broadcaster’s logo. The deadlock was eventually resolved with a reluctant compromise of half a page. ‘He just wrote it,’ says Day, ‘and I took out the expletives.’ Day was frustrated and felt undermined by Morris, and thought he was crippling his own show.
But elsewhere in Channel 4, the fears about the show’s content that were coming to crisis point would prove far more dangerous for its existence than arguments over headed paper. It was a reflection of the character of the publicity campaign that when the news broke that the show had been postponed, many assumed the announcement was just phase II of the anti-PR PR master plan. The show had been trailed on Channel 4 by then, and the week’s listings magazines had already highlighted it for 19 November. ‘Is Chris Morris too hot to handle?’ asked Bruce Dessau presciently in his Time Out preview.87
Conspiracy theories circulated among Morris’s base of fans on the internet about the official line from Channel 4, that more time was needed to be sure that everything complied with regulations. But prosaic though the explanation was, senior management at the broadcaster were still concerned about certain sketches. In the end, the series was referred up to Michael Grade and the effect was catastrophic. It was the first time he had become properly involved, and he reignited the debate over many sketches, instigating another set of changes with the lawyers. Morris was faced with beginning the negotiation process all over again.
‘Right up until the end,’ says Seamus Cassidy, ‘Chris was gentlemanly, courteous and reasonable.’ The end was in sight. With the reports of the postponement had come rumblings from David Amess and Sir Graham Bright, the MPs who had been featured in the Drugs episode. They got together with Home Office Minister Tom Sackville, who had been involved in drafting an answer to David Amess’s question on cake, to condemn the show for wasting taxpayers’ parliamentary money.
And it wasn’t just the MPs’ interviews that were under threat. Other celebrity names began to appear in the press, and Michael Grade suggested revisiting all of the hits. Morris’s gentlemanly reason went up in a sheet of incandescent rage. ‘Grade was just looking for an easy life and a knighthood, and he didn’t want to have the cigar swatted from his mouth by some blowsy celeb,’ he later said. ‘He called me into his office and offered me a drink in a showbiz-matey kind of way and said, “Look, all we have to do is ask permission [for the interviews].” My argument was that wouldn’t work. The whole point was that the hoax wasn’t bulletproof. It was quite brittle.’ He refused to make any more changes. Grade told him, he later claimed, that great though the series was it would never go out: ‘I really spent three days thinking about very little else than what great pleasure, what absolutely total pleasure it would give me really to kill somebody. I’ve never felt that before. But I could imagine every aspect of killing somebody and but for the fact that the opportunity didn’t present itself …’88
The channel’s regular editorial meeting was the most popular event in the company the week that the Brass Eye question was debated. They were turning people away. Executives, commissioning editors and their deputies jammed themselves into the room, with the majority – though not everyone – in favour of the show. Strong support was expressed by John Willis and Seamus Cassidy. Caroline Leddy from Talkback lobbied hard on Morris’s behalf. ‘It began to turn Michael’s views,’ said Willis later.89 Brass Eye went to the heart of what Channel 4 meant for the station staff – whichever side they were on. But there was still much to be done to convince a boss who had become reluctant about the show as a concept and about Chris Morris in particular.
‘Why on earth was I keen to buy trouble by giving him a slot on Channel 4?’ Grade later asked readers of his autobiography. ‘Why do people become lion-tamers or swallow razor-blades for a living? I recognized a rare talent and felt that Channel 4 had a libertarian tradition that ought to be able to accommodate Chris Morris’s satire – though, as with lion-taming, the cardinal rule would have to be: never take your eyes off the beast.’90
The Guardian reported no fewer than 112 websites discussing Brass Eye, and journalist Jim White wondered at the source of their information: ‘You could imagine Morris at its centre, firing off the email, relishing the opportunity to drop a few pearls of misinformation into the public domain, undermining and sabotaging, while all the time maintaining his anonymity.’91 It couldn’t have been further from the truth. The mood in Morris’s camp was despondent at the way in which his innovative PR campaign had descended into a shouting match.
‘After spending a year of our lives and £1 million,’ Peter Fincham told the Guardian on 25 November, ‘we are very keen that this thing be shown. I can assure you this is not a stunt.’92
On the Hour and The Day Today writer Steven Wells ranted splendidly in his NME column against the ‘bottle job over Brass Eye … Having seen previews of the series, Brass Eye is great and utterly moral comedy. Its “postponement” is nothing other than an act of spit-licking corporate cowardice. You DESERVE to see this programme. Are you pissed off yet? Are you going to do something about it?’ He gave the Channel 4 number and instructed, ‘Give them hell.’93 Morris happened to run into Wells some months later and asked with some amazement what he’d written, saying readers had flooded Channel 4 with calls.
Emotions were running just as high within the station itself. Seamus Cassidy was among those who maintained that the second round of cuts was unnecessary. And eventually the tireless campaign mounted by champions of Brass Eye paid off, with Grade persuaded by the arguments and undimmed passion for the series. It was rescheduled for the new year.
The battle might have been won, but it had exhausted everyone. Cassidy, all the enthusiasm he’d had when he’d first saw Torque TV lost, soon quit the channel. Michael Grade himself abruptly announced his departure from Channel 4. Having timed the statement two days before rescheduled Brass Eye began its run on 29 January 1997, it was widely questioned whether the series had been a factor in his decision.
The new transmission date placed Brass Eye at the start of an election year which was anticipated to mark the end of almost two decades of Conservative rule. There was a sense of imminent change in the country which seemed to fit with a show as sharp, clever and knowing as Brass Eye. Morris might not have been party political, but targeting the self-satisfied and the hypocritical seemed to fit in very well with the mood of the times. The Tories were seen as burned-out history, stale and stodgy, and their replacements were younger and smarter and promised to create a fairer society. Morris himself would have been the last to claim to be part of any of that – only months later he dismissed New Labour as ‘hopelessly cosmetic’.94 But for those watching the show who could barely remember a time without the Tories, there were eerie parallels between Brass Eye’s celebrities prepared to say anything as long as they got on television and the Tories hanging on desperately to power having lost their majority of one seat in Parliament. Incompetence and sleaze coloured the perception of Major’s last days. It was only the previous September that the ‘cash for questions’ affair climaxed when MP Neil Hamilton and lobbyist Ian Greer dropped their libel actions against the Guardian. Their reasoning was that they could not afford to continue with the case, but the damage to the Tories’ image had been done – they were
seen as the party who could be paid to take issues to Parliament. Overdosing on too much cake somehow went well with fat-cat Conservatives.
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,’95 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’.96 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.’97
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.98 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 u
p 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.
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