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20 Years of the one thing we DIDN'T want to happen

Started by M-CORP, July 26, 2021, 09:40:34 AM

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M-CORP

The 'Paedogeddon' episode of Brass Eye was broadcast 20 years ago today.

It contained the best made-up name in all of Chris Morris' shows - Gloriora Paymaster.

There is absolutely nothing else to talk about.

Shaky

Watching Brass Eye with my Aussie ladyfriend for the first time, she found the special to be the weakest episode by far. I'm inclined to agree these days. A hell of a lot of it doesn't land, among the handful of excellent lines.

It's the first one I saw, but people older than have also said they found it to be the weakest.

Coming so long after the first series, I wonder if they were keeping the door open to further, sporadic one-off specials.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I think it was always considered to be inferior to the main series, at least on here.

I can imagine to the wider public, it might be seen as Morris' masterpiece, though, just based on the controversy. If they still made the Britain's Top 100 Comedies, type of programme, Stuart Maconie would turn up to say something like, "It was utterly fearless. It marked the moment that Morris truly ascended to the ranks of someone like Peter Cook. If only they could have worked together."

Twenty years old (eyes bulge like Jez North's in the doctored mugshots)!

13 schoolyards

Plenty of other shows* would have gone "pedophile disguised as a school - there's the joke", but only the BES would have combined that with vision of said pedophile actually walking (slowly) around in his school disguise.

On the other hand yeah, the original series was a lot stronger. The whole crisis center approach never quite clicks, even if there are a lot of good lines.

*no other show

willbo

they're ready yet?

I remember James Whale on talkradio talking about watching it - his wife begged him to turn it off, but he calmly said "no, i know its horrible, but I have to see it". His verdict - not only typical channel 4 trash, but simply not funny.

McChesney Duntz

I'll credit for him watching the fucking thing before making up his mind about it, which is more than most of its contemporaneous detractors can say.

As for the show itself, in an odd inversion from the way it usually goes, I find the credulous celebrity pranking to be the strongest part of the program by far. And the maximally minimal graphics.

Noodle Lizard

I think it gets an unfairly bad rap here, and possibly among other comedy fans. It's incredibly funny, and still genuinely packs a punch in terms of shock value - which isn't inherently a bad thing. The first five minutes alone have a higher gag rate than almost anything else I can think of. I'd argue there are worse (and also better) episodes in the main series - I can't think of any particular one to single out, but I remember there being a few segments which really drag and kill the pacing a bit, same with The Day Today, and some bits felt like ideas that were left over from other projects. I can't remember many dead spots in the special, it's consistently high-energy and tonally dead-on, which makes sense given Morris et al. had a couple of years to zero in on just one solid half hour rather than spread it thin across six episodes.[nb]Now I think of it - had Brass Eye been created in the "modern era", it probably would have been conceived as a sporadic one-off format, especially given how much research Morris likes to do.[/nb]

I'm not old enough to have been aware of Brass Eye when it aired, so I'm not sure how I'd feel if I'd seen this special a few years after the main series had ended (in fact, I think it was the first Brass Eye I saw), but it was absolutely one of the funniest and most clever things I'd seen at the time and opened up a whole other world of comedy to me (if only for The Day Today and Jam) - and led me here, of course, for which you should all be grateful.

Chedney Honks

Classic case of 'first thing you saw opened the door' but it's not as good as anything before and heralded the decline via over-researched bloated projects with massive big satirical TARGETS. The end of Chris Morris for me.

wrec

Quote from: McChesney Duntz on August 03, 2021, 06:08:02 PM
I'll credit for him watching the fucking thing before making up his mind about it, which is more than most of its contemporaneous detractors can say.

David Blunkett claimed to have watched it too IIRC