Disgusting Bliss (32 page)

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 long-time 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 and 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?’ Co-producer 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

But then photographers came to doorstep him with partner Jo and their children. It was the only aspect of the media coverage which genuinely upset Morris – otherwise he might even have appreciated the irony in the press claiming to defend the children of the country while sticking long lenses into the Morris family buggy to get a story. ‘Everyone felt very protective towards Chris,’ says Jane Bussmann. ‘Because the idea that someone as nice as Chris would be regarded as a bad person was just ludicrous. People standing outside his front door . . . the malevolence . . . it was insane.’

Co-host Doon Mackichan was also targeted. ‘He was holed up in his house,’ she remembers, ‘and we were kind of talking each other down because our anger was so high we did just want to go and smash their cars up.’ Morris sent her a case of champagne.

The women connected with the show were particularly vilified, painted by the
Mail
as somehow betrayers of their sex for not only telling vulgar jokes but controversial ones at that. Caroline Leddy, by then head of comedy at Channel 4 and responsible for commissioning the show, was according to the paper ‘herself the mother of a young child’, and the child actors featured alongside Doon Mackichan were ‘not unlike her own’
¹³⁶
– although it wasn’t made clear how they might have differed.

Mackichan had already warned her mother that she would probably hear about the show and explained that she’d found it quite hard that people close to her hated it, including some
Smack the Pony
colleagues. Mackichan had been blanked in local shops and by mums in her kids’ playground. Then the
Mail
tracked Doon’s mother to Spain. She innocently relayed the conversation she’d had with her daughter, and the
Mail
worked it into a piece so vicious that on advice from friends Mackichan has never read it.

It wasn’t until well into August that the stories eventually dried up. Ali MacPhail later received a copy of the
Brass Eye
DVD with a card from Morris: ‘This is to remind you that you are as sick as I am.’ But it wasn’t just the usual suspects ranged against Chris Morris. The
Special
also alienated some who had been traditionally sympathetic to his work.

The
Guardian
’s Hugo Young thought, ‘The satire was too deeply embedded in the shock effect to make much sense.’
¹³⁷
And in the same newspaper Ros Coward addressed the subject of the show being watched by those who had been abused. ‘Who on the liberal left, intent on a critique of media forms, really cares about that? They think the only problem with paedophilia in our society is that it’s the subject of a moral panic, paedophiles as wildly exaggerated bogeymen.’ She went on to say, ‘I’m much more concerned that many people (including media liberals) still don’t really believe sex abuse happens.’
¹³⁸

Channel 4’s own Dorothy Byrne, later head of news and current affairs at the channel, is not so prescriptive, though she agrees wholeheartedly with Ros Coward’s assertion that the content of the
Special
diminishes the threat posed by predatory paedophiles. Perhaps they might not so often affect middle-class families, she says, but she herself had become much more sensitized to the dangers during the production of the
Dispatches
on Sidney Cooke. She’d seen public spaces in less well-off areas where paedophiles would meet, and she had challenged a man who approached her own young daughter.