'Brass Eye': Secrets from the UK's Most Controversial Comedy

“When I first met him the questions he asked were like: ‘If I wanted to fill a supermarket up with water, how would you do that?’” recalls Brass Eye director Michael Cumming of meeting its creator and presenter Chris Morris. “It became apparent pretty quickly this was going to be something unusual.”

This month marks the 25th anniversary since Brass Eye first aired on Channel 4, back in January 1997. An anarchic mix of satire, farce, news spoof, celebrity baiting and profound silliness, it is a treasured cult classic and something of a set text in contemporary British comedy.

Back in 2017 – to coincide with the 20th anniversary – Cumming made a 60 minute documentary, Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes, featuring never before seen clips, outtakes and deleted scenes from a personal archive of hundreds of hours. Now, the film is getting another theatrical release in independent cinemas and venues up and down the country.

To coincide, Cumming – who directed Toast of London, Toast of Tinseltown and the music doc King Rocker – is speaking about his experiences of working on the show for the very first time. “While making it we couldn’t speak about it because it was being made undercover in secret,” he says. “There was a blanket silence – and for me and Chris that carried over afterwards. But it feels like a really important thing to celebrate – it’s a very special show.”

It’s a small miracle that Oxide Ghosts exists at all, because, for a while, the VHS tapes containing all the original rushes from Brass Eye were simply taking up shelf space. “The really sad thing is the box [of tapes] would have been three times as big,” Cumming says with a sigh. “I distinctly remember recording over some of them with Twin Peaks.”

Once Cumming began to assemble footage, the first hurdle was getting the thumbs up from Morris. “I just made [the documentary] without telling him,” says Cumming. “When it was done I sent it to him and waited to see whether he said, ‘You're never showing that’ or, ‘Yes, but cut this and that’.” Neither happened. “He was great and very supportive.”

Oxide Ghosts will never be shown online or on TV, only existing in these independent cinema and venue runs. For Cumming, it was the chance to show a different side of the show. “People talk about it as this innovative piece of satire about news and TV, but the bottom line is that Chris was always saying: ‘Is there a sillier way?’” recalls Cumming. “Could that character have a more ridiculous name? Could the edit be more frantic and stupid? There was a lot of stupidity, and in Oxide Ghosts you get a chance to see the stupidity at work, as well as the serious stuff.”

There are also insights into the working process. One stand-out deleted clip features an advert for a Holocaust-themed family board game called “Horrorcaust”. It transpires that it was created as nothing more than a shock-inducing bargaining tool with the channel’s executives, and was never intended for broadcast. “Chris cleverly set up a situation where it was almost created for bartering, where he was able to go, ‘Well if you won't [let us] show that then can we at least show this?’ It's a good technique, but unfortunately it will never work again, because everyone knows about it.”

Elsewhere there are insights into early slip-ups and backfires, like when they called notorious gangster Reggie Kray in prison, only for him to trace the call and send someone over in retaliation. “It felt very serious,” Cumming says. “It was stupid to make the phone call from the offices of the production company.” Thankfully the company name was fictional, so they could lie convincingly about no such company existing. “It was scary because we were in the building the night the bloke came around. We were concerned they might follow Chris and find out where he lives.”

While Oxide Ghosts reveals much of the craft of Brass Eye, there is still much that has been lost and lives on only in memories. Cumming recalls the groundwork that went into creating the infamous celebrity interviews, in which high profile figures were coaxed into championing or condoning completely fictional issues, like Noel Edmonds warning against the dangers of a drug called “cake”.

“On screen there might be a one minute clip,” he says. “But sometimes those people had to be talked into it for a long, long time on camera by Chris. Sometimes they needed a lot of persuasion and to hear him talking somebody into doing something they clearly weren't comfortable with was sort of genius. I remember watching and thinking: ‘Bloody hell, that's amazing that he wheeled somebody in from a position of not really wanting to do it, but by the end they're just saying any old shit.’”

While making the pilot for the show for the BBC – which was then rejected and picked up by Channel 4 – one of the jobbing BBC camera crew was appalled by the duping of celebrities and threatened to blow the lid. “We had to get rid of him pretty quickly,” recalls Cumming. Battles at Channel 4 continued however, despite Morris’ deceptive efforts to get stuff on air. “Six episodes were signed off, but Michael Grade [former Chief Executive of Channel 4] wanted to watch them all and that halted the broadcast,” Cumming remembers. “Then he came back with a number of cuts. Chris was totally pissed off.”

Morris decided to bait his boss with a series of bizarre pranks that included writing a letter to Nelson Mandela that accused Grade of having led a campaign to keep him in prison. He even reportedly wrote to Paul Simon, telling him that Grade considered his former partner, Art Garfunkel, to be in possession of all the talent and had banned clips of Simon being shown on Channel 4 because he was “ugly”. Some of Grade’s proposed cuts were still being fought over right up to the day of transmission. At the last moment, Morris slipped in a freeze frame, only visible when paused, carrying the message: “Grade is a Cunt”.

“Shit hit the fan,” recalls Cumming. Although in hindsight he thinks they did pretty well to release the show in its final form. It was a long and stressful production, running almost two years from pilot to broadcast, which Cumming says is almost unheard of in TV. “People had to leave to go and work on other jobs,” he says. “It was just me and Chris left at the end.”

All of this resulted in a huge surplus of footage, which Cumming was able to sift through for the documentary. “In Oxide Ghosts I include longer segments of things that were featured in the show,” he says, including an extended cut of the controversial sketch Peter Sutcliffe! The Musical. “There was loads of stuff that in any other show would have definitely been included but because we had more time we felt we could improve it or give something else the elbow.”

When Cumming toured his documentary in 2017 there was one audience question that came up again and again: Do you think Brass Eye could be made today? “I've worked out my answer,” Cumming says. “I think Chris could, probably – he’d somehow find a way because he's an extraordinary person – but I'm not sure whether anybody else could. I mean, thank Christ that it was before social media or when you could easily Google ‘elephant trunk stuck up anus’.”

@DanielDylanWray

Oxide Ghosts is touring UK cinemas from Feb 25th. Tickets can be bought here.