Brass Eye
Brass Eye (1997, 2001) is a Channel 4 satirical spoof documentary show, parodying current affairs documentaries and the media sensationalism and moral panics surrounding certain social issues. The series was created by Chris Morris and written by Morris, David Quantick, Peter Baynham, Jane Bussmann, Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan.
Series I
[edit]Animals
[edit]- Fox Hunter: The fox feels nothing. It's made of... string.
- Chris Morris: Institutionalised cruelty is one thing, but the twisted brain-wrong of a one-off man-mental is quite another. Ted Maul disturbs.
- Chris Morris: (voiceover) The evil of our relationship remains a paradox. If you plot "Number of animals abused" against "What makes people cruel" versus "Intelligence of either party", the pattern is so unreadable that you might as well draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks. And if you do that, an interesting thing happens: the word "cruel" starts flashing.
Drugs
[edit]- Chris Morris: The effects of a heroin overdose are lethal. Yes, in the short term, but there's been absolutely no research into the long-term effects.
- Chris Morris: If time's a drug, then Big Ben is a huge needle injecting it into the sky!
- Chris Morris: Luckily, the amount of heroin I use is harmless. I inject about once a month on a purely recreational basis. Fine. But what about other people less stable, less educated, less middle-class than me? Builders or blacks for example. If you're one of those, my advice to you is leave well alone. Good luck.
- Chris Morris: People say that alcohol's a drug. It's not a drug, it's a drink!
- Noel Edmonds: What is cake? Well, it has an active ingredient which is a dangerous psychoactive compound known as "dimesmeric andersonphospate". It stimulates the part of the brain called "Shatner's bassoon", and that's the bit of the brain that deals with time perception. So a second feels like a month. Well, it almost sounds like fun, unless you're the Prague schoolboy who walked out into the street, straight in front of a tram. He thought he'd got a month to cross the street...
Science
[edit]- Ted Maul: Loser Street. Look at all the feckless dregs.
Sex
[edit]- Chris Morris: If this were really happening, what would you think?
- Sir Hugh Maharggs: Homosexuals can't swim, they attract enemy radar, they attract sharks, they insist on being placed at "the captain's table", they get up late, they nudge people whilst they're shooting. They muck about. Imagine... the fear... of knowing you have a gay man on board a boat, when you retire at night you think to yourself "God... will I wake up and find everybody dead?" You can't run a ship like that.
Crime
[edit]- Ted Maul: For the cops it's a jungle, where dangerous animals speak Swearhili.
- Ted Maul: And last year, the mayor gave them a goldmine. It actually worked for a bit, this, until someone clogged it up with sick!
Decline
[edit]- Moss Staples: The most likely explanation is that people are just seeing some blue light bouncing off a strut. But try telling that to these bog-brained murphies. You'd have more chance of getting a blowjob from the pope.
- Christopher Morris: Your phone calls tonight have been described variously as "rabid", "pig-ignorant" and "stultifyingly ill-informed". Thanks... for those.
Paedophilia
[edit]- Ted Maul: Yes, and I don't know if you can sense the air of aggression here, but ten minutes ago, we threw this crowd a dummy full of guts. It lasted just eight seconds. This is very much a protest that's swallowed a bomb and given the detonator to a monkey.
- Andy McNab (ex SAS): Let's just get one thing straight: the British Army has never launched an offensive against a six-year-old child.
- Dr. Fox: Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact: there's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
- Chris Morris: You are a paedophile, you are a nonce, you're a perv, you're a slot badger, you're a two pin DIN plug, you're a bush dodger, you're a small bean regarder, you're a unabummer, you're a nut administrator, you're a bent ref, you're The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, you're a fence vole, you're a free willy, you're a chimney bottler, you're a bunty man, you're a shrub rocketeer...
- "Peter": Yes, well, those are just some of the names we have to put up with every day, and it's really just another form of racism.
- Announcer: The Pedo-Files! Starts next week on 4, straight after Paedophile Island: a hundred kids and an ex-offender, on an island full of cameras! What's going to happen?
- Ted Maul: Yes, a vigilante has just tried to fire himself over the prison walls using a giant catapult. Minutes earlier, a test projectile, believed to be a side of beef, cleared the parapets by a full twenty feet. But when the man himself was fired, his trajectory was all out of goose. He thumped into the wall, you could hear his bones breaking on impact. Medics say he may live, but only with his neck as an internal organ.
- Chris Morris: A Peter File was attacked in his car this evening, but I have to say, if your surname was File, would you call your son Peter?
- Swanchita Haze: No!
