Shatner’s Bas­soon: Michael Cum­ming on the mak­ing of Brass Eye

First aired on Chan­nel 4 in 1997, Brass Eye remains the north star of mod­ern British TV satire, influ­enc­ing every­thing from Look Around You to The Thick of It to Char­lie Brooker’s Screen­wipe. Viewed today, the most strik­ing thing about Brass Eye is how fresh and fun­ny it still feels – not least when series cre­ator and pre­sen­ter Chris Mor­ris is in full flow, bait­ing and bam­boo­zling unwit­ting celebri­ties and politi­cians as only he could. Rewatch­ing the orig­i­nal six episodes, it’s impos­si­ble not to be left awestruck by the show’s auda­cious genius, while at the same time lament­ing the fact that it could nev­er be repeat­ed now.

Thanks to series direc­tor Michael Cum­ming, how­ev­er, Brass Eye’s lega­cy con­tin­ues to evolve. Orig­i­nal­ly released in 2017 to mark the show’s 20^th anniver­sary, Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes is an archive doc­u­men­tary con­struct­ed by Cum­mings from hun­dreds of hours of out­takes and unbroad­cast mate­r­i­al. Due to legal restric­tions and rights issues, the film can only ever be shown pub­licly, mak­ing it a holy grail for fans. Ahead of a new UK-wide tour this autumn, Cum­ming spoke to LWLies about the Brass Eye’s endur­ing appeal, how Oxide Ghosts came togeth­er, and the price­less moments left on the cut­ting room floor.

LWLies: How did you first become involved in Brass Eye?

Cum­ming: Well, it was all a bit ran­dom. I men­tion it in the begin­ning of the film, just to give the audi­ence the con­text of where I was at the time. Basi­cal­ly, I was an art stu­dent and a film stu­dent who had become a pret­ty dis­il­lu­sioned, job­bing direc­tor. I’d been direct­ing The Word on Chan­nel 4; they would send me off to Amer­i­ca to make these lit­tle films for the show. I was on the verge of giv­ing up when the series edi­tor got the job of pro­duc­ing Chris Mor­ris’ Brass Eye, and because The Word was sort of this edgy show, they asked me if I’d do it. Chris and I met and we obvi­ous­ly got on in a way that I can’t quite quan­ti­fy. So that’s how I start­ed doing it. But up until that point I’d nev­er made any com­e­dy at all. I’d nev­er even real­ly thought about mak­ing com­e­dy. Then the show came out and, of course, from that moment on nobody ever offered me any­thing else.

Look­ing back on the mak­ing of the show, what were some of the biggest pro­duc­tion challenges?

The big chal­lenge that made it dif­fer­ent from doing anoth­er kind of com­e­dy show was that we didn’t real­ly know at the time which bits of it might be used to put in front of real peo­ple to con­vince them to do ridicu­lous things. Of course, it was sup­posed to have a real­is­tic doc­u­men­tary style, but the ideas were often quite absurd, so they had to be exe­cut­ed in a way that would feel con­vinc­ing. For exam­ple, fir­ing a cow out of a giant can­non… in a sketch com­e­dy you’d shoot it com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent­ly, but when you know you might be putting that footage in front of a politi­cian or a celebri­ty and try­ing to con­vince them that this stuff’s real­ly going on in the world, it has to be shot in a real­is­tic way. Get­ting our heads around that was the first big chal­lenge I suppose.

Are there any sketch­es you remem­ber being par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to execute?

Yeah, pret­ty much every one! I remem­ber when we shot the Purves Grundy char­ac­ter, who’s obvi­ous­ly sup­posed to be Jarvis Cock­er, Chris wasn’t hap­py with the way he looked in it. He didn’t think he had got the man­ner­isms right. So we reshot that. But I don’t remem­ber us reshoot­ing much else.

Speak­ing of the celebri­ties and politi­cians who appeared on the show, were there any inter­ac­tions that real­ly sur­prised you at the time?

Again, pret­ty much all of them. For me, the ones that stick out are prob­a­bly the first ones we shot, because real­ly we had no idea what was going on – we didn’t real­ly know what the show was yet. The ​‘Ani­mals’ episode, which was the pilot, was the first mate­r­i­al we did, and there wasn’t real­ly any sort of pro­to­col of how to do it. We sort of bum­bled into our inter­views with cam­corders and I would shoot them myself and we prob­a­bly looked like we didn’t know too much about what we were doing. That was our cov­er I sup­pose. I don’t want to spoil [Oxide Ghosts] for any­one com­ing to see it, but there are some good sto­ries around the very first film­ing and us get­ting slight­ly trapped in Nigel Benn’s house.

Is there an episode or a sketch that you’re par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of?

The bits that I remem­ber now are dif­fer­ent from the celebri­ty stuff because I’ve seen those clips a mil­lion times. I real­ly like the Ted Maul char­ac­ter that Chris brought from The Day Today, espe­cial­ly the ​‘Crime’ episode where he goes to the hous­ing estate and he’s talk­ing about ​“Dante meets Bosch in a crack lounge”. It’s the one that opens with the longest crash zoom in his­to­ry, which starts on a wide shot of Earth viewed from space and then zooms right into Ted Maul’s face. In those days you had to join up 40 dif­fer­ent bits of film to make it. I love that shot and I love the way Ted Maul just shouts his way through everything.

Why do you think Brass Eye has had such a last­ing impact?

Sim­ply because nobody had done any­thing like it before and I don’t think there’ll be any­thing like it again. Also because of Chris; peo­ple are end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the stuff that he’s done and he doesn’t real­ly talk about it much which sort of adds to the mys­tique of it. Brass Eye exists in this per­fect lit­tle bub­ble of time, and after we made it a lot of the loop­holes we exploit­ed got closed. So I don’t think any­thing like it could exist today – and it would be hard to satirise some of the insane shit that goes on.

How did Oxide Ghosts come about?

The whole thing with the film is com­plete­ly ran­dom, real­ly. I made it for a one-off screen­ing – some­one had asked me to do some­thing for Brass Eye’s 20^th anniver­sary and I men­tioned that some­where I had this box of tapes from the mak­ing of the show. I thought it would be fun to find a clip to show for the audi­ence at that screen­ing, and when I realised how good some of the mate­r­i­al was, I thought it could be a big­ger thing. The sort of acci­den­tal nature of how it was put togeth­er is part of its charm, I think.

The last time you toured with the film was in 2022 for the show’s 25^th anniver­sary. What can peo­ple expect this time around?

Stew­art Lee, who’s doing one of the Q&As on this tour, said it remind­ed him of going to see a film like Air­plane back in the day, where you have a lot of peo­ple laugh­ing in a room togeth­er. I don’t think you get that in any oth­er envi­ron­ment, real­ly; it’s a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence to watch­ing some­thing at home on TV. So I hope peo­ple come along and have a good laugh.

Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes screens across the UK from Octo­ber 28 to Novem­ber 27. Tick­ets are avail­able at michael​cum​ming​.co​.uk