This is the one thing we didn't want to happen

July 29, 2016 4:23 AM

Fifteen years ago, Brass Eye released the special episode "Paedogeddon". The Atlantic weighs in on its significance.
posted by Ned G (29 comments total)

Metafilter discussed the episode the first time around.
posted by Ned G at 4:25 AM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I try to make virtually all of my friends and loved ones watch this at some point. Even if it wasn't so damn biting and (yes) righteous, I can't think of another comedy piece that's as relentlessly creative, clever, or well-produced, except for... y'know... everything else Chris Morris has ever touched.
posted by rorgy at 4:28 AM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

At the end of “Paedogeddon,” a mob sets a man named “Peter Phile” on fire in his car

I remember that they used the same gag on an episode of IT Crowd with one of Jen's blind dates having that exact name.
posted by dr_dank at 4:32 AM on July 29, 2016

And IT Crowd's benevolent dictator Graham Lineham wrote for Brass Eye! What a lovably incestuous bunch.
posted by rorgy at 4:34 AM on July 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Metafilter discussed the episode the first time around.

....Upon review of that thread it looks like people were more interested in discussing whether Phil Collins sucks or not.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:46 AM on July 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Lest we forget, at roughly the same time—during the same panic—a hospital paediatrician was driven out of her home by vigilantes who mistook her job title for "paedophile".

Paedogeddon was so close to reality that it's terrifying.
posted by cstross at 5:17 AM on July 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

I can't tell the difference between making fun of child abuse and making fun of the media treatment of child abuse, and am therefore offended.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:43 AM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's never a good sign when an outlet thinks the current news moment requires a thinkpiece on anything made by Morris, Brooker, or their friends...
posted by gusandrews at 5:55 AM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

In "life imitates art" news, this has been making the rounds over the last day or two: His report for Sky News went a bit Brass Eye today... [23sec video clip]. Much more plausible as a Brass Eye lost scene than as actual news piece.

As an aside, you've all seen Look Around You, right? Missing the point of the OP, perhaps, as it's satirising a particular style of educational programme rather than aspects of wider society, but I'm yet to meet anyone who enjoyed one but not the other.
posted by metaBugs at 6:35 AM on July 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

While we're on the subject of Peter Serafinowicz, here's him doing an uncannily accurate impersonation of long-serving Irish BBC radio host Terry Wogan hosting a London dubstep pirate radio station.

"Hold tight Luke from Croydon."
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:55 AM on July 29, 2016 [6 favorites]

I remember that they used the same gag on an episode of IT Crowd with one of Jen's blind dates having that exact name.

"They pronounce it 'pedophile' in America. Maybe you should move to America."
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 7:10 AM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

MP duped by 'Brass Eye' made chair of psychoactive substances committee.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:21 AM on July 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

My username obviously requires me to comment on anything Morris-related. 'Paedogeddon' itself is a (nasty, bitter, unflinching) masterpiece, but what really floored me was, in the days and weeks that followed, how the response from politicians and parts of the media demonstrated exactly what the episode was satirizing. TFA briefly mentions the Mail's hypocrisy but to me this famous two-page spread from the Daily Star is even more gob-smacking: I'm honestly not sure you could do better if you tried.

metaBugs, that Sky News bit is amazing. Ted Maul lives!
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 7:37 AM on July 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

You are a paedophile, you are a nonce, you're a perv, you're a slot badger, you're a two pin DIN plug, you're a bush dodger, you're a small bean regarder, you're a unabummer, you're a nut administrator, you're a bent ref, you're the crazy world of Arthur Brown, you're a fence foal, you're a free willy, you're a chimney bottler, you're a bunty man, you're a shrub rocketeer...
posted by metaxa at 7:49 AM on July 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

miss chris morris too much. world needs more morrises...
posted by brainimplant at 7:55 AM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Regarding the story of the paediatrician cstross mentions above: I just found this ten-years-later follow-up on its subsequent coverage; it's darkly amusing to see the press twisting the story over the years and dropping the ball over and over on the facts. My favourite part:

The Irish Independent has claimed that in the 'summer of 2001' (actually it was 2000) a 'couple of newspapers so fuelled the mob' (actually there was no mob in Gwent) 'that a paediatrician was burned out of her home in Gwent' (actually she wasn't).

Private Eye had run a very silly cartoon literally a month or two beforehand that depicted roughly the same thing happening. It was an odd time to be alive.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 7:56 AM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I first saw this (and other shows from the series) on youtube, what really got me is that there's absolutely no wink to the camera, no signal that the film makers don't mean 100% of what's being said on camera. I don't think you could do that in America, but god was it fantastic to be genuinely confused for the first five or ten minutes before the realization that it was satire.
posted by phack at 8:01 AM on July 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Atlantic: Its main target might have been the news media, but as a result of its intentionally manic presentation, it feels broadly dismissive of almost every kind of victimhood.

I don't get that as a survivor. It's so thoroughly skewering the patronizing "stranger danger" BS that mass media had been feeding us. We didn't need more witch hunts in our name, we needed adults willing to listen when we didn't feel comfortable with family, teachers, churches, or youth organizations.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:07 AM on July 29, 2016 [22 favorites]

The Daily Show comedians like Stewart and Colbert owe much of their success to the kind of unrelenting and non-eye-winking work done to satirize the media in The Day Today and Brass Eye. Without those two shows, particularly, TDS would have probably kept the same Kilborn-based formula.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:11 AM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

And IT Crowd's benevolent dictator Graham Lineham wrote for Brass Eye! What a lovably incestuous bunch.

Not to derail , but Morris also appeared in IT Crowd as the head of Reynholm Industries.
posted by diziet at 10:14 AM on July 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

miss chris morris too much. world needs more morrises...

GAH! Dont DO that! I had to check a few places to make sure he wasn't dead.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:23 AM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't think he survived this.
posted by dr_dank at 11:29 AM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I remember that they used the same gag on an episode of IT Crowd with one of Jen's blind dates having that exact name.

That gag seems like a nice blend of Brass Eye and the Joel Rifkin joke from Seinfeld. It's not deliberate (Linehan told me on Twitter, during the period when he was following about 10,000 people, including me. I did not survive, nor deserve to survive, the cull) but it seems like a pretty logical (and funny) unconscious extension of those two influences.
posted by howfar at 11:53 AM on July 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Morris is still kicking; the last place I saw him was as Stewart Lee's interlocutor in the third series of Comedy Vehicle, I think. I agree that he's been a bit too quiet lately... but now that I think of it, has anyone ever seen him and Trump in the same room?
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 12:52 PM on July 29, 2016

Chris Morris has just started work on a new feature film! For real!
posted by rorgy at 2:25 PM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Rorgy's Chortle link says Morris appeared as a newsreader in an episode of Veep. I've seen every episode of that show, but I don't recall seeing Morris. Does anyone else remember this?
posted by Paul Slade at 2:37 PM on July 29, 2016

Rorgy's Chortle link says Morris appeared as a newsreader in an episode of Veep. I've seen every episode of that show, but I don't recall seeing Morris. Does anyone else remember this?

You don't see him, but if I remember right, I think you hear his voice in the first season's "Full Disclosure", as a FOX News talking head giving the VP's office grief, right after Mike gets caught calling the "over-jocular" Secret Service agent an ape.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 6:30 PM on July 29, 2016

My username obviously requires me to comment on anything Morris-related.
I, too, share this curse.

The quality I most like in Morris' satire, and I think practically everyone in this thread has touched on it, is just how unsparing it is. It goes beyond being constitutionally incapable of winking at the camera and neutering the joke; there's a very principled manner in which reality is heightened and extended to its logical conclusion.

I think it's true that The Daily Show and Colbert, or Australian offshoots like the Chaser crew and Shaun Micallef's earlier satirical news programmes, bear the influence of Morris' sensibility. But the true inheritors of Morris' satirical legacy are online spaces and the media projects they've generated. Weird Twitter in particular has a creative vulgarity and Dadaist ethos that's been funnelled into leftist twitter projects like Chapo Trap House and Carl Diggler which deride the media and politics in a way Morris would probably appreciate. I can definitely see those guys producing something as crass (to some) and cutting about mass media hysteria and cynicism as Paedogeddon.
posted by Collaterly Sisters at 6:38 PM on July 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I AM THE PAEDOFINDER GENERAL AND YOU ARE A PAEDOPHILE!

Under the basic principles of English law, every man is innocent until speculated guilty!

(holds up notepad reading YOU ARE A KIDDY-FIDDLER)

Bang to rights.

I hereby sentence you to... FIRE!

(all links contain violence and sexual references)
posted by BiggerJ at 10:37 PM on July 29, 2016