Disgusting Bliss

  It was an enviable freedom from the point of view of those who were returning to full-time front-line duties: ‘By the end of Jam I was absolutely exhausted,’ says line producer Philippa Catt, ‘and I’d lost loads of weight. Going back to Brass Eye, I was quite excited at the prospect of working with Chris again, but the whole politics of all the money shit and having to fight about [it] all the time – everything is so intense.’ Faced with the prospect of having to mediate between Morris and Peter Fincham at Talkback for months, she decided to walk away and had almost made it to liberty before Chris and Sally Debonnaire convinced her over the course of a weekend to return.

  Many other familiar faces returned to the show, including Jump Design, whose minimalist opening sequence reflected a more self-conscious mode of current affairs presentation. They were partnered once again on the musical side by Jonathan Whitehead.

  Among the new contributors was Charlie Brooker, who was probably the most notable addition to Morris’s circle, despite not getting a particularly large amount of material in the Special itself. But his involvement marked the start of a productive new writing partnership which would culminate in 2005’s Nathan Barley. Like Morris, Brooker was wildly creative and a naturally comic writer. Production crew who have worked with both men say that Brooker demonstrates the same inspiring leadership quality, and he would get his own TV team behind him for his later Screenwipe show, pulling together to create last-minute bits of extra invention. His early career was also spent in the media rather than in performing comedy. As a teenager, Brooker had contributed cartoons to Viz-alike comic Oink! He later worked as a games journalist for PC Zone magazine, where he was given a regular slot for his artwork which prompted the entire publication to be withdrawn the month he created a fake advert for a zoo that encouraged animal abuse. He had doctored Argos catalogue images of kids with animal toys to look like the results of the wanton slaughter players could inflict on wildlife as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. ‘There wasn’t any satirical point to be made there,’ he says. ‘I just liked the idea that it was wilfully unpleasant. That becomes amusing in itself, when it’s that unnecessary.’ He also investigated the comic potential of prank calls, a series of which he made as irritating customers calling computer helplines which were featured on a PC Zone cover disk. Off the back of that he was asked to co-present a technology show on TV.

  But it was his spoof TV listings webpage that gave him cult status and brought him to Morris’s attention. TV Go Home’s layout imitated the reassuring look of the Radio Times, but read as if years of churning out bland, neutral programme descriptions had led the writer to be consumed by an increasingly rabid hatred of all television and of the viewing hordes.

  ‘It was a weirdly cathartic thing to be doing,’ says Brooker. ‘It would be about three in the morning every other Thursday in quite a grumpy mood because I was usually knackered and I’d have to be doing something the next day. I do remember specifically there was a Valentine’s edition I wrote the day after an appalling breakup, and it was so bitter that I ended up finding it amusing while I was doing it.’

  He stored most of his bile for Nathan Barley, the twenty-something Trustafarian star he created for regular TV Go Home documentary Cunt: ‘Wearing trousers apparently cut from charcoal-grey crêpe paper, Nathan Barley crosses a busy street clutching a mango smoothie and a punnet of takeaway sushi,’ ran a typical entry, ‘simultaneously listening to a speed garage compilation on his Minidisc walkman, contemplating the purchase of a Nokia WAP phone and mentally picturing himself sliding all the way up to the nutbag in a passing teenage girl in a tissue-thin summer dress.’130 The co-host of Brooker’s TV show knew Morris, showed him TV Go Home and introduced the two during the run-up to production of the Brass Eye Special.

  Brooker was invited to writing meetings, and in return Morris and Peter Baynham both contributed to TV Go Home. Morris’s pieces included a description of a Nathan Barley attempt at short film-making: ‘11.39 (deckbang). A crack-crazed Yardie sprays an Uzi round the top deck of a number 23 bus; as the mortally-wounded passengers writhe in the blood, smoke, dribble and spilt bags, their moments of eye contact provide cues for fantasy porn vignettes in which they have sex with the person whose dying face they’ve just glimpsed. Music by Goldfrapp.’131

  Nathan had been born of an undefined sense of bitterness that Brooker had felt years before towards the confident, young media types hanging out near the flat he could ill afford just off Chepstow Road in gentrified Westbourne Park. It was the kind of ‘weird modern fuck who can kind of effortlessly get away with anything’, says Brooker, ‘and just seems to succeed and is operating behind about ten layers of irony which are constantly flipping around so you can’t pin them down’. Readers would approvingly email TV Go Home about the sharp satire of idiotic new trends and fads which Brooker had been under the impression were entirely his own invention. The extraordinary savagery of his writing prompted further emails expressing fears for Brooker’s mental well-being. ‘I seem to remember Chris suggested that I should toy with the idea of making it more demented until it really looked like I was going a bit Network,’ he says.

  It was also Morris who suggested that Nathan could be developed into something more than a simple receptacle of hatred. The TV series would take five years to get to the screen, Brooker and Morris discussing how the show might work as far back as sessions for the Brass Eye Special, when they were joined by Peter Baynham. For a while they experimented with having a character playing the part of the rage-filled observer in TV Go Home, with documentary-maker Claire Ashcroft one candidate. Nathan himself was considered for the role of violent monster, but they found more humour in him being at heart a rather desperate figure. They talked about the show for so long that Brooker, unused to Morris’s deep and long approaches to development, wondered at times if it would ever happen. In the meantime Brooker drew on his computer journalism experience for the Special, discussing such accoutrements of the modern paedophile as online games and working on rapper JLb-8, the Eminem figure who writes his tales of abuse into ‘nu-ass’ music and dates girls ‘as young as seven’.

  The cast of the Special included Doon Mackichan. Since the original series, she had been in Talkback’s Smack the Pony, the show winning an international Emmy in 1999. She came to be Morris’s co-host on the Special and, sharing with him a deep hatred of Crimewatch, was particularly enthused to discover they were to take off its presenting style. Her Swanchita Haze combined the disturbingly still quality of The Day Today’s Collaterlie Sisters with an absurdly sexualized Fiona Bruce off Crimewatch and dripped suggestively over every line – ‘We believe his story is actually too upsetting to transmit. We only do so tonight with that proviso.’

  Doon Mackichan remembers Smack the Pony and Big Train comparing notes to avoid doing the same gags, and they joined forces again as Big Train’s Amelia Bullmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap arrived on the Special via Jam. Their former co-star Simon Pegg, who had gone on to find fame with his sitcom Spaced, made a show-stealing appearance as Gerard Chote, studio-storming spokesman for militant paedophile organization Milit-Pede.

  Pegg’s scene attracted some of the greatest criticism of the show for its apparent involvement of a child playing Chris Morris’s son. The boy is shown to Gerard, who denies wanting to have sex with him – but not for any moral reason. ‘I just don’t. I don’t find him attractive,’ he explains apologetically. Morris’s face betrays his character’s agonized confusion on hearing this news about his son – relief battling wounded pride. But the boy, like all of the young actors, was never really exposed to any adult conversations – he was filmed only in long shot and otherwise painted in during postproduction. All parents were fully consulted and aware of what was happening in the show, just as had been the case in Jam.

  In the American child beauty pageant sketch, careful precautions were taken to guard the footage of a little girl with apparent breast implants, created as special effects and then pixellated
out for the broadcast – ‘They jiggle,’ observes father Kevin Eldon happily. The original tape was meticulously logged and then destroyed at the end of production, unlikely as it was that anyone would think of trying to obtain it. It was the adults who featured in the Brass Eye Special who were told less about what was going on. Some auditioned for parts without even knowing what they were going for and later turned the show down when they found out what it was. Then there were those who were invited to make a different sort of contribution as part of the traditional Brass Eye fake campaign – the celebrities were rounded up again.

  ‘I thought people would be so much more alert and on their guard. And I was staggered at how gullible they were,’ reported Morris. ‘It’s simply a case of identifying the right blind spot and exploiting it.’132

  Gerald Howarth MP held up an advert designed to look like the prostitute cards left in telephone boxes. Next to a contact number and the slogan ‘Kids! I can help you with your homework’ was a picture of a man, hands on hips, wearing just pants and glasses. Runner and cameraman James Serafinowicz was quietly relieved to find his own striking resemblance to a fully clothed version of the model went unnoticed by the MP as he condemned the ad.

  Morris brought back his vox popping in the form of a focus group, an appropriate update for the technique given the way the subject had itself been characterized by mass displays of public emotion. It seemed to be no more difficult for him to lead on half a dozen people at a time than it had been to do one or two. They nodded approval of the ‘Singapore solution’, a technological breakthrough which involved a cashew nut-sized implant in a paedophile’s rectum reacting to the sound of children’s voices by expanding to the size of a 42-inch colour television set.

  The nightly protests of the year before were recalled in the form of reports punctuating the programme from Morris as Ted Maul outside a prison where a public riot over a paedophile prisoner named Jez North grows in ever more irrational fury, climaxing with North being grabbed by the mob from a prison van and ritually burned, Wicker Man-style, in a giant phallus. A sketch in counterpoint, which didn’t make it to the final show, was to feature paedophile friends at home making placards for their own, small pro-child sex march while the mother of one of them prepares sandwiches and flasks of tea.

  Not every target was framed so concisely. The self-confessed paedophile Morris interviewed never seemed genuine, though coaxing ‘Peter’ on to the show had been time-consuming and stressful for the crew, who had to appear sympathetic to hearing his views. He was accompanied to meetings by an adult friend, who remained silent until a discussion on the damage done to children. ‘I’ve been having sex with him since I was six,’ he said without prompting, ‘and it’s never done me any harm.’ Though Peter had been a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange and had published a book justifying what he termed ‘inter-generational sex’, none of this came over in the programme. Rather, he seemed like an actor in the preposterously heavy disguise he had brought along for filming in the bright sunshine of a London park. He listened patiently to Morris’s absurdly elongated list of names for paedophiles – ‘unabummer’, ‘the crazy world of Arthur Brown’, ‘nut administrator’, ‘two-pin din plug’, ‘bush dodger’, ‘small-bean regarder’, ‘shrub racketeer’ – as if the whole scenario were perfectly sensible. His comment – ‘it’s just another form of racism’ – should have been disturbing in its self-pity but in context sounded more like a scripted punchline.

  There was another moment in the show which would have gone unnoticed by the audience, and it was the one in which Brass Eye put itself in greatest peril, risking prosecution because members of the crew supplied their own childhood snaps for a sequence on composite images. And as Morris and Channel 4 knew, legally you couldn’t give consent even as an adult for an image of yourself as a child to be used like that. Morris played a gently lisping art expert, eliciting instant decisions from the ex-head of the obscene publications branch Mike Hames on the legality of a massively enlarged child’s head juxtaposed with a tiny image of a naked woman (not obscene) and a boy’s head on to a dog’s body with a huge penis (obscene). While the interview did expose the inevitably personal notions of taste behind apparent moral certainties, the more interesting legal paradox of the crew effectively incriminating themselves as their own abusers was lost. Hames was the best placed of anyone duped in the show to bring a prosecution. He had been a supporter of the News of the World campaign and written a book about paedophiles called The Dirty Squad.

  If the programme hadn’t hit all its targets in the way that the original series had, it was nevertheless packed with astonishing invention. The first cut revealed that Morris had made it almost exactly fit the required twenty-five minutes. Morris’s agent Chiggy even noticed he had become more willing to compromise with how he presented material to the broadcaster. Was he finally beginning to mellow? ‘He might have to at least tell them they’re going to get what they think they’re going to get,’ she says. ‘Even if they’re not.’

  Trombone was finally revealed as the Brass Eye Special on Thursday 26 July, repeated in the early hours of the following Saturday morning. Maintaining his rule of not commenting on or justifying his shows, Morris left for a holiday in the south of France immediately after the broadcast. There would still be plenty of questions for him by the time he came back.

  Channel 4 presented a united front on the broadcast – there was no repeat of the internal arguments which had threatened the original series. But a furious response came from almost every other quarter, allies as well as longtime critics. It made previous criticism of Morris’s work seem like polite equivocation. There was no doubt that the emotive subject matter had made it by far the harshest Brass Eye, and there was something for everyone to find at least awkward – the song with which the programme concludes, as a choir of children sing about not quite being ‘ready yet’, loses none of its power to disturb no matter how many times you witness it. And the fact that Morris had never been sentimental in the way he dealt with children on his shows over the years was never going to figure as part of the defence. There was a debate to be had, about the show as well as the issues it raised, but the media largely plugged itself straight back into the incoherent rage of the previous summer. And coverage was underscored with a curious moral fervour, as if implying that the Special were somehow a defence of child abuse.

  For anyone who recalled the mob-rousing tabloid campaign with some horror, the fierce insight and questioning of Brass Eye never seemed better deployed. That some would find it unacceptable was inevitable, but those sensitivities were not alone reason enough to say that the Special should not have been made. What would ultimately carry it would be the approach to the subject and in that Morris’s energy and the inspired seriousness he brought to the process of production were themselves a response to the critics: few, if any, other programme-makers could have made something so suspect but ultimately persuasive. If nothing else, Brass Eye demanded the respect of being engaged with beyond the predictable condemnation that at one point looked as if it might lead to state intervention in the programme.

  Tessa Jowell, newly installed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, condemned it as ‘a viewer and a parent’133 and highlighted concerns about how such a controversial programme had been given a repeat only days after its initial showing. Home Office minister Beverley Hughes went on Radio 4’s Today programme for an interview that, even without Morris’s physical presence, seemed as if it could have been cut from Brass Eye itself. ‘I’ve not seen the whole programme and to be honest I really don’t want to,’ said Hughes. She had read a ‘detailed commentary’ and ‘I’m very clear that this is not the right way to deal with the subject’.

  ‘But wait a minute, hang on, you’re a minister in the government,’ interrupted interviewer John Humphrys. ‘You’re coming on the air for not the first time in the last 24 hours to talk about this programme as a serious subject and you say you haven’t seen it a
nd you don’t want to see it. Aren’t people entitled to think that’s an absurd statement?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Hughes, adding that there was a debate to be had on the media and paedophilia, but a comedy programme wasn’t the place to start it. Fellow guest David Quantick commented that the debate she said she wanted was happening now as a result of the show. After the broadcast Morris called to say he hadn’t known David would be asked to appear on the programme, but thanked him for saying the right things. Then Peter Fincham called. He had been watching days go by with no sign of the arguments diminishing. Talkback were hoping to limit the damage, Peter Fincham said, and could David please stop going on the radio to talk about the show.

  The government started to show signs of anxiety about the way in which they were being portrayed as advocating censorship, and Number 10 eventually retracted much of the implied threat about regulating the broadcast of future controversial shows. Beverley Hughes’s description of the show as ‘unspeakably sick’ was taken up as one of the Mail’s many headlines on the subject, and the Sun went on to ask if the Special was ‘the sickest TV ever?’ Coproducer Phil Clarke and production coordinator Holly Sait, alone in the office when the show went out, became the front line in heading off what turned into an endless stream of calls from journalists as a press campaign against the show got into full swing.

  It soon became very personal, far more so than had been the case even in the coverage of the original series. The Daily Mirror claimed that some, inevitably unnamed, colleagues found Morris to be ‘an arrogant, egotistical character, driven by an almost psychopathic need to shock but too cowardly to account for his actions’.134 But if Morris was ever affected by such articles, he never showed any sign of it to friends and colleagues, and the Mirror’s impact was further undermined by the lack of available photographs. The paper was reduced to reprinting the image accompanying an interview Morris had done back in early 1990 with the NME. And as the subject of the original article concerned the dangers of backwards messages hidden on pop records – Morris regularly spoofed that earlier example of a moral panic – the Mirror’s caption could accuse him of nothing more dastardly than ‘proudly holding a Jason Donovan LP’.135