Brass Eye - Original Series (1997)

Original Series (1997)

Brass Eye aroused controversy because public figures were fooled into supporting fictitious, and often absurd, charities and causes.

The second episode was called "Drugs" and is one of the most successful. A voice tells viewers there are so many drugs on the streets that "not even the dealers know them all". An undercover reporter (Morris) asks a purportedly real-life drug dealer in London for fictitious drugs, including Triple-sod, Yellow Bentines and Clarky Cat, leaving the dealer puzzled and irritated. He also asks the dealer if he is the Boz-Boz and says he doesn't want his arm to feel "like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon". Later, Morris dressed as a baby with a nappy on and a red balloon-like hat on his head and again asked for Triple-sod and then says "last time I came here a friend of mine just got triple-jacked over a steeplehammer and jessop jessop jessop jessop jessop". He explained that possession of drugs without physical contact and the exchange of drugs through a mandrill were legal.

David Amess, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Basildon, was fooled into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European drug called Cake and asked a question about it in Parliament. The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called Shatner's Bassoon (altering your perception of time), can give you a bloated neck due to massive water retention (allegedly known in by-then-dissolved Czechoslovakia as "Czech Neck") and was frequently referred to as "a made-up drug" (a drug, they were told, not made from plants but made up from chemicals).

Sir Bernard Ingham, Noel Edmonds and Rolf Harris held the yellow cake-sized pill as they talked, with Bernard Manning telling viewers that "One young kiddie on Cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It's a fucking disgrace" and that "…you can puke your fucking self to death — one girl threw up her own pelvis-bone… What a fucking disgrace". Manning, with other participants, told the public that Cake was known on the street as "loonytoad quack", "Joss Ackland's spunky backpack", "ponce on the heath", "rustledust" or "Hattie Jacques pretentious cheese wog", and told anyone offered it to "chuck it back in their face and tell them to fuck off".

Other episodes dealt with science, animals and sex. Morris posed as a talk-show host in favour of those with "good" AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion against those with "bad AIDS" caught through sexual activity or drugs.

The 1997 series was postponed nearly six months as it made reference to murderer Myra Hindley, who was in the news after her portrait was vandalised in the Royal Academy exhibition Sensation.