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 postproduction 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.
Decline was a powerful conclusion to the series. The pre-title sequence opened under a flyover in black and white where cardboard cut-out citizens had been positioned in the rubbish and rubble. Voiceovers gibbered inanely, representing a society in meltdown, before the scene jumped to Morris in a comfortable house as the head of a happy family, all laughing slightly too loudly to illustrate a society in which nothing could be better. There was the human-sized model of Britain in its sickbed, animated so it was breathing shallowly – until Morris shot it to put it out of its misery. And a pastiche of Pulp came in the shape of ‘Me Oh Myra’, a love song to moors murderer Hindley. All before the end of part one. Even the cut to the commercial break itself was a fake, interrupted by a Channel 4 newsflash on the apparent shooting of Clive Anderson by Noel Edmonds, complete with grainy images of the alleged killer gesturing from the window of his mansion. The sequence prompted complaints from viewers who claimed to have been fooled, having perhaps missed the generous moustache modelled by Gina McKee as the reporter. Decline was one of the finest editions of the series.
The success was matched by the relief everyone at Channel 4 felt that it was all over. The following night there was to be a celebratory dinner for all involved at the broadcaster and Talkback. But that morning there was disturbing news of a posting on a Brass Eye fan website. It indicated a specific point in Decline – not just a scene, but a precise moment, a single frame. If you pressed pause there, you would see a caption. ‘Grade is a cunt.’
Surely not, everyone at the station thought. They told themselves that a screen grab of the offending insert was a fake. But then the ITC called John Willis with the same tale, closely followed by the tabloids and Time Out, which had been given the story by a known Chris Morris sympathizer, journalist Simon Price.
John Willis asked Prash Naik and Katie Taylor to review the transmission master. Armed with the timecodes leaked to a number of websites, they quickly located the sequence but there were no offending words immediately visible. After persevering and slowing down the sequence frame by frame, they found the message. They briefly wondered if, having cleared the show for broadcast, they would have to resign. The Sutcliffe! substitution had simply been a diversion. While they were all looking at the blank space, something much worse had been inserted elsewhere. A classic sleight of hand. But after the initial, sickening lurch, Naik and Taylor knew they couldn’t really be held responsible. It would have been impossible to see a single frame without being told precisely where it was. Even then the words were partly camouflaged by having been superimposed over an existing scene rather than inserted as a caption. But they were there.
The end-of-series dinner was cancelled.
‘I have a fairly thick skin,’ Grade later wrote, ‘but I developed serious sense-of-humour failure with Chris Morris.’99 Channel 4 quickly announced an enquiry into the circumstances.
‘He weaves reality like a spell and turns everything into ironic media language,’ an exasperated Channel 4 press office told the Independent. ‘Although the series has finished now, he won’t go away. He seems to lurk in the air.’100 With Morris not returning Channel 4’s calls, Chiggy was asked to get a response out of him. ‘That wasn’t you, was it?’
‘No,’ he said.
She recalls that she called Channel 4 back: ‘Like a real idiot, I went, “That can’t have been Chris.”’
Talkback were responsible for the delivery of the programme, and Peter Fincham received letters from Channel 4 solicitors threatening action ‘and worse’.101 He was himself annoyed with Morris, albeit fleetingly and – like so many of Morris’s managers – more as something he had to do in his official capacity. Others who had been more directly involved with the show were angrier.
‘It was a very dark day,’ says Sally Debonnaire, ‘because we just thought we’d finished and we’d worked through every last difficult thing and I was certainly breathing a sigh of relief, thinking, I don’t believe we’ve got this to air. I don’t believe we’ve done it. Feeling really exhausted and elated and just sort of bewildered by the hours spent on what felt like getting every last sentence through. And then for that to happen …’ Bluntly telling Morris he’d turned on everyone after they’d been dedicated to the production for months, she made a resolution never to do anything like Brass Eye again with him – though she had long relented by the time of the Special. She found it hard to stay angry at Chris Morris for long.
‘It just takes hours out of your day that you hadn’t planned to spend dealing with very cross pe
ople,’ says Chiggy. ‘It doesn’t happen that often.’ It was a reaction typical of Morris’s friends and colleagues, none of whom were critical of him when recalling the incident. They seemed to accept that it came out of frustration with how Sutcliffe! had been sacrificed rather than egotistical reasons. And yet there was something in the nuclear nature of Morris’s explosion which went beyond reluctance to compromise and connected directly to his early radio days at Radio Cambridgeshire when he’d left his colleague to get on with interviewing boring old ladies on her own. That unswerving resolve which he had undoubtedly needed to get his shows as good as they were did, when unchecked, veer towards outbursts of petulance.
Channel 4, and Michael Grade in particular, had run out of patience. They were aware that the only other person with access to the master tape that night was the editor, and they threatened to go after him if Morris didn’t make a confession. This was a challenge that Morris couldn’t avoid. And once his initial fury had subsided, he showed no sign of wanting to preserve his anonymity and make his point at the expense of the editor. Morris officially took responsibility for inserting the frame, and Talkback agreed a deal with Channel 4 in which he was effectively banned from working with the broadcaster for the immediate future.
The stunt quickly became part of Brass Eye lore for fans. The series had in any case been packed with fleeting gags which rewarded those who were quick on the video pause button. The Grade caption was absorbed as another example of a treat for the sharp-eyed. As Armando Iannucci observes of the shows from the safety of some distance: ‘You just don’t know what attitude it’s [Brass Eye] going to strike. It is genuinely unpredictable. And part of the unpredictability is the level to which he will take it. And Chris has always been that one to take things to a level that you didn’t realize you could take it.’
The pressure on Morris around Sutcliffe! continued to tell. In the weekend following the broadcast of Decline, Will Self wrote in the Observer: ‘About halfway through Wednesday night’s final episode of Brass Eye, it began to occur to me that Chris Morris might possibly be God.’ The article appeared as Morris was being threatened with legal action by Channel 4, and it was a measure of the level of suspicion at which he was operating that he initially thought he was himself being hoaxed by Self’s mordant tone: ‘The idea of a Morrisian deity is appealing for a number of reasons: it explains why there is little real justice to be had for the poor and the oppressed and it provides a convincing explanation for why public life in this country is dominated by talented mediocrities … Coming to Brass Eye was witnessing that most unusual and remarkable of phenomena: an artist who has grown and reached the height of his powers.’102 The Royal Television Society Awards agreed. In spring 1998 Morris won Top TV Performance of the Year.
There was still one more battle for Brass Eye to fight, but at least it was one that had been long predicted. A complaint had been made to the ITC by the MPs featured in the Drugs episode. Graham Linehan remembers Morris telling him he had phoned David Amess pretending to be Piers Morgan in order to find out if he intended to sue. Amess not only shared his plans but was sufficiently convinced by Morris’s impersonation to round off the conversation by asking who he thought would win the general election that month. Morris improvised some likely Morgan-esque banter on the subject.
On 19 May the ITC ruled that the MPs had been misled over format, subject and purpose and, as expected, the robust defence of public interest offered by Prash Naik and Jan Tomalin was not allowed under the code. Both complaints were upheld and Sir Graham Bright’s contribution was removed from further broadcasts, though the ITC also ruled that the show was ‘in general amusing and innovative’. Channel 4 believed that the adjudications helpfully acknowledged, for the first time, tacit approval for the use of a public interest defence in entertainment programmes of a similar sort and some months later lobbied successfully for the ITC code to be revised to allow such set-ups (an amendment affectionately known in the station’s legal department as the ‘Brass Eye clause’).103
In some ways the clause made it harder for programme-makers. Producers might once have subtly misled subjects about certain aspects of how they were going to appear, but after Morris had exposed the most intimate parts of celebrities’ media transactions for the public to point and laugh at, anyone else had to make very sure they could comprehensively defend any deception.
Brass Eye’s Andrew Newman went on to develop the 11 O’Clock Show, where Sacha Baron Cohen, advised by Prash Naik, developed Ali G off the back of the changed code. Newman applied Brass Eye tricks and methods to Ali’s celebrity interviews, though he recalls that the production team had to explain a little more of what was happening post-Brass Eye. He was later a consultant on Borat the movie. Ali G’s target was media vanity but, while Prash Naik’s advice was that the new public interest test might be met, it was also heading into uncharted broadcasting territory. Its overwhelming success led to further amendment of the code after lobbying by Channel 4, and Baron Cohen was able to do further set-ups – though had it not been for Brass Eye neither Ali G nor similar programmes would have seen the light of day.
Brass Eye had an equally formative influence on the production of serious documentaries. ‘The parody was so brilliantly close to reality at times it was painful,’ acknowledges Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs. It’s a view held by many in the industry, if one on which few others are prepared to be quoted. Byrne notes how journalists suddenly became much more self-aware and naturalistic in their delivery and the presentation of shows was toned down as a direct result of Morris’s series. Rather than being heralded by a great fanfare of a theme, investigative strands such as Dispatches now shuffle sheepishly into living rooms with little more than an embarrassed cough. Being ‘too Chris Morris’ remains shorthand for a very particular sort of criticism in news studios. On the Hour and The Day Today had begun the process of observation, but after Brass Eye, says Byrne, ‘there was no going back. It really hit people in the face.’
More immediately, the series established Chris Morris as a contemporary satirist, though he was never at ease with the term. Towards the end of 1997, as part of the promotion for Blue Jam, Morris touched on the subject in interview with Simon Price for the Melody Maker. ‘Satire is essentially a conservative form,’ he said. ‘As soon as you stand up in front of an audience, you’re immediately relying on the consent of more than half the audience which neuters the whole exercise. If you look at Private Eye, which is the most prominent satirical organ in this country, it’s little more than a more intelligent and witty version of saying, “Whatever next …?” Anyway, I’ve never really thought of what I do as satire. I think of it as opening my mouth before I can shut it. What I do is rooted in … intense stupidity.’104
For Morris there seemed to be something dismissive in the term satirist, as if it suggested taking the moral high ground over being funny and made him safer through explanation. The fire of Brass Eye was as much to do with a deep questioning that showed the influence of the rigour of Jesuit teaching. It was something that Iannucci describes as, ‘that kind of: “Well, you say that, but let’s just examine what you’ve just said to make sure that it stands up and isn’t just nonsense.”’ That Morris had produced something with wider resonance was for him secondary to making people laugh. ‘If you make a joke in an area which is for some reason – normally random – out of bounds, then you might find something out, you might put your finger on something,’ said Morris later. ‘But it’s a matter of finding yourself in that area rather than setting out to cause trouble.’105 Once there, Morris roamed those areas with agility and tenacity until he had it all mapped out with terrifying clarity. It was that disquieting energy that seemed to characterize his humour, something which his brother Tom identifies as an ‘extraordinarily self-contained approach and process’.
Tom says he regards the discussion of the ‘slightly transgressive element’ within Morris’s work as something of a distrac
tion, explaining with distinctive Morris eloquence, ‘I regard Chris as an artist of astonishing ability, clarity and single-mindedness in a way that I’m not in any sense. The strength required for him to define his creative practice both in terms of what it was and where and how it was made is truly inspiring to me and I think anyone else. The fact that you really can be, and he has continued to be, completely uncompromising in his selection of material, the way he has approached the dramatic language of it in whatever form and the way in which he has insisted, in an industry in which it is famously impossible to insist on the terms within which you can carry out your work, he has absolutely done that. It’s extraordinary. It requires a much stronger force field around his creative process than I have and actually than almost anyone else I know has.’ In taking subjects for comedy of which others were wary, Morris had discovered a painful kind of honesty through techniques that seemed to owe as much to the traditions of investigative journalism as humour.
Morris’s force field was depleted at the end of Brass Eye. He typically fell into something of a slump after finishing off a major project, when there was nothing left to do but pick over the parts of the show that might have been done better and wonder where the next idea would come from. As the torture of the process was forgotten, he would become increasingly absorbed in the next thing. But Brass Eye had been a particularly gruelling experience. It had, he told the Guardian, ‘exhausted my appetite for discovering people’s tolerance for talking nonsense’. And the constant fighting in getting Brass Eye out and keeping it intact had been worse than anything he’d known: ‘No doubt getting to the end, where you’ve been forced to be a sort of surrogate lawyer, well, that’s the most creatively stifling thing you could possibly do.’106
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