Synopsis
Brass Eye (1997) Season 1 is Chris Morris's savage British satire, six episodes you can watch online on iFILM. It poses as a hard-hitting current-affairs programme, then takes the whole format of televised news apart from the inside.
Each episode picks a single moral-panic subject — animals, drugs, science, sex, crime, and the decline of the nation — and inflates the hysteria around it until it bursts. The trick that made the show notorious: real celebrities and MPs were filmed earnestly campaigning against threats that did not exist. The best-known stunt has public figures denouncing a made-up drug called Cake without a flicker of doubt. Morris fronts it all stone-faced, and the more absurd the claim, the straighter the delivery.
Produced for Channel 4 by the team behind The Day Today, the comedy is cruel, deeply awkward, and not for everyone. What it skewers is media credulity, and it lands harder than most reporting. Stream Brass Eye Season 1 online on iFILM.
6 episodes
S1·E1Animals
The show is split into two halves. The first half delves into the world of animal fetishes, with helpful contributions from Paul Daniels and Carla Lane. The second half focuses on the elephant, who has trapped her trunk up her anus.
S1·E2Drugs
The voices of Bernard Manning, Noel Edmonds and David Amess MP attempt to save British schoolchildren from the horror drugs coming from Eastern Europe, Clarky Caps, Yellow Bentines and the made-up Cake.
S1·E3Science
Tomorrow's World meets Watchdog meets Wired. Science gets the Brass Eye treatment. A number of celebs again espouse their scripted knowledge of 'mad' experiments and covered up and untold stories of electricity falling from pylons and frogs being grown with rabbit's feet.
S1·E4Sex
Chris Morris casts a satirical eye over the subject of sex and its relationship to society. Helpful contributors include Peter Stringfellow and David Sullivan.
S1·E5Crime
Chris Morris turns his laser eye on to crime. Highlights include revelations of how elephants are being used to disperse rioters, and Vanessa Feltz's message to murderers.
S1·E6Decline
Religion falls under the spotlight in this episode, which features Terry Waite discussing how Britain has been poisoned by the gospel.
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