todays observer? is it an interview? is there a web link?

yes, no, and apparently not.

quite a good piece on morris,says he thought he didnt go far enough.
as for from hell.well,the accents are awful.depp is playing a combination of two characters from the moore/campbell comic.
eddie campbell has said in interviews that hes not too bothered about what hollywood will do because both him & alan moore know it will be done badly.
should be good for a laugh though.

>quite a good piece on morris,says he thought he didnt go far enough.

can someone post this article PLEASE!

Your best bet is to ignore the film completely and put the money you would have spent towards any (or all) of the compilations of the titles which Moore has been churning out recently. Promethea, Top 10, Tom Strong, the fantastic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tomorrow Stories (which hasn't been compiled) - it's all good. It's always rewarding to watch ridiculously erudite people entertaining themselves.

From Hell (the film) looks unintentionally funny compared to the book. Life in the London 'hood, anyone? What made Moore go back to (albeit skewed) superhero stuff? I thought he was done with that. Shame he never go to finsh Big Numbers, though.

For the Morris story, go to www.guardianunlimited.co.uk, click on The Observer link, and the Why Chris Morris Had To Make Brass Eye story should be on the main list.

"... the intention was to make us think not about the media, but our own laughably confused attitude to children... A golden, innocent, fenced-off part of society full of tow-headed little angels - until the minute they pass 16, when the fence crashes down and they want us to tear their clothes off and roger them senseless."

Isn't this exactly what I was saying the other day? The program was about the consent issue and how all sides of the argument are happier to dodge the real debate and talk about anything else (mental illness, censorship, etc.) And nobody even commented on what I said!

I was right, the rest of you were all arguing about the wrong things, and you must now bow to my cleverness and call me Fonzy, because I am the King of the Forum.

When I was forced to abdicate, I appointed Unruly Butler to be my successor as King Of The Forum.

Ask him if he'll let you be Home Secretary Of The Forum.

His attitude as it comes ver in that article seems very similar to Bill Hicks' in many ways. - he's the new him

"... the intention was to make us think not about the media, but our own laughably confused attitude to children... A golden, innocent, fenced-off part of society full of tow-headed little angels - until the minute they pass 16, when the fence crashes down and they want us to tear their clothes off and roger them senseless."

Then it was still a total bloody mess, because that issue was not handled clearly at all.

>Then it was still a total bloody mess, because that issue was not handled clearly at all.

#"But maybe the day after that..."#

i get the feeling he realised the programme didn't come near to saying half of what he wanted, so he's done a Lady Di/Andrew Morton type thing. Might he have been better using the opportunity to go on Newsnight or somewhere to make his points?


_________________________

Why Chris Morris had to make Brass Eye

The man who set Britain talking with a 30-minute TV satire is already moving on to his next target

Euan Ferguson
Sunday August 5, 2001
The Observer

Chris Morris feels the programme didn't go far enough. Which is grand news for the Daily Mail. Good news for all of us, in fact, who make a living from swift opinionating. Morris's Brass Eye programme spoofing the demonisation of paedophiles, broadcast by Channel 4 on 26 July and repeated the next night despite a record number of complaints, provided Middle England and its liberal enemies with a handy midsummer bandwagon, and on it we all leapt with abandon.

The Mail went loco, calling it The Sickest TV Show Ever. The red-tops followed, as 'outrage' mounted. Back bit the Guardian , pointing out that a satire on the media's treatment of paedophilia did not mean Morris was condoning paedophilia: the Times and Telegraph similarly attacked the rubber logic of the Mail , praised the power of satire and warned of the dangers of censorship.

Then it got sillier. Government Ministers condemned the programme, only to admit they hadn't watched it. The papers which were frothing most exuberantly began quietly shooting themselves in the feet. One Mail splurge on the programme (headed 'Unspeakably sick', the words of one of the Ministers who hadn't watched it) was preceded by close-ups of Princesses Beatrice (13) and Eugenie (11) in their bikinis; in the Star , beside a shock-horror-sicko Morris story, sat a picture of singer Charlotte Church in a tight top ('She's a big girl now ... chest swell!'). Church is 15.

He's gone too far, even for him, said some Morris-watchers. He'll have to back off. He must be delighted, said others: the lunacies of the reaction must reinforce every point he hoped to make. Morris himself remains, officially, silent, but both sides were quite wrong.

He won't back off, far from it. This is the man who, in the week of Diana's death, was fervently wishing he was still at the helm of a radio programme in order to make the jokes that weren't (then) being made, so worried was he by the wave of censure against anyone who wanted to challenge pious media orthodoxy.

Not repentant, then; and not ecstatic either. 'If I was happy at the result I'd need to have had my brains sucked out through a straw,' he told a colleague last week. 'Because the only conclusion is such a depressing one - that the standard of public debate is so lamentably low; what's good or satisfying about that?'

He was mildly depressed, too, at the predictability of reactions; for the debate often nosed towards a simple argument over censorship, or a discussion about the media. It wasn't intended as a satire on the media. Well, in part, of course, for every Brass Eye spoofs the media, - but it had two other main intentions. Firstly, to make people laugh. Morris is an anti-polemicist: if he sets out to make a Big Point, he has insisted, then tries to make it funny, it won't work; the recipe must be reversed.

Secondly, the intention was to make us think not about the media, but our own laughably confused attitude to children.
The idea had been fermenting for years. Morris was becoming increasingly frustrated at the way children, and the idea of childhood, had become deified. Inviolate. A golden, innocent, fenced-off part of society full of tow-headed little angels - until the minute they pass 16, when the fence crashes down and they want us to tear their clothes off and roger them senseless.

He had been worried for years, as his friends preceded him in having children, by the fact that this apparently conferred on them a divine right to make endless pronouncements unfettered by such restrictive critical considerations as logic, fact or honesty. After he had his own two children - he has insisted they're 'nothing like these mythical angels, they're great but they're bloody complicated human beings' - he was worried by his own confused thought processes, the heightened senses of love and worry and genuine fear that every parent feels.

Morris was coldly angered at the deliberate stoking by the media of a culture of fear: as if a parent didn't have enough to worry about without being told at at every turn, to the strains of mawkish melodrama, 'This could be your child - your child could be next .' These illogical, visceral fears brought with parenthood, incidentally, are what Morris blames for a couple of back-backlash pieces in the Guardian condemning the programme as degrading to children; he was as perturbed by these pieces as anything in the Mail , but then remembered his visit earlier this year to the Balham march - so-called Posh Paulsgrove - and the discovery that liberals' arguments, when shorn of their caring finery, often conceal exactly the

Far better than the laughable Mail on Sunday piece yesterday about how BES left Doon close to tears as a mother...except it's all very obviously a cuttings job and a clumsy one at that.

>Far better than the laughable Mail on Sunday piece yesterday about how BES left Doon close to tears as a mother...except it's all very obviously a cuttings job and a clumsy one at that.

can someone upload this please. ocr it or type it or show me a web link. thanks.

Silence! Fonzy is about to speak!

Jon is correct to say that this still leaves the special looking messy. That bit in the above article about them painstakingly trying material, "testing" it (on rabbits?) and making subtle adjustments to scientifically increase the funnyness - eh? About half the programme looks like they filmed the first things they thought of (note: not ALL of it, Fonzy does appreciate quite a lot of the BES.)

But the main point stands (in two parts) (1) if you think you've caught Mr Chris out each time you spot something that doesn't satirise-the-meda's-portrail-etc, then Fonzy thinks you are a very stupid idiotic person. He just likes making sick jokes, first and foremost, and only partly because they sometimes highlight something that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. Mainly because they make him laugh. And (2) much of the hurrumphing on all sides is a knee-jerk reaction to the uncomfortable feelings associated with confronting the reasons why a child might deliberately seek out a newsgroup called "alt.sex.children" in the first place, and the absurd notion that something magical happened to (for example) RHC on her 16th birthday and suddenly all you filthy sods are allowed to jump on her!

Signed, Fonzy.