What happens when you satirize hysteria?
Chris Morris, creator of the "Brass Eye" TV show, ran an episode mocking his country's response to pedophilia. Within hours he was the most hated man in Britain.
By Ian O'Doherty
Aug. 20, 2001 | Sick. Depraved. Indescribably evil. Vile. These words have been used a lot in Britain recently.
Following the July 26 broadcast of "Brass Eye," a satirical television program poking fun at the hysterical and sensational way the media deals with pedophilia, politicians, the public and, of course, itself, the media have been queuing up to condemn the program and "Brass Eye" creator Chris Morris.
It was always going to be a controversial program, but nobody, except perhaps Morris himself, could have predicted the deluge of recrimination, condemnation and spluttering indignation that greeted the latest installment of his scabrously funny satire.
Airing on Channel 4, Britain's most progressive and risqué terrestrial channel, "Brass Eye" has developed a reputation over the last few years as the most dangerous show on television.
Morris, a master of disguise and an expert exploiter of hubris, has made a career out of making the great and the good look stupid and vain. But his latest pastiche of an investigative news magazine program dealing with child abuse has made even some of his staunchest supporters feel uncomfortable.
Introducing the offending program with the words "Welcome to Pedogeddon," Morris and his team of writers gleefully filleted every media cliché, mob reaction and hysterical misconception about pedophilia that has stalked Britain and Ireland for the last 18 months.
In that time, a moral panic of gargantuan proportions has swept the land. Last summer in the English coastal town of Portsmouth, egged on by English tabloids running a "name and shame" campaign, mobs of vigilantes roamed the streets like medieval peasants. But instead of pitchforks they carried knuckle dusters and baseball bats, and rather than hunchbacks they were seeking "kiddie fiddlers," who existed only in the minds of the mob.
Dozens of people were wrongly accused, and one man, a pediatrician, had to leave the area after some of the protesters were confused by the term and torched his house. The pediatrician managed to keep his name out of the press, for fear that more crime might follow him. Another pediatrician, 30-year-old Yvette Cloete, had to leave her home in Gwent, South Wales after it was vandalized: Cloete arrived home from work to see the word "paedo" daubed all over her walls. Police say "the astonishing ignorance" of local anti-pedophile protestors forced her out.
Morris, the most determined iconoclast in Britain today, quickly pounced on the hysteria. His show was initially pulled from the schedules after lawyers at Channel 4 received word that musician Phil Collins was threatening to sue. The former Genesis drummer had been roped in to the "Pedogeddon" episode to present an obviously fake public information film.
Called "Nonce Sense" ("nonce" being an English slang term for child abusers), Collins eagerly spouted a barrage of drivel, oblivious to the fact that he was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming himself a "nonce."
Other celebrities were duped as well. One popular London DJ, reading from a cue, described with a straight face how pedophiles were found to have genetic material more in common with crabs than humans. An MTV jock warned children how pedophiles can cause toxic vapors to emerge from the keyboard of a child, making them more susceptible to the "perverts advances," while another celebrity described how new Internet technology allowed pedophiles to send penis-shaped sound waves down the computer to vulnerable children.
It was all obviously hokum, and the kind of leg-pulling that Morris excels at. After all, he was sacked from his first job as a radio announcer after he interrupted a live show to say that the Queen Mother was dead -- she wasn't, but his future at the radio station soon was.
Indeed, the studious-looking young man with the impressively middle-class accent had just been warming up back then. Some of his early radio antics included spontaneous and usually obscene running commentaries over somebody else's live news report, filling the studio with helium just before the newscaster began his broadcast and on one infamous occasion, while working with Great London Radio, he spliced a tape of the British queen in which she appeared to be giving a tour of Buckingham Palace saying, "and this is the room in which my father used to service men."
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