Chris Morris, Brass Eye Pedophilia Special

Web log entries dealing with the Brass Eye program satirizing anti-pedophilia hysteria, which first aired on Channel 4 on Thursday, July 26, 2001.

Here's a weird story. British satirist Chris Morris has produced a hoax TV special about paedophilia, for which he invented two fake charity campaigns and invited celebrities to promote them on camera. Several celebrities, including Phil Collins, got suckered into participating and are now furious over the hoax. One celebrity dupe, comedian Richard Blackwood, appears on camera warning a group of children that paedophiles can make toxic vapours rise from their computer keyboards. A network spokesman defends the program: "Chris Morris's Brass Eye Special is a powerful satire on the way the media exploits and sensationalises the subject of paedophilia. It is a programme that is both humorous and directed to make a serious point. As with much of Chris Morris's work, it is in places disturbing, and is astonishingly vivid and original."
The Guardian

Britain's Channel 4 broadcast Chris Morris's latest Brass Eye program last night, a boldly tasteless satire on anti-paedophilia hysteria. For the program, Morris concocted phony paedophilia scares and conned several celebrities and politicians into appearing onscreen to make patently ridiculous claims, such as "We have footage, too alarming to show you, of a little boy being interfered with by a penis-shaped soundwave generated by an online paedophile." The Guardian describes highlights from the show. The network received a deluge of protest calls about the show, but Channel 4 defends the show and plans to rebroadcast it as scheduled. Earlier in the week, Dea Birkett anticipated the outrage and defended Morris's brand of satire. Morris caused similar outrage four years ago with a phony anti-drug documentary, for which he convinced unwitting celebrities and politicans to speak out against a made-up drug called "cake" (one participant declared on camera that "cake" affects an area of the brain known as "Shatner's bassoon").
The Guardian

The furor over Chris Morris's Brass Eye anti-paedophilia satire continues in Great Britain. Channel 4 rebroadcast the show Friday night as scheduled, despite receiving 2000+ viewer complaints and criticism from government officials and child welfare organizations. Writing in The Observer, Channel 4 CEO Michael Jackson defended the program and the decision to broadcast it. . . . Observer critic Kathryn Flett calls the program "grimly hilarious" and ridicules the celebrity dupes who agreed to spout nonsense factoids from Morris's cue cards. . . . Before the latest Brass Eye aired, Euan Ferguson profiled Chris Morris and printed extensive excerpts from earlier Morris shows, including an interview with Princess Di biographer Andrew Morton ("OK, let's look at the book. New edition. Here it is. Em, first of all, its size; it looks bigger than it is, which is quite a crafty move. Was that the intention?"). . . . This Chris Morris fan site has the program available for download in DivX format (total of 83Mb, so you'll need a very fast Internet connection and DivX installed).
ITN | BBC | The Observer | Cook'd and Bomb'd

Still more about Brass Eye. Chris Morris's satirical anti-paedophilia special has sparked a vehement debate about censorship. Some British government officials are blasting Channel 4 and calling for expanded powers to regulate TV programs, while insisting they don't want the government to be an "arbiter of content." Another article speculates, "It seems [culture secretary] Ms Jowell is interested in giving the ITC [Independent Television Commission] some sort of emergency intervention powers that will break with the light-touch regulation introduced by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who abolished the TV regulators' powers to preview programmes 11 years ago." . . . Less than 24 hours later, however, Jowell "made a dramatic U-turn in the Brass Eye row, declaring the content of TV is not a matter for government after all." . . . Guardian critic Emily Bell belittles the offended officials: "The incredible spectacle of government ministers lining up to publicly condemn a satirical show they have not seen, and -- as the Home Office minister, Beverley Hughes, declares -- 'does not want to see' defies even the stupidest depths of the silly season." Meanwhile, the Guardian's editors call the show "degrading" and "deeply unpleasant" but also criticize government officials for trying to pressure networks over programming content.
The Guardian

The Brass Eye affair is winding down in Britain, but here are a couple more commentaries. The Telegraph's editorial board defended the program and chastised the more rabid critics. "It is worth pointing out, if only for the record, that Brass Eye was a parody, not of paedophilia, but of the low-grade investigative programmes that seem to dominate evening television: the kind where self-important presenters set out to 'expose' some vice or other, while knowing all the time that their appeal rests on the audience's salacious interest in that vice." Also in the Telegraph, Christopher Howse takes a similar tack in defending Brass Eye. "The object of its satire was the hypocrisy of television and newspapers that whip up public outrage while catering for voyeurs.... Yesterday's Daily Mail carried a banner headline 'Unspeakably sick' across a double-page spread on Brass Eye, in which it gave a catalogue of 'sordid scenes that caused the outrage', such as one in which 'a paedophile is portrayed stalking youngsters'. On the pages before, the Mail printed a large colour picture of the 'bikini princesses' - the rounded forms of the Duchess of York and her daughters displaying their ample breasts in skimpy swimwear. How old are the 'bikini princesses'? They are 11 and 12, for God's sake."
Electronic Telegraph