Disgusting Bliss (22 page)

Throughout the series, even those props and situations which appeared fleetingly were sourced and worked to look authentic. In the sketch about Shaftesbury’s Jam, the company which allows drugs in its production meetings, the drugs drew praise in an article by Will Self: ‘Not only were all the paraphernalia and substances depicted with uncanny accuracy rare on television, but the reactions of the drugged executives were entirely credible.’ The marketing manager falls out of the boardroom as the voiceover intones, ‘Soon he will learn to maintain his levels.’ Will Self commented, ‘Maybe he will, but I doubt Chris Morris ever will. Put starkly, this man genuinely knows no limits.’
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It was an assessment that was most apparent in
Brass Eye
’s interaction with the real world. Morris had little time for other comic interviewers of the time like Mrs Merton, who appeared to mock their subjects. ‘So easily assimilated,’ he said of Caroline Aherne’s character. ‘People know how to play her, they just get their best grin on and come out stinking of roses.’ And the same was true of
Have I Got News For You
: ‘It’s the biggest warm handshake, glass of sherry, pat on the back, pair of fluffy slippers to the Establishment you could possibly dream up. It becomes mere court jester tittle-tattle which has no bite whatsoever.’
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Morris was prepared to put himself in situations of real physical risk in his interviews. For the Drugs episode, he bothered west London drug dealers, dropping extracts from his mission into the programme as if part of a real investigation. That casually professional approach, using just snippets, combined with his supernatural confidence meant there was no indication in the final sketch of the very real fear that the crew had for his safety.

Researchers Rob Moore and Andrew Newman had selected All Saints Road after a reconnaissance mission which was successful in every respect, except that on closer examination their test purchase turned out to be nothing more potent than wood shavings. On the night of filming, the team gathered in Peter Fincham’s house nearby. Morris was relaxed, sitting with a cup of coffee, chatting and watching the telly. The crew mothered him anxiously, saying he would get cold and be stabbed. Ali MacPhail talked him into wearing a padded jacket for protection.

Morris was first driven down the road a number of times looking for likely characters. Once he was on All Saints Road itself he was covered by a film crew in a flat overlooking the road, while Andrew Newman was installed in the back of a van filming on a digital camera on the opposite side. There was no police back-up. The crew were in radio contact, and Morris was wired for sound but would have been hard to reach if anything went wrong. When one of the dealers took him down a side alley, everyone held their breath as the sound cut and Morris disappeared from view for a while.

His dominating attitude was the most effective defence – he dodged ahead of his quarry all the time, as if he were cutting off their way of escape while blitzing them with a stream of entirely made-up drug terms – ‘triple sod’, ‘yellow bentines’ and ‘clarky cat’ – and demanding to know if one dealer is the ‘boz boz’. Clearly angered yet strangely weary, the dealer eventually says, ‘My friend, please leave us alone.’ It was almost as if there had been a physical confrontation which Morris had won, yet it was all aggressive wordplay. Not that it all went his way. Remembering how the researchers had been ripped off, Morris hectored the dealer, ‘Last time I came here a friend of mine just got triple-jacked over the steeple hammer and jessop, jessop, jessop, jessop, jessop. It’s not wood, right?’ The dealer was clearly not completely cowed by Morris’s stream of nonsense. Despite his angry, ‘This is not wood, man,’
Brass Eye
had once again bought shavings.

Reconvening back at Peter Fincham’s house, the rest of the crew were fizzing with nervous excitement and yet Morris remained as calm as he appeared on screen. If you were concentrating on his mental agility, you might even miss his deceptive physical toughness entirely. But it had been part of Morris as early as his days on Andy’s Records, when lugging heavy boxes of records around had been as important to the job as knowing music. It was always there, just under the surface, even in the celebrity interviews, alongside the psychological power play – it was as if he exercised an almost tangible control over his guests while simultaneously signalling huge amusement to the audience. Morris told Armando Iannucci that he struggled not to corpse, but it was sometimes visible – when he played a pretentious music critic asking one-hit wonder Jas Mann from Babylon Zoo, ‘What is your song? Is that like an audible sound or just like a bubble of oxygen?’ he had to choke back a laugh.

Morris seemed to be energized by those celebrity interviews, which the
Brass Eye
team called hits, but for the other crew members there was just sweaty, prickly fear in setting them up. It wasn’t quite so bad when they were doing interviews in the familiar surroundings of a studio. They used ITN with a production secretary who had worked on Radio 4 news shows to reassure subjects. But location shooting was a miserable experience if Morris didn’t go along, as everyone else was left with the worries that he just didn’t seem to have – about how unconvincing they felt they were. Once the interview was confirmed and set up, Morris would think about questions and guidelines and fax them as late as the morning of the shoot. The crew would have time only to look them over as they sat in their taxi on the way to the hit.

For the 2001
Special
, DJ Neil Fox was approached to assert that paedophiles have more in common genetically with crabs than with humans, and the crew had to get him to back it up by smashing a crab to pieces on camera. The runner on the show, James Serafinowicz, recalls going to Billingsgate Market to procure a genuine crab and, as he shivered among the ranks of early-morning stalls, the pseudo-science of
Brass Eye
seemed as if it would never convince. And yet DJ ‘Dr’ Fox did what he was asked to do. ‘There’s no real evidence for it,’ he said of the genetic assertion, ‘but it is scientific fact.’

The interviews were recorded months ahead of broadcast, and the worst thing for the crew was the fear that they would be the ones who said something which made a celebrity go to the press and ruin the whole concept. ‘Those were horrible. I couldn’t handle that at all, the going to the hits,’ says Tristram Shapeero. ‘It felt like your whole world was going to end.’

Remembering the experience of the Krays during the shooting of the pilot, Andrew Newman and Rob Moore hired an anonymous serviced office off Leicester Square for the main series under the guise of being telemarketers. The front organization of each show had its own phone line, post office box and headed paper. Some campaigns were given a veneer of authority with specially shot film shown to the victims, such as the grainy footage of the cow in Animals being rounded up and fired out of a metal tube in Libya (a stretch of land under the A40 Westway in west London stood in for the Middle East).

No celebrity was off-limits and, although there was little sympathy for media veterans like Noel Edmonds or Bernard Ingham, some of the production staff felt a bit of a pang about certain much-loved figures like Claire Rayner or kindly Richard Briers. But Morris accepted no pleas for mercy on the grounds of twinkly national treasuredom. Everyone who was willing to speak up for something that didn’t exist was fair game as far as he was concerned.

It was usually only Andrew Newman and a camera operator who went to the hits so that it seemed as if they were working with limited resources like a real campaigning organization. Though they sometimes filmed the preamble to an interview, there was no covert recording and they were careful not to slip into breaking the law by passing themselves off as a charity. Rather than telling outright lies to the targets, much of what was revealed about what was going to happen with the filmed material was more or less true – in welcoming new inmates to prison, as Tommy Vance did for the Key 2000 spoof Home Office video, he was told his footage was to be shown to as many young people as possible and hopefully would be given airtime on Channel 4, possibly in some late-night slot – ‘We told them as much as we could,’ says Newman.

Only very few followed up their interviews and even then only in a very basic way, in one case calling the fake office to check on Gita, one of the teens affected by ‘heavy electricity’ falling out of domestic power lines. Had she really been squashed to just eight inches? A simple, solemn confirmation by the researcher was all the reassurance required.

Morris was insistent on the same level of quality control in the hits as in the rest of the show, which meant on occasion redoing the shoot, despite the even greater fear of the crew in getting someone to say the same nonsense twice. One team had got Sebastian Coe in the Houses of Parliament for the
Special
, but Morris decided that the eyeline of the sporting peer, who read his words off cue cards, was wrong. The next day they got into the imposing Conservative Party headquarters, the grand surroundings making them feel particularly fraudulent. But Coe again held up the pictures of Hall and Oates treated to look like police shots, once more said the images were of a paedophile before and after changing his appearance and again that he ‘holds a low-status job in the American music market’.

Not all hits worked. There was the celebrity gangster who seemed so frightening that crew members won’t go on the record about him even now. And Welsh Tory MP Nigel Evans had an interview that became too farcical when Morris hit on the idea of introducing black powder into Evans’s make-up. Ali MacPhail pretended to be a make-up artist and applied black powder to Evans as he sweated under the hot lights. Inevitably, he spotted particles coming off his face and asked if he had any marks, but Morris had become determined to continue and point-blank denied the evidence with a politely puzzled expression. Evans called over Ali MacPhail who, had there been an award for least convincing make-up artist in an interview, would have won it for steadfastly claiming she didn’t have a mirror in the make-up box. So the MP said he would just go to the bathroom. Morris got Newman and Moore in the production gallery to race Evans to the studio toilets and jam the doors shut from the inside. Evans returned – fairly good-humouredly – and the interview was abandoned.

Other celebrities were asked to give reactions to
Brass Eye
’s brief news stories. It created further potential for secrets to be revealed months before the scheduled transmission start date of that November. Bernard Ingham’s segment in Drugs was shot at the
Daily Express
offices, and he later showed the paper’s news desk one of
Brass Eye
’s fake foreign articles on cake. A very enthusiastic
Express
crime reporter phoned the Leicester Square office and suddenly FUKD and BOMBD were placed in the awkward position of being anti-drugs campaigners who seemingly didn’t want any publicity. Yet somehow secrecy was maintained almost to the end, by which point the threat came not from an external source, but from Channel 4 itself. Just days before transmission, the broadcaster abruptly lost its nerve over the more contentious material in
Brass Eye
and pulled the programme.

It wasn’t as if they had only just become aware at that late stage of what was in the show. Channel 4’s legal team had been working with Morris from the start to meet the many challenges in getting it out. For Prash Naik, controller of legal compliance, it was better to be in at the beginning of something like
Brass Eye
than doing a last-minute, messy round of cutting, re-editing, blurring images or bleeping out words.

He took on both the scripted elements and the hits, balancing the show’s content with regulatory requirements for libel, contempt and taste and decency. Young and informal, he was a good match for Morris. Rather than telling him what wasn’t possible, he and Jan Tomalin, head of legal and compliance, knew the grey areas in programming regulations and were enthusiastic about trying to get as much as possible on air. And they loved the show.

It was anticipated that the most difficult element would be the interviews with politicians. The channel had just had to apologize to Harrow MP Jerry Hayes – who had also been caught on Chris Morris’s Radio 1 show – because he had been filmed for campaigning comedian Mark Thomas’s
Comedy Product
in early 1996 in an eight-foot inflatable penis costume without being told it was for a humour show.

Prash Naik worked closely with Morris to build the case for
Brass Eye
being in the public interest. MPs had parliamentary researchers who could have checked out the bona fides of campaign organizations – Basildon MP David Amess had his with him during his Drugs interview that summer. During the interview, the MP himself added a new element by offering without prompting to submit a written question about cake in the Houses of Parliament. It was naturally irresistible for Morris, despite the additional risk of discovery, and the official parliamentary record
Hansard
registered the government’s response for posterity: ‘We are not aware of any reports of misuse in the United Kingdom of the substance known as “cake” but the advisory council nevertheless has under review the question whether this and a number of similar substances should be brought within the scope of the 1971 Act.’
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They tantalizingly didn’t say what the ‘similar substances’ were, and a request under the Freedom of Information Act to the Home Office in the course of writing this book prompted the disappointing news that accompanying briefing papers for questions are always destroyed after two years.

Though the scripted parts of the show weren’t as legally troublesome as the interviews, almost every episode involved subjects being treated in a way that could breach parts of the broadcasting code. The general defence for the whole series was to be that it built the outrage over the course of the episodes and was a satirical treatment of the often arbitrary reasoning for taboos in the media.