But Brass Eye is a satire of modern media, at its simplest:

a) how media report events
b) how we respond to that reporting

While it is meant and often assumed to be the transference of truth, it is clearly not. Brass Eye plays with that.

It's funny and it's a satire. Can't it be both?

No 'Satire' is a bollocks word! I hate it. Ugh.

Im a critic critic

So what you're saying is we shouldn't talk about it, we should just watch it?

I say lead by example.

i think what he's saying is
"i can make an argument out of thin air, just by saying something stupid".

We should talk about it.
We should enjoy its madness. That Morris interviews celebs and makes out how stupid they are.

He is a 'gun' who 'shoots' the kind of people who really deserve to be shot.
But i am saying, all the stuff C4 say it is, prob wasnt in Chri's mind when he thought up a lot of the material.

I can't beleive some people thought its serious. It might address the issues, but it rips the hell out of them, and rips the hell out of celebs.

Oh yes.

>But i am saying, all the stuff C4 say it is, prob wasnt in Chri's mind when he thought up a lot of the material.

i agree, but this is true of all good art or entertainment. if you asked da vinci about the mona lisa he would probably say he just painted it for the money.

"I just take what da Vinci does and extend it" - little-known Italian street portrait artist Ianus Leus

>"I just take what da Vinci does and extend it" - little-known Italian street portrait artist Ianus Leus
>
>
Well, that was worth staying up for.

>Well, that was worth staying up for.

Well fuck off to bed, then.

Some of the earliest satire that survives is Juvenal, written around 100AD. This raises the uncomfortable notions of the time (mainly Greeks being smelly and Turks being criminals) and places them in epic metre.

There is also hyperbole-a-go-go.

I remember studying a pamphlet by Jonathon Swift encouraging people to eat their own children, which would have been as shocking then as Morris is now.

It's just that the media put on their collective hysteria hat and go a little crazy nowadays. Which accounts for Morris' notoreity, as opposed to others' fame.

Anyway, satire done well is anti-Plebeian.

>I remember studying a pamphlet by Jonathon
>Swift encouraging people to eat their own
>children, which would have been as shocking
>then as Morris is now.

IIRC, it was significantly more shocking. Or was that Defoe?

Either way, it only highlights the point. I'm sure it was Swift. Unless they both did one.

"A Modest Proposal" was Swift and no-one else.
http://www.sincity.com/penn-n-teller/pcc/a-modest-proposal.html

>"A Modest Proposal" was Swift and no-one else.

Defoe just took what Swift did, etc.

A nice description of Morris' technique turned up on here a while back. I think I've quoted it since, but it wasn't mine originally.

In a variation on Wilmut's theory of the "bucket sketch" - where you take a format, empty the content, and refill it with nonsense; Upper Class Twit Of The Year for example - Morris-style humour could be described as a "sausage machine".

Imagine a big machine that automatically turns facts into news. This is the repeated theme of Michael Alexander St John's On The Hour / Day Today stings.

This process may be one you have learned at journalism school or on BBC training courses (like Morris), but the machine will just do it automatically.

Now, instead of feeding facts in, feed in gibberish. Out the other end of the news machine will pop a sketch that looks and feels like current affairs, but is merely polished nonsense.

This is very funny, and will delight your inner naughty schoolboy ("I can make rubbish look like news! Let's switch it to making documentaries! I want a go!"). That's the look you see on Ianucci's face all the way through The Armistice, and in that tiny grin Morris does in Brass Eye before the Irish report.

This process, by an interesting side effect, is also satirical. It points out the way that newsgatherers can create the illusion of hard fact from the flimsiest of starting points, by coating nonsense in a credible sheen. This is what the journalists see when they review Morris, without realising that it isn't the reason he does it, just a lucky accident of the process. He does it because it's silly and he can.

Brass Eye, like most satire before, is an attack on preconceptions of the public and reaction of the media. I'm not sure this fits the element described above.

It's placed within the apparent confines of a current affairs show for a number of reasons; because he's done it before, as it were, because it works, and because he can do his Paxman impression. The 'spoof' element is merely for extra laughs.

And what Butler says above.

TDT is different. Few sections fit the above. Kim Wilde is one.

I think TDT is very much in this mode. Think of the Rosie May, Valerie Sinatra, Collaterlie Sisters stuff, all of which is gibberish given a news coating, pure and simple.

The delight of Brass Eye was the discovery that unwitting celebrity stooges could be tricked into operating the news machine for him. They could spout his nonsense (or nonce sense, if you prefer) and give it the sheen of credibilty.

This has diminishing returns, however, once the public become aware that celebrities will say anything you ask them (so the satire is a victim of its own success once the point has been made). The only remaining challenge is to make them say more and more outrageous things. This must be the motivation behind the Brass eye Special, to force a bunch of celebs to go so far against public feeling that they're making fun of society's last taboo.

We'll see whether it's funny or not, but it's the only reason I can see that he'd return to the format of twatbaiting: to see how far he can make people turn the handle on his news spoofing machine. "Schoolboy glee" again, not satire, the driving force behind almost everything he does.

I meant 'the above' as in the above text, not the prior message. Although it wasn't clear.

I don't entirely agree. Sisters and Sinatra would certainly not work in any context other than that in TDT. Obviously, there are elements of 'schoolboy glee' (nice turn of phrase, BTW). It's not satire, certainly, but it isn't just a case of the sausage machine. May is, however.

Maybe it's the case that Morris became bolder and chose real targets as opposed to nonsense.