On the 8th of August 1999 - 25 years ago to this day - I was bored. It was a Sunday, Sundays are always boring, it's the law.
I'd been dabbling with little websites for a few years by this point, and I think almost on a whim I decided to start one dedicated to Chris Morris and Peter Cook. Within a couple of hours, I'd knocked up a truly gaudy and eye-watering concoction - a bright blue background with big red boxes the text sat on. Javascript was used to make a trail of stars follow along behind your mouse pointer as it moved across the screen. The whole thing was an absolute eyesore. I loved it.
To be honest, I didn't take the whole thing seriously at all, I stuck it on Geocities because I was already using up tons of bandwidth on my ISP account.
The reason I first started making these websites was that I get incredibly enthusiastic about art that I love, and I desperately want to share it so that others can hopefully experience the same joy. Towards the end of the 90's, I realised that websites were going to become the new mixtapes. Instead of pissing about with two cassette decks for ages - usually just for the benefit of one person - you could just fire clips online for people all over the world to check out, amazing!
Around this time, video compression was starting to get a lot better, and I was able to download or stream 35mb episodes of South Park almost as soon as they were released. It's hard to describe how revolutionary this actually was in the late 90's, given how accustomed we are to streaming and downloading these days, but it was an absolute gamechanger. Comedy was already getting archived and posted about by collectors (often through good old snail mail), but video codecs like RealVideo and DivX meant that filesizes massively decreased with almost no real loss in quality.
At the time, it was commonly accepted (wrongly, as it goes) that Brass Eye would never be able to get a commercial release, and so I resolved to use this new technology to get it encoded and spread online for people. The early days of this site involved a constant rooting out of Chris Morris material, I had so much energy back then, it's insane to think back and remember just how much actually got done. I'm sorry I wasn't able to keep the pace up - I still have tapes I need to encode and/or return to people! - but I'm immensely glad that we all managed to surface and rescue so much of this rare and precious material at the time, and I'm thrilled that it's kept circulating
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