It is fairly straightforward to place Brass Eye in the family tree of British broadcast comedy television. It is right there as the offspring of radio’s On The Hour and TV’s The Day Today, and its progeny includes the spectrum from The Thick of It to Look Around You. Its influence can be found anywhere the medium of television is being played around with, both with fondness and as a critique. And yet, in that family tree it also sticks out like an unruly uncle, a disgraced aunt, a disowned half-sibling. It is both of a piece with the shows it followed and those it inspired, yet completely singular. The 25 years since it aired have not dulled the experience of watching it. It remains an attack on the future of news, media and representational politics from a place of knowledge and uneasy foresight. At the time, the furore around the show (in particular the notorious episodes on drugs and paedophilia) reared its head as an attack on the perceived sensationalism of the approach the show took. In 2022, with hindsight, the furore can be read as a culture acknowledging its capacity for a feverish annihilation of reason. The show captured so beautifully what has become an hourly media occurrence. It was taken by some as impossible and reactionary but scans now as a bang on prediction. The drugs and peadophilia episodes remain incredible for what they suggest and capture, but also because of how funny they are.
The show stands out, still, because of how it melds visual comedy and satirical comment seamlessly. Its points are embedded in the heightened aesthetics of the news programme format and felt as the laughing settles in the gut. In this regard, the show’s director Michael Cumming stands as the natural heir to the filmmaker Richard Lester. Lester, most famous for A Hard Day’s Night, had a preternatural ability to disappear into a genre (often inventing a few of them himself) and blend a deeply satisfying experience with needle sharp commentary on the form he was working within and the wider society the work was released unto. Cumming’s career as a director following Brass Eye has seen him work with some of Britain’s finest comedy talents and in the case of 2021’s release King Rocker, made in collaboration with Stewart Lee, on landmark work. King Rocker is a film that simultaneously celebrates, skewers and invigorates the music documentary format. To celebrate 25 years of a show that did something similar, and ignited his career, he is taking his film, Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes, on the road. It is difficult to explain what is in the film because I haven’t seen it. Not many have. There is no online version and never will be. What is known about this elusive and unique film is that Cumming put it together based on material shot at the time including behind the scenes material, deleted scenes and alternate takes that have never been seen. So, on the road is the only place audiences can and will ever be able to see the film, at events where the conversation with the audience and their response to the film in the moment are key to the experience. Cumming explains why the film was made with this presentation in mind, along with some other insight into his experiences of working on one of the best pieces of British television ever conceived, in this interview before heading out around Britain to spread the gospel of confrontational, challenging, uncomfortable, hilarious television.
The Quietus: When did you get the idea to put the film together and how long did it take?
Michael Cumming: I’ve had this big box of tapes that I’ve carted around with me since the mid 1990s and I had a vague idea that I might try and do something with them one day, but over the years they got packed away and forgotten about. In 2017 I was asked by Greg Walker, from Manchester’s Pilot Light TV festival, if I would speak at an anniversary screening of Brass Eye. I agreed, and mentioned I had some tapes somewhere that might contain interesting stuff and that I would see if there was an unseen bit we could play for the fans at the event. Once I had located and digitised the tapes, I started looking. I was in my edit suite, just pulling clips I thought were funny onto a timeline, and by the end of that process I had a couple of hours worth of material. That was when it struck me that perhaps there was a film to be made. I had no interest in making a traditional documentary about Brass Eye, so the film had to be from my personal perspective. I also knew that I wouldn’t show it if Chris Morris didn’t want me to. I sent it to Chris, who said he was happy for it to go out exactly as I had made it. I expected the screening at Pilot Light to be a one-off, but after that showing I had a few requests from programmers who were in the audience and things just snowballed from there. Once programmers realised it was available, they wanted to show it. By the end of this tour, we will have done over 100 shows!
Why is it only screened with you in attendance?
It was originally conceived as having an introduction and Q&A from me as part of the event, so I have just stuck with that format. Also, Chris and I decided that to make these events special it should only ever be shown at live events. I like the idea that, in this day and age where everything is available at the click of a mouse, you would actually have to come out to a communal event to see it. Some people have come to see it numerous times because there’s a lot to take in, you can’t see it any other way and the Q&As are always lively.
Brass Eye must have been a baptism of fire for a comedy director, but also a hard act to follow? How do you feel about that experience and opportunity looking back?
It would have been a baptism of fire for a comedy director, but I wasn’t even a comedy director. I had never directed comedy in my life before Brass Eye. Since doing it, I’ve never been offered anything else! I went to art school and then to film school at the Royal College of Art. I made video art and short films. When I met Chris I was becoming something I had always hated the idea of… a jobbing director, a gun for hire. I had done corporate videos, low-budget documentaries, kids TV and had recently directed the film inserts for the late night Channel 4 show The Word. All this had left me entirely disillusioned by television, and I was at the point of giving it up and going back to the freedom and obscurity of the art world. Chris showed me that you could make TV that not only had some artistic merit but that could make a point about the medium itself. I learned a lot from him, particularly how important getting the right balance between precision, spontaneity and stupidity is.
I was always interested in TV comedy and was drawn to the more unusual stuff – Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, Monty Python, The Young Ones, Reeves & Mortimer…but it wasn’t something that was planned in any way. It was an entirely accidental career that started when I met Chris and continues to this day. My latest TV work, Toast Of Tinseltown, was broadcast this January, exactly 25 years from the month that Brass Eye went out in 1997. I’m very proud of it – and its previous incarnation in London, that I also directed – precisely because it is not run-of-the-mill comedy.
It’s trite to say a show like Brass Eye wouldn’t get made today but it’s amazing really that it ever did. What do you think the legacy of the show is for British comedy and for comedy more broadly?
It’s probably not for me to say what the show’s legacy is, I’ll leave that to you, but as the years have gone on it’s interesting that it’s actually got harder to make work that stands out. You’d think it would have gotten easier, but it seems to me that it’s gone the other way. If I were to draw a Brass Eye-style graph representing the algorithms that generate TV commissions – that plotted “viewing figures” against “budget requirement” versus “memorable legacy” – the pattern would be so unreadable, you might as well draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks.
How has the presentation of the film changed over the years you have been taking it out on the road?
It’s the audience and host’s questions that make the night different each time. I’ve had some really interesting hosts lead the Q&As, including Stewart Lee, Graham Fellows (AKA John Shuttleworth), Father Ted and Toast writer Arthur Mathews and broadcaster and playwright Jonathan Maitland. Hopefully there will be some surprise guests this time and some questions that are so obscure that even I won’t be able to answer them and will have to make up complete lies.
What are you looking forward to about these 25th anniversary shows?
The most unexpected thing was hearing the sound of an audience laugh, and sometimes gasp in shock, en masse. As a director, you get – hopefully positive – comments about your work, but you never really have a chance to hear lots of people in a room reacting to it. People do react differently when they are part of a group. Also, it brings like-minded people together. I’m as much a fan of Brass Eye as the audience, and it’s wonderful to be able to celebrate the show with them.
Do you think there will ever be a show that captures the cultural conversation, for good and ill at the same time, in the same way again – or has comedy and commissioning changed too much?
I think it’s important to remember that what made the series different was that it was made for broadcast television, in a pre-social media age, where TV meant much more than it does now. Today, of course, there is a huge variety of platforms for content but, for me, the key thing about Brass Eye was its critical relationship with the media, and so it has the most impact when viewed as part of a broadcast TV schedule, on an actual television set amongst the very shows it parodied. Brass Eye had the constraints of television rules to push up against and, occasionally, bend and break. The media landscape – whatever the hell that even means – is very different now, but I have no doubt that if Chris wanted to do something along those lines again he would somehow find another unique way to do it.
What are your fondest memories of your time working on the show?
Brass Eye took a long time to make in comparison to other TV comedies. From initial pilots to final transmission it took two years and, in that time, there were a number of occasions where I honestly thought it would never see the light of day. So, I suppose the fondest memory I have was just before it was first broadcast, knowing that we had something really special that was about to be unleashed, for better or for worse. Having said that, if someone had told me I would still be talking about it 25 years later I would definitely have questioned their sanity.
Michael Cumming’s tour of Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes kicks off on February 25th, 2022 and ticket details can be found here.
