Disgusting Bliss

  The same accusation could not be made of Richard Geefe, where far more care was taken to render his decline into a crushing depressive episode. He describes the days of ‘smothering dread’ leading up to his first suicide attempt, painting his trendy loft black, helplessly watching the mail pile up and refusing to talk to his friends on the phone. He seizes on any shreds of hope with a touching vulnerability: ‘… anything that feels like a reason to live at the moment,’ he says, ‘it glimmers for an instant – easy to see because it is alone – and then vanishes like a mirage …’

  In his later columns Geefe records being filmed by a BBC crew, his documentary to be called Time to Go: A Chronicle of Courage. The crew capture his increasingly demented attempts to finish his book to coincide publication with his death – ‘committing myself to what I’ll be doing, how I will feel about it and my exact method of blapping my lulu. It’s driving me nuts.’ In one of his occasional asides, the editor admits that he has a 50 per cent interest in the book deal.

  The last full column followed the Evening Standard naming of Morris. On 4 July the Observer reprinted the collected works with a final short piece from the editor explaining that Geefe had killed himself before the agreed date. There were tributes from friends who were with him on his final night at a dinner party, leaving readers in what had also been the setting for the original Blue Jam monologue. Both versions of the character had been halfway through the commissioned run of their column, giving them a final, bitter triumph over the editor who had thought their life was just another regular feature under his control.

  Geefe’s life might have been truncated, but the weekly columns had turned into Morris’s first extended narrative. It was an indication of his growing interest in developing complete stories, as well as being yet another outlet for ideas from Blue Jam. In opening up the recesses of the mind late at night, it had found all the things which are usually hidden at more respectable hours – self-loathing, the horror of being alive – and used them as inspiration for a comedy that never diminished them as subjects. When the columns concluded, Blue Jam’s transfer to television was still six months away. But if Jam’s visual derangements weren’t to attract controversy, the following year everything changed. Chris Morris revived Brass Eye.

  13

  17.8 PER CENT SAFER

  BRASS EYE RETURNED FOR A ONE-OFF SPECIAL IN JULY 2001 with the same powerful blend of rapid-fire gags, documentary parody and celebrity deception. Chris Morris was taking a risk in returning to a format which had, after all, been successful partly through its originality and unexpectedness and which could have come back seeming admired but maybe little more than worthy. Even four years on the series remained a landmark achievement, and its extravagantly mangled news-speak was, like The Day Today before it, still much quoted. Its transition from audacity to adoration had been instantaneous. Morris’s presenter character might have become a familiar sort of anti-hero, which could fatally detract from his impact. Everything rested on why the show had been brought back, and it was the choice of subject which made the show compelling all over again.

  In using Brass Eye to look at the way in which paedophilia had become such a predominant issue, Morris placed himself at the centre of the unsayable. Brass Eye came only a year after a tabloid-led campaign of anti-paedophile marches and violence, when any dissenting voices were denounced at best as liberal apologists and at worst as defenders of abusers. Morris’s was virtually the only voice of sustained response, and Brass Eye was attacked with unparalleled ferocity. It became the headline story of the summer. The programme even divided Morris’s own longtime contributors. He hadn’t pressurized anyone to take part and approached cast and crew with the expectation that some wouldn’t want to be involved. Everyone knew that they were taking a stand simply by having a credit in the show; making an act of calculated defiance against the popular press which was unlikely to go unpunished. Graham Linehan asked for his name to be taken off on viewing the completed Brass Eye: ‘I felt you didn’t have to press the accelerator quite so hard to the floor with a subject like paedophilia to have it work,’ he says. ‘There was a lot of stuff that was quite harsh and unpleasant. I thought it was like throwing a live grenade. I chickened out a little bit … Maybe it’s something that couldn’t have been helped. As an experiment, it was brave and worthwhile but you could say that it didn’t quite come off. The subject matter in the end took over.’ Having being born in Ireland and lived for much of his early life in Dublin, Linehan didn’t feel he would have the instinct to judge the nuances of English life well enough to predict the reaction to the show – although you could have spent your whole life in the country and still not quite have believed the scenes of mobs going on nightly paedophile hunts in late 2000. What if Brass Eye stirred all that up again? ‘I didn’t know what the results would be. I didn’t know if I’d get attacked in the street,’ Linehan says. ‘The level of stupidity was so high around all that.’

  David Quantick’s thoughts about the show ran along the same lines, and he even uses the same explosive metaphor as Linehan, but the conclusions he reached were very different. ‘I think some of the jokes in it are completely out of order, but they’re hilarious,’ he says, citing the opening with real-life paedophile Sidney Cooke reported as being blasted into space in a rocket which inadvertently also holds a small child. NASA comments, ‘This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen.’

  ‘Absolutely unjustifiable, but I think it’s really funny,’ says Quantick. ‘Unjustifiable, because what that is basically saying is, “Isn’t it funny that this real man has raped children?” So, morally, appalling, but worth it because it’s a very good gag. You could say it’s satirizing something but it’s not, but that’s fine. It’s a perfectly valid show because it satirized media attitudes to paedophilia and the hypocrisy and the way they are making money out of children’s pain. Some of the jokes are dodgy, but I don’t care … Anything can be a subject for humour. It’s like letting off a grenade. You then go in and see who’s dead and what it’s achieved. Has it knocked down any useful walls or has it just created a load of mess?’

  Jane Bussmann agrees: ‘It was making fun of the media’s reaction to paedophilia. If you give in to boundaries, you are letting them win. If you really care about an issue, if you think it’s bad, the best way to reduce its badness is to mock it. It’s as old as history itself. If you think a person is evil, laugh at them and then see how much they like it. Being caught by the cops is a random fate for a paedophile, but being mocked in a comedy is a certainty that you can create and execute.’

  Runner James Serafinowicz early on asked that his name be changed to James Sezchuan, as his grandfather had only a couple of years earlier been the subject of worldwide coverage of charges accusing him of being a war criminal. Though the charges against him were dropped after it was ruled he was unfit to stand trial,121 such was the apprehension about the show’s reception that James imagined ‘Nazi grandson in paedophile outrage’ headlines if he kept his distinct surname (and the story was indeed revived when his brother’s Peter Serafinowicz Show aired in 2007).

  It was in recognition of how much was invested in supporting what Morris was doing that even though Quantick and Bussmann didn’t get any material in the final show he gave them a credit: ‘It could have backfired quite badly,’ reflects Quantick now, ‘if we’d been assassinated by loonies.’ But though the sense of violence in the air was very real, it hadn’t solely been that which provided the inspiration for the show. Morris had been thinking about doing something on attitudes to children with Brass Eye even before 2000.

  New contributing writer Charlie Brooker was transfixed by the way the show coalesced over the months: ‘It seemed to be happening by osmosis,’ he says, ‘in that I don’t think there was a definite point I could say where he told me specifically what he was doing and asked for ideas. The show drifted in a bit like a cloud and you think, Surely that’s not going to happen … Jesus Christ! And then it is happenin
g …’

  The roots of Brass Eye lay in the country’s general uneasy sense of its relationship with children, who were more often viewed as empty vessels to be filled with good or evil than as individuals. It was an instinctive reaction which held them to be either innocents to be kept away from a brutal world or monsters like the 10-year-old killers of toddler James Bulger in 1993. Five years after his murder, the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales was lowered from fourteen to ten. But as soon as young people approached an age of official maturity they could be leered at, as the Star would do in the wake of the Special, publishing a picture of 15-year-old singer Charlotte Church and her cleavage, showing ‘how quickly she’s grown up’. (The facing page attacked Brass Eye’s ‘perv spoof’.)

  The darkest fears for the well-being of the young were confirmed by a series of scandals in state care in the late 1980s and 1990s. London boroughs came in for particular criticism – seventeen years elapsed before reports on one particularly sadistic head of a home in Islington were followed up. Investigations showed how systems of child protection had been lax; the abused were often not believed, incompetence was covered up. Just as damaging were the allegations that became mired in uncertainty and often bitter controversy, such as the diagnosis of abuse in the late 1980s in Cleveland. Truth was hard to find, and in that vacuum unease flourished.

  There was a growing sense that not enough was being done about predatory paedophiles. And when they were caught and convicted, there was further concern about whether they would be released and go on to reoffend. Of all the fears and threats that faced children, it was the image of that most dangerous paedophile which was most terrifying.

  The most direct influences on the format of the Special were emotive documentaries which used such predatory paedophiles as source material. They were often powerful programmes, but it wasn’t so much how far they succeeded on their own terms which concerned Brass Eye as the inevitably manipulative techniques they used to get there. Specific programmes were given to Morris’s writers to watch, among them a Channel 4 Dispatches of October 1998 which featured paedophile Sidney Cooke with what Morris later described as ‘camp relish’.122 Dispatches editor Dorothy Byrne had commissioned the programme as Cooke’s release date approached amid public debate about where he should be housed. Her starting point was to question whether he should be released at all. It had been alleged that he had committed other offences for which he hadn’t yet been charged, so she conceived the programme as a counterpoint to investigations into miscarriages of justice which resulted in the conviction of innocent people. This would be Crimewatch in reverse – Dispatches knew its criminal and appealed, successfully, for information relating to his activities. ‘The popular genre in TV was getting people out of prison,’ explained Byrne. ‘So it was actually a very daring programme because it resulted in a dreadful paedophile going to prison.’123

  Even unadorned, Sidney Cooke’s story of squalid perversion and murder provided a narrative as compulsive as it was horrifying. Yet Dispatches had horror-movie touches that Cooke hardly required – portentous music, dramatic pauses, gravelly voiceovers and eerie shots of menacing housing estates in reconstructions of his hideouts. Even some of what seemed to be Brass Eye’s wilder flights of invention proved to be little more than direct transplants. A real-life victim of Cooke is described as so traumatized that he will only speak off camera and then only while holding a small toy animal in front of his face – as presenter David Jessel solemnly relates this prurient detail, he holds his hands up protectively by way of demonstration. In Brass Eye, an interviewee talks to Morris only via her sister disguised as a blue toy troll.

  Both programmes were presented as live from an office dominated by a blow-up photograph of their featured paedophile leering down in black and white. The real Sidney Cooke was a fairground worker who spent years in parks and amusement arcades (‘Places where your children may have been’) and the Special captured Dispatches’ sensationalism in hinting darkly at details of the story which would be simply too vile for the audience to bear in full, the sort of programme that never reassured where it could play up threats, throwing a spotlight on to monsters and making the victims look freakish in their shadows. It all served to reinforce the idea that the official system of child protection was inadequate and required the media to do its job. The volatility of public fury in the face of this became clear almost two years later, on 1 July 2000, when 8-year-old Sarah Payne was abducted in Sussex and murdered, and the News of the World took up its anti-paedophile campaign.

  The aim was to get a version of the US law which allowed communities to be told when a paedophile moved into the area. Between July and September, the paper printed endless stories about the most abusive UK paedophiles, promising to name all 110,000 on the sex offenders’ register – ‘virtually one for every square mile of the country’.124 Ignoring those who said that attacks by strangers were far outnumbered by abuse within the home, every week they published photos of fugitive paedophiles, despite being refused permission to do so by the police. The paper was filled with headlines such as ‘What to do if there is a pervert on your doorstep’ and ‘Ten facts to shock every parent’.125

  Though the paper denied it was encouraging vigilantism, within a day of the first report, mobs hunted the ‘named and shamed’ paedophiles, and many offenders fled their homes in panic. Celebrities such as Esther Rantzen and GMTV’s Eamonn Holmes backed the campaign: ‘If you had a person living next door who had a contagious disease, you’d be told,’ Holmes said. ‘Why should this be different?’126 In Manchester an offender killed himself when his home was surrounded. Another had his flat attacked in Portsmouth on the Paulsgrove estate, which had the most energetic rabble and a long, if largely speculative, list of paedophiles. Cars were torched, innocent families were targeted. ‘They should be burned alive,’ offered one Paulsgrove woman as she protested about a local man, while nearby a young girl chanted, ‘Burn him, stab him, kill him.’127

  A march held in gentrified Balham in London near where Chris Morris lived was inevitably called ‘posh Paulsgrove’ in the press, but the unmediated emotion on display was pretty much the same. Morris had gone along to find out what protesters really thought of paedophilia beyond the headlines and was told by one parent that they would rather their child were murdered. It was a comment that played a decisive part in convincing him that there was something worth looking into, along with the personal contact he’d had himself with officers investigating child abuse allegations at his old school, Stonyhurst. He’d felt that the investigation – which resulted in no convictions – was also driven by panic. Morris returned to Balham in filming the Special, dressed in a top hat and riding gear and inhaling helium gas, obtained for the production at great trouble at the last moment. He went door to door in a sequence that didn’t make the final programme, warning people of a paedophile moving in nearby who wore strange clothes and spoke in a squeaky voice.

  Morris later said: ‘The very specific nature of Brass Eye is in identifying a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to an issue. If you tackle drugs or paedophilia, then you’re dealing with something where people’s brains are nowhere near the point of debate.’128 Debate was actively discouraged during the News of the World campaign, when those judges, MPs and newspapers who suggested that perhaps there might not be a paedophile under every cot in the country were named in the paper and ridiculed by its editor Rebekah Wade as ‘feeble men’.129 It seemed as if just the act of walking past children’s playgrounds might result in being the subject of a hunt by a baying crowd of demented parents. A paediatrician had to leave her town after vigilantes got confused about her job title and scrawled ‘paedo’ over her front door.

  The News of the World never formally agreed to drop its campaign, despite protests from groups representing both offenders and children. In practice, as the lynch mobs spread, the naming and shaming aspect was quietly dropped – at least until the following year, when it would be revive
d specially for the cast and crew of the Special – and the headlines died out, leaving a sense that the traditional image of the English as a reserved people was not necessarily to be relied on.

  By the beginning of the following year, pre-production had begun on the Special, known within Talkback and Channel 4 only as Trombone. The reputation of the original series guaranteed goodwill, but also brought its own risks. Chris Morris had become a legendary figure in the industry, and there was a generation who had grown up with his shows and would have wanted to work with him whatever he was doing. Ali MacPhail joked that he was surrounded by fans rather than colleagues. He thought she had a point. ‘Mm. Maybe you’re right,’ he told her. ‘I can walk to the water cooler and people fall about laughing these days.’ To ensure that the show wasn’t thrown together on autopilot, Morris canvassed impartial advice from friends such as Armando Iannucci, who introduced his longtime producer and friend Sarah Smith. Experienced and with a cool head, she could be relied on to point out the gratuitous. She became the Special’s script consultant. ‘He wanted to make the right points and only the right points,’ she says, ‘and he wanted to be careful about why he was doing it, and I think he just wanted to be challenged along the way whether or not the stuff was in there because it appeals to someone’s evil comic instinct as opposed to guessing at something specific. It was really important in that show that it did have a fundamental satirical intent.’ And quite apart from anything else, it was enjoyable for her to engage in Morris’s extended debates about comedy without the stressful responsibility of having to run the show herself. ‘I just went in and sat with him every now and then and argued.’