Films > Film Reviews

Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes

Cinema City

16/10/17

Interior. A pokey, unheated flat on Aylsham Road, Norwich. A portable television sits on top of a battered chest of drawers, the only piece of furniture in the room other than the bed. It is a freezing January evening in 1997, and I’m contemplating going to the Catherine Wheel for a half of lime and soda just to be warm for a while when the TV announces that the next program would be something called ‘Brass Eye’.

I recalled reading something in the paper about this show; something to do with its broadcast being delayed owing to complaints from some politician who had been fooled by the show's makers into raising a question in parliament about a hoax drug. I decide to put off the trip to the pub to watch it. Half an hour later I’m on the phone, frothing at anyone whose number I can recall that I’ve just seen absolutely the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and that they absolutely should watch it too.

Incidentally, if you’ve never seen Brass Eye, you absolutely should watch it. Twenty years later, it remains the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV.

If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean. The twisted brainchild of Chris Morris - a man I regard as the James Joyce of satire - Brass Eye is, in part at least, a razor sharp and technically virtuosic pastiche of current affairs programs like Newsnight, complete with their meaningless graphics, unearned superiority, and distasteful sensationalism. It’s dark, beautiful, brave, anarchic, and often knuckle-bitingly audacious.

What it’s remembered most for though are the celebrities, writers, and politicians duped. There are just too many wonderful moments to list, but Britt Ekland pleading with viewers to help get Carla the Elephant’s trunk from “up its guts” and Rolf Harris informing us that the street name of the new drug Cake is “Joss Ackland’s spunky backpack” are personal favourites. These sections work so well largely because of Morris’s extraordinary performance, but also because, rather than relying on their victim’s stupidity or good will, a la Ali G, they rely on their victim’s ego, narcissism, hunger for publicity, and inability (or disinclination) to do even a modicum of their own research. The result is a brutal takedown not just of celebrity culture, but of media per se. What’s more, it’s pant-wettingly funny. Unfortunately, the nature of the beast means it ran for only six main episodes in 1997 and a single special episode - on paedophilia, no less - in 2001.

Twenty years on, director Michael Cumming has unearthed a box of VHS cassettes and distilled them into Oxide Ghosts, a whole hour of unseen footage and outtakes. However, there are no plans to release Oxide Ghosts on disc or download. Instead, Cumming is touring it around independent cinemas personally, and treating the audience to a Q and A session after the showing. It’s not hyperbole, then, to say that this is literally a once in a lifetime thing. Thankfully, the tour called into our own Cinema City. And I was there. Thank fuck.

You see, Oxide Ghosts was an absolute joy from beginning to end. To be honest, there’s not much actual reviewing to be done here. If you’ve seen Brass Eye, then I guess it’s enough to tell you that it’s more of that. There’s very little to get in the way; no extended explanations, no mucking about, just another hour of the best television I’ve ever seen. We get to see more of Morris dressed in a nappy with a space-hopper on his head trying to score fictional drugs from non-fictional drug-dealers, more of retired weasel fighter Bernard Lerring, more of the Peter Sutcliffe musical, and more of cow tormentor Simon 'Chob' Hottrin. We also get to hear Morris' near-legendary phone conversation with an incarcerated Reggie Kray, which remained unbroadcast following a visit to the production office by a brace of gangland henchmen later that day.

It’s at once fresh and familiar, like meeting a long lost friend who really hasn’t changed much. The outtakes are great too. An elephant depositing a deluge of piss onto the studio floor reduces the crew to hilarity, and Morris’s frequent corpsing is a treat.

The only problem with Oxide Ghosts is the ephemerality of its presentation. I’ve seen each episode of Brass Eye tens of times in the last twenty years, and there’s no doubt that it benefits from repeated watching. It is, then, both uniquely exciting and frustrating that I’ll only see this particular hour of material once.

Twenty years later, Oxide Ghosts shows, as if there were any doubt, that Brass Eye was a TV phenomenon. We shall never see its like again. Nor, it seems, will we ever see Oxide Ghosts again. And maybe that’s the point.