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 20th 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.
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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 20th 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 25th 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 michaelcumming.co.uk
