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That bit from Brass Eye Religion where CM goes into a church

Started by Captain Z, September 02, 2016, 03:32:00 PM

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Captain Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=332q9x_0WAA

I am always intrigued by this bit. The reaction of the priest seems too well acted and the second camera angle would suggest it was all set up, but the reaction of the congregation always looks to be such genuine confusion and surprise I can't help but wonder, given his previous record, if Chris Morris actually burst in on a proper church service for this clip?

Has anyone ever heard any more details about it?


BlodwynPig

no, it was a sketch and they used a mosque amended to look like a church

That priest that is 'too well acted' is David Cann you nana.

neveragain

It was going to be the opening to an episode based around Religion, wasn't it? But they got cold feet (or couldn't get enough material) which is why we end up with Decline as that episode's title and Crime being a bit short; certain sketches from Crime were shoved into Decline, as well as the Jam Factory sketch which is a deleted scene from Drugs.

That's my stuff that I think I know.

Raymond

Everything about Martin Brunt's delivery and body language in this report reminds me of Morris in that clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmn1NK8IS6Y

Depressed Beyond Tables

Might be worth listing the 'real' bits in Brass Eye apart from the obvious celeb interviews.

Drugs: Morris on the street trying to buy from various dealers.
Paedogeddon: Interview in the park with nonce.

There must be others.

neveragain

There was a rumour some of the audience in Sex thought it was a real chat show. Not terribly believable but I hope it's true.

Shoulders?-Stomach!


Shit Good Nose

If memory serves, most (perhaps all) of the churchgoers were not "in" on it and believed that it was a genuine service.

Which makes me hope that David Cann did at least a few minutes of sermoning before CM blew in.

thenoise

Quote from: Depressed Beyond Tables on September 04, 2016, 01:40:10 AM
Might be worth listing the 'real' bits in Brass Eye apart from the obvious celeb interviews.

Drugs: Morris on the street trying to buy from various dealers.
Paedogeddon: Interview in the park with nonce.

There must be others.

Simon Pegg genuinely doesn't fancy Chris Morris' son.

Hangthebuggers

Reasonably I'd guess Morris set it all up and then hired an audience to 'sit in and listen', so that's why you get the shocked reaction. But no way he'd get away with shoving a priest.


Noddy Tomkey

Quote from: monolith on September 08, 2016, 09:03:32 PM
Are you fucking serious?

If the nonce is an actor, he's the best there is and I'll eat my dvd

Edit: unless you're being sarcastic - then you can eat the dvd

monolith

I never even considered it was real, just all seemed so mad.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: monolith on September 08, 2016, 10:25:36 PM
I never even considered it was real, just all seemed so mad.

Me too, but it's been done to death here in years past (and confirmed, I think, in Lucien Randall's biography) and it turns out he was indeed a genuine paedophile.

monolith

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on September 09, 2016, 10:06:34 AM
Me too, but it's been done to death here in years past (and confirmed, I think, in Lucien Randall's biography) and it turns out he was indeed a genuine paedophile.
Haha fuck, I confess you had me going for a while, I actually had to go back and watch it again to confirm and it's clearly not, I think it's Mark Heap in fact. Well done on getting me to check though.

Edit: Err, okay it's not Mark Heap, just watched the last bit over the credits and I'm not sure again now!

Edit 2: Ok it's not. I feel silly.

greenman

Quote from: monolith on September 08, 2016, 10:25:36 PM
I never even considered it was real, just all seemed so mad.

Honestly it would seem rather needlessly assholish if it were, nobody involved was really "asking for it" and really I'm not sure it being a real service would make it any funnier.

Ambient Sheep

Although the paedophile's genuineness was informally confirmed on here years ago (I can't remember how, or by whom), the Randall book makes it explicitly clear.

For the avoidance of any further doubt, just google "disgusting bliss" paedophile interview and click the first Amazon hit (the third result, on my screen).  And you get:



So there you go.  My case is rested.


Although somebody should tell Lucien and his editor that DIN is capitalised.

(And as someone who wrestled far too much with DIN plugs and a soldering iron in my youth, I also have to say that that's one of my most favourite Morris-isms ever -- whoever wrote that gag really groks 1970s connectors. :-) )


monolith

It was the racism line that indeed had me thinking it was scripted. What a thoroughly strange (and with hindsight disturbing) bit of television.

Ambient Sheep

Agreed.  As I said up there, I was originally in the "actor" camp (well, more accurately the "probably an actor but just might have been the real thing" camp), and was surprised myself to find out he was real, for much the same reasons as yourself.

Quincey

What was the intention behind having an actual paedophile on there? the fact he was accompanied by someone who used to abuse him since he was six is even more disturbing. It probably reinforced his desires to be able to say to someone "it's just another form of racism."

I find it a bit disturbing that Morris did that, just like the bit about Sidney Cooke blasted into space seemed to overstep the mark a bit.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: Quincey on September 13, 2016, 01:32:46 PMWhat was the intention behind having an actual paedophile on there?

I've been wondering the same thing myself since this came back up again.  Maybe so that if challenged he could say "we ripped the piss out of a real paedo with a spoof interview too, yannow, so it's not just the do-gooders we attacked"?


Quote from: Quincey on September 13, 2016, 01:32:46 PM...the fact he was accompanied by someone who used to abuse him since he was six is even more disturbing.

You're making an assumption there that's not warranted from the wording.  There's a far more disturbing possibility: that the other guy was the younger party; the latter's off-camera comment would make far more sense if this were the case.

There's even a (small) possibility that they were the same age, and had both been prematurely sexualised, however I suspect my previous paragraph is probably nearer the truth *pulls "yeuch" face*.


Quote from: Quincey on September 13, 2016, 01:32:46 PMI find it a bit disturbing that Morris did that, just like the bit about Sidney Cooke blasted into space seemed to overstep the mark a bit.

Yeah, quite a few people didn't like the Sidney Cooke bit - I remember one long-term senior member here being absolutely appalled by it.  Myself I did think it was a bit of a lapse of judgement to use a real-life paedo in that joke, they should have just made the space-voyaging-nonce a generic one.  I think using S.C. was particularly unpleasant because he wasn't yer average kiddy-fondler, he also tortured and murdered his victims, so the idea of a kid being locked up in a space capsule with him was really really not very nice.

The same person also pointed out something that I hadn't realised, about the segment with a victim only speaking through her sister/friend(?) dressed as a troll with blue hair.  This simply baffled me at the time as it just seemed to be a bit of LOLRANDOM whimsy, I couldn't work out what the point of it was.  Turns out that apparently it was a shot-for-shot pisstake of a Dispatches interview with one of S.C.'s victims who survived -- a mentally handicapped man whose sister was holding his hand as he talked.  As the original poster said: "Very strange choice for 'parody' if you ask me" and I can only agree.  Apparently much of the B.E.S. was parodying the same programme, e.g. the bit about Jez North's caravan, but if, like me, you hadn't seen it, this just sailed over your head.


Myself I felt that a few other bits missed their target, for example there was a brilliant point to be made about the idiocy of campaigners calling for "a return to Victorian values"[nb]For our younger readers, that was quite the buzzphrase at the time amongst the blue-rinsed Tory types and indeed others too.[/nb], when Victorian London had a huge young-teenage-girl prostitution problem, aided by the fact that for most of Victoria's reign, the age of consent was still 12, as originally set in the year 1275.  Indeed, it was due to the huge problem of rich toffs boffing young teens that the age of consent was put up to 13 in 1875, and then to the present-day 16 in 1885.

So how did the B.E.S. treat this?  By a very brief shot of Morris(?) in a top hat screwing some young lass in Victorian frillies, with no explanation or context beyond the mention of "Victorian values".  So if you already went into the show knowing the above facts, then it might provoke a wry smile of acknowledgement; and if you went into it ignorant of the above, then it would just seem to be an unfunny gratuitously explicit lie about Victorian behaviour.  It explained nothing and enlightened nobody.

All it would have taken was one line, either narrated or spoken by one of the characters, that mentioned the low age of consent in Victorian Britain, and point made beautifully (and hopefully if the line was a good one, amusingly too).  But instead it just totally failed to make its point at all, let alone coherently.


So much of the BES seemed to be like this: an incoherent badly-thought-through mess that, although it had some good bits, never quite hung together as a completed piece (rumours of rushed last-minute re-edits seem all too plausible, given the on-screen result), and to some degree never quite seemed to work out exactly what it was attacking and why.[nb]However, I did think that the much-maligned song at the end was one of the better bits, although again the lyrics could perhaps have been a little more pointed in pointing out the tabloid hypocrisy of 15yrs 364days being paedophilia and 16yrs being "Wheyyyyy, get in there lads!".[/nb]  Anyway, this has all been said before and is really now quite off-topic, although if anybody actually wants to start a new "Was the B.E.S. any good?" thread -- especially given that all the original ones are now lost to bit-decay -- then maybe its 15th anniversary is as good a time as any...

...although perhaps 16th or 18th would be better.


Noddy Tomkey

Quote from: monolith on September 12, 2016, 04:50:27 PM
Ok it's not. I feel silly.

Don't, it took a few years even for me to realise it - and I'm me! After seeing the scene so many times I noticed that he seems genuinely hurt at those ridiculous names. Slop badger?! And the weird filming set-up

Ambient Sheep thanks for the back-story info, sounds like a show in itself. I'll have to check out the book

The Masked Unit

I've been thinking about the special a bit lately. Was the whole thing very ill-conceived do you think? I'm starting to think so.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

#24
I think it's unfair to criticise a show for not knowing what it's attacking when it's far more likely based on any reasonable judgement that it's a misinterpretation, misunderstanding on your part and/or projection of what you feel it ought to have been doing.

It's like SOTCAA's inability to judge I'm Alan Partridge on its own merits because they had become obsessed with it apparently being a fly on the wall documentary rather than it simply exercising the medoum for expedience, that being entering into the character's world for the purposes of humour -or Emergency Lalla Ward Ten who could only see Darkplace as a parody and therefore there had to be a neat stylistic venn with single objects of parody, rather than you know, a nod of the head here and there that created a different yet familiar feeling whole.

As far as I see it, BES sets out to create internal chaos in the mind of the audience and the duped celebrities, forever pitching concepts and ideas in places that subvert - in various ways, established norms. While certainly it was partly shining a light on the unsubtle, and ironically infantile manner the media treated the issue, there is also a clear desire to create a sense of chaos, a runaway mine train feeling, gathering pace and with it risk and danger.

Far from it being a 'mess' (the sort of philistine comment the art world levelled at impressionists), the piece of art created is in my opinion an attempt to reflect the internal chaos, confusion anger and burnt synapses that the topic so frequently generates. Everything presented to us by the programme supports this assertion, meaning Morris was not satisfied simply with the focus being on the media. This is interesting because it demonstrates a broader ambition that only periodically reared its head in the original series.

Not that Morris had any obligation at all to ensure the audience understood it.

None of this means you have to personally like it but it does make a strong case for it being one of the most interesting and challenging pieces of art ever committed to television. From a Brass Eye perspective it was certainly attempting to move the format on structurally as well as stylistically. I think the Sex episode of Brass Eye is slightly more effective, but is essentially a masterpiece. BES is a sort of White Album in the canon.



newbridge

I find it very baffling that there are people on a Chris Morris fan forum who are seemingly offended by Brass Eye.

Pepotamo1985

#26
Quote from: Ambient Sheep on September 13, 2016, 04:36:18 PM
I've been wondering the same thing myself since this came back up again. Maybe so that if challenged he could say "we ripped the piss out of a real paedo with a spoof interview too, yannow, so it's not just the do-gooders we attacked"?

The intro to that book excerpt nails why the skit falls flat for me - the guy just looks like an actor in that getup, and there was nothing in the show to suggest he wasn't[nb]Although I believe Morris alludes to the guy's authenticity in the DVD easter egg[/nb]. Conversely, while his reaction is fairly amazing given it's unscripted, it almost becomes unfunny knowing it's essentially Morris hurling imaginary abuse at an actual paedophile - abuse which will no doubt be cackled at and subsequently regurgitated by point-missing, gurning twats (although it's easy to miss the point in this instance, given it's not satirising how paedophilia is presented in the media, and actually just laughing at a paedophile).

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on September 13, 2016, 04:36:18 PM
The same person also pointed out something that I hadn't realised, about the segment with a victim only speaking through her sister/friend(?) dressed as a troll with blue hair. This simply baffled me at the time as it just seemed to be a bit of LOLRANDOM whimsy, I couldn't work out what the point of it was. Turns out that apparently it was a shot-for-shot pisstake of a Dispatches interview with one of S.C.'s victims who survived -- a mentally handicapped man whose sister was holding his hand as he talked.  As the original poster said: "Very strange choice for 'parody' if you ask me" and I can only agree.

I remember that post very well indeed - or, someone referencing it later. That bit seemed a bit weird to me before I knew the context, and not just because of the 'troll' girl - it seemed like the target was the 'victim' in the clip. When I read that, I was genuinely appalled. The caravan bit again seems to be laughing at the 'victims', although the uber-horrifying presentation does nail the feel of paedophile documentaries of the late 90s - I remember vividly watching some around that time, and their unsettling horror movie-esque sensationalist reconstructions etc. stick in my mind.

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on September 13, 2016, 04:36:18 PM
rumours of rushed last-minute re-edits seem all too plausible, given the on-screen result

Yeah, the episode was definitely cut to buggery before transmission. The structure's all over the place, as is the pacing - some of the sections seem very comprehensively thought out and developed, others a bit thrown together.

On a somewhat related note, I had a friend who worked at TalkBack who tracked down a tape of raw footage from BES in the tape library[nb]I would say claimed to have seen, in the vein of that mate of yours at school who had a SNES 2, but she took pixellated screengrabs on her phone as proof and is a very trustworthy person.[/nb], I think there was two hours of it. I desperately tried to get her to sneak out a copy, but apparently things were very tight and she could've ended up in serious trouble[nb]like legal trouble[/nb] if her role in the leak was proven, so she never did. I wish I could recall what  was meant to be on it specifically, on top of longer cuts of scenes and alternate takes there was never-broadcast-in-any-form material - I remember speaking with Neil about this about 10 years ago, but my PMs only go back to 2010. Given the clips in the BE intro that never made air, and how much we know got cut from Animals etc., I'd imagine there's a vast wealth of unseen material out there. That should be released. Obviously.

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on September 13, 2016, 04:36:18 PM
To some degree never quite seemed to work out exactly what it was attacking and why.

Yeah, it seemed a bit directionless in its fury - just having a go at anyone and anything. There were tons of open goals the programmes missed - either obvious issues that weren't included, or as you say, vague allusions to issues that singularly failed to hit their targets.

Mark Steels Stockbroker

The lasting legacy of modernism: graduates who blather about "internal chaos" and "challenging" work when faced with simple incompetence. The death of critical judgement.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

The lasting legacy: self-appointed superiors who 'neg' people on internet forums by way of debate.

It may be you are mired in years of misanthropy and can't think outside the increasingly narrow confines your critical brain allows you to. That's not my fault.

Incompetence? Competence inherently demands an average or control sample by which such a statement could be compared. There isn't a non-Morris one. It isn't a requirement for the Brass Eye series to not have existed for BES to be considered a great work of art. As a singular work it succeeds - indeed it succeeds in ways it didn't necessarily plan to - as is so frequent in great works.

Incomparable works set new paradigms; all art produces unique reactions. These statements don't excuse failings in the art, they explain failings in the critic.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on October 02, 2016, 04:24:59 PM
The death of critical judgement.

I guess it's easier to make overblown statements like this than to form an argument of your own.