Brass Eye

Very possibly my favourite comedy show ever shown along with 'The Day Today' which you may know is also the brainchild of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. Consistently cry with laughter funny, savagely so at times, but the laughs are never cheap and where it does deal with cruder matter Chris Morris brings so many clever and surreal twists and chooses his targets so accurately that this is where the comedy lies rather than in the crudeness or lewdity of the subject matter. It may be 11 years old now (with the exception of the 'special' episode which dates from 2001) but the behaviour of Brass Eye's intended targets (News media and celebrity culture) remains very much the same. Brass Eye works - and brilliantly on different levels: It lampoons the very nature of the sorts of news and factual programming that we watch every day, from Chris Morris' excellent portrayal of a highly Paxman-esque anchor man, smug in his own intellectual superiority to the OTT bombast of the theme tune,… more »

Very possibly my favourite comedy show ever shown along with 'The Day Today' which you may know is also the brainchild of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. Consistently cry with laughter funny, savagely so at times, but the laughs are never cheap and where it does deal with cruder matter Chris Morris brings so many clever and surreal twists and chooses his targets so accurately that this is where the comedy lies rather than in the crudeness or lewdity of the subject matter. It may be 11 years old now (with the exception of the 'special' episode which dates from 2001) but the behaviour of Brass Eye's intended targets (News media and celebrity culture) remains very much the same. Brass Eye works - and brilliantly on different levels: It lampoons the very nature of the sorts of news and factual programming that we watch every day, from Chris Morris' excellent portrayal of a highly Paxman-esque anchor man, smug in his own intellectual superiority to the OTT bombast of the theme tune, credits and ludicrous graphs and animations which were apparently so good their creators were then hired to perform the same function on Channel 4 news). It also serves to illustrate with uncomfortable clarity, just how easily celebrities can be persuaded to utter the most ludicrous toss if at the end result they believe they will have increased their exposure and painted themselves in a good light, regardless of whether they have a shred of knowledge regarding the topic. There are so many instances of this throughout the series it's hard to pick one that stands out. Personal favourites include Richard Blackwood's insistence that he 'feels more suggestible' having smelled a computer keyboard and that it smells like 'hammers', Tanya Bryant expounding the virtues of 'Vertical Farms' - albeit with a rather puzzled expression, Stephen Berkoff's dramatic recreation of the effects of 'heavy electricity' utilising a mallet and some plastic models and who can forget Bernard Manning warning us all from using 'the latest killer drug from prague...cake' by informing us of a young girl who 'cried all the water out of her body' having taken some.
Add to this Chris Morris's fantastic use of the English language: '...O' once happy bauble, twisting on the bliss twig of ignorami...', '...the twisted brain wrong of a one off man-mental...', '...a roboplegic wrong-cock...', his use of actors as opposed to gurning comedians to portray the various characters and the way he can pick apart popular - though unspoken sentiment (Good Aids - Bad Aids, firing paedophiles out of cannons) and show it to us in it's ugly and truthful state while still giving it comedic value and you've got something which for me, stands up as one the all time classic and definitive moments in television. Honestly, everyone should see this and take it as a reminder to take what we are presented with as fact with a large pinch of salt and to look at the culture we live in with a different and more critical eye.