Sober light of day thoughts:

I think the crux of the problem was the studio-based setting. In doing a kind of live telethon format thing, Morris was immediately establishing parameters within which to gauge the effectiveness of what he was doing. The "classic" Brass Eyes had a format which existed inside a kind of vacuum. Whenever Morris was on camera in his presenter persona, he'd be on some kind of custom set or in front of banks of monitors, and the structure of the programme was made up by a kind of montage of association. THIS is what made Brass Eye good, and what defined it as a development from OTH and TDT. Although its predecessors still stand alone as classic comedy in their own right, the format had matured. In this respect, the BES was a retrograde step. Its closest siblings in the Morris family are probably "Crash at Big Street Station" and the "WAR" episode of TDT, fun sketches in their own right, and good enough for Morris to perhaps consider the ground covered. Anyhow, by establishing this framework from the outset, we were forced to evaluate the BES not in the context of other Brass Eyes, but in the context of *every Ghostwatch-style telethon spoof ever made*. And it performed adequately, but it is not a step forward in Morris's development as a satirist, comedian and artist.

It seems to me that the peak of Morris's career thus far is the end of the first series of Blue Jam. He moved from the cleverly staged mayhem and embryonic celebrity-hoaxing of R1, to OTH and its natural progression TDT, reaching the logical conclusion of his "current affairs spoof" cycle in Brass Eye, and then returning to radio in a show which broke new ground for the medium: Blue Jam. The second and third series of Blue Jam became bitter and unpleasant, and the Channel 4 Jam seemed a mysteriously redundant exercise. Why not write new material? Why ruin jokes which were expressly designed to be funny *only on the radio* by televising them. What poinyt could he have been trying to make? And now, Morris continues his journey into the past by not only attempting to revisit the spirit of a pre-Blue Jam project, but presenting it using a format previously explored in 1994.

We've been wondering where Morris could go after Blue Jam, and it looks like we need wonder no longer.

oops, posted in the wrong thread

how ironic!