 Brass Eye Guardian Article - By John Mulholland - 10th March 1997
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When Channel 4's Brass Eye wrote a musical sketch about the Yorkshire Ripper the aim was to expose media hypocrisy. The sketch was
never broadcast, but achieved its purpose anyway.
This story begins in mid-February when a national broadsheet newspaper ran an article disclosing that Chris Morris's Brass Eye series would contain a sketch where Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was seen in a musical production of his own life. Close to the end of the piece there is a one-sentence defence from Channel 4 which mentions that this sketch is part of a programme called Moral Decline, and that it illustrates how society is obsessed with killers, and how the sketch is intended as a spoof in the tradition of black humour. But by then it's too late. By then it has been condemned as `sick and tasteless'. An MP has condemned it. A member of a TV pressure group has done the same. It's official: it's sick. Any media journalist will tell you that all you need for a good TV outrage story is a quote from an MP and a quote from a member of a pressure group. It happens all the time. The MP legitimises it and the spokesperson lends it the credibility and support of an organisation. It takes just two calls. You don't need to have seen the offensive material, nor do they. The writer of this story knew someone who acted in the Peter Sutcliffe sketch. The MP almost certainly hadn't seen it (since only Morris and his editor had access to it at that point), and nor would the pressure group spokesperson. This is common practice. One newspaper routinely calls on the same three or four MPs to add fibre to its screaming headlines. The MPs oblige, as does a member of a pressure group. It's a convenient recipe; you can't go wrong. You may even get a splash - a front page story. One journalist who diligently follows the recipe and who will admit privately that it's a sham says, `The people who work for this paper are cunts and the people who read this paper are cunts. So you just do it.' That's all right then. Which brings us, briefly, to the Chris Morris series. It was about raising doubt; questioning whether what you see and read in the media is real and truthful. It parodied the media's obsession with hysteria and panics. It proved how easy it is to get people to talk. It invited us to doubt whether the usual parade of spokespersons the media call on actually know what they are talking about. In some cases it was painfully obvious they didn't. And the newspaper story proves Morris's point very well - the fact that no one outside of the Morris team and senior executives at C4 could have seen the Sutcliffe sketch (much less in the context of the finished programme) was never likely to get in the way of a little moral panic and a class A TV outrage story. By now the story was out. Other papers, particularly those in Yorkshire, were reheating the original and adding quotes from their own local MPs. They won't have seen it either. No matter. Still, C4 seemed to be riding this one out. Sources close to the programme insist that the Sutcliffe sketch was still part of the programme when Michael Grade jetted out to Los Angeles a week before it was to be broadcast (last Wednesday). Because of the amount of media heat trained on the Morris series (see timeline) Grade had taken a personal interest. He had left a didactic note outlining which parts of the programme he wanted the lawyers to do further work on. Two months earlier Grade had reviewed the defence which the lawyers would present if challenged by the ITC on the Sutcliffe sketch. There was a stack of documentation making a case for that programme and that sketch. Those working on it were left in no doubt he was happy that the sketch could probably go out. But in the note he left on the Wednesday before transmission he restated the need for a powerful defence. A programme source says: `He said, `Our defence needs to be good' but he wasn't saying `It can't go out'. But in the light of that note we redoubled our efforts to defend it.' Defending a sketch about the Yorkshire Ripper is an improbable task. They had to place it in context, even if no one else could be bothered to. The Morris team had pointed out that the whole of that week's programme would lampoon the media's ever-enlarged appetite for verite TV, where the principal ingredient is the vicarious pleasure offered by doorstepping tragedy, whether it's on the back of paramedics or police cars. They would point to the huge stash of books, films and TV programmes routinely made about murderers. And who can properly say that a TV documentary about this or that notorious killer is not, at least in part, an exercise in entertainment? Then there's the case of Mad Frankie Fraser. He left his calling card in print in the Mirror when he said `They never did me for murder, but I did kill. I won't say how many times. And I was happy to do it.' The Morris team had offered in defence that this programme merely lifted a mirror to society. After all Mad Frankie had packed them in during his revue show, first in the East End, then Soho. The papers hadn't lashed out then. No, this was time for those `lovable old rogue' stories, based, it seems, on the conceit that crime `was different back then'. You could try telling that to Fraser's victims but, if we're to believe what he says, they're probably dead. The Observer wrote that the `notorious former gangster has turned his career with cutthroat razor and teeth-pulling pliers into a packed music hall litany of laughs'. By now the Morris team had compiled an impressive sheaf of cuttings illustrating just how much of this `lovable old rogue' stuff was about. The media had cosied up to Frankie; he had legitimate celebrity status conferred on him by, well, the media. Chat shows, talk shows, newspaper interviews. Having redoubled their defences the Morris team presented it to the Channel 4 lawyers. They had worked closely on the Morris show for the last year, compiling innumerable defences for different elements. The lawyers, according to a source at C4, seemed pleased. `Their words were, `This is a fantastic defence, we're absolutely sorted.' `` Well, not quite. It is at this point that the Daily Mail enter the fray. It was the day after Grade had left for the United States (six days before transmission) and the Daily Mail, oddly sluggish off the mark for a paper that has refined the art of TV outrage stories, put a call in to the C4 press office about the Sutcliffe sketch. They asked if C4 would transmit it or, failing that, would they be cutting it? The spokesperson said they couldn't say at this point. Then, according to a C4 spokesperson, the Mail journalist said, `Right, we're talking to the ITC about what we're going to do about your programme.' Reasonable enough. After all, the Mail had, three weeks earlier, lavished a whole page on the programme under the almost hysterical headline, `Has This Man Pushed TV Comedy Too Far? Why Celebrities Are Outraged By Chris Morris's New Spoof Series'. Here was the mother of all TV outrage stories. The Mail piled in: `fast becoming the most loathed man in television' ` what drives him to such outrageous and vicious extremes?'. They were particularly agitated by the part of the programme that dupes various celebrities into making nonsense statements about some hoax event. For instance when David Amess, MP, was caught condemning the non-existent drug `cake', or when Nick Owen was seen lamenting the tragic consequences of `heavy electricity' which was `falling from the skies' and had reduced one 14-year-old girl victim to just 18 inches in height. He even measured the distance with his two hands. They were hoaxes. They were hilarious. But the Mail was particularly concerned at the way Morris brimmed with `fake concern' to get one of his victims to condemn some bit of nonsense. It was the words `fake concern' which caught our eye. And it was difficult not to suppress a smile. A year ago, when the Guardian was organising a debate on Youth And The Media, we thought to approach a Mail journalist who had penned a full-length attack on how the media were corrupting young people in Britain. It was another vein-busting TV outrage story, full of frenetic moral panic about how TV and films were injecting filth into the hearts and minds of our young people: a robust personal polemic. This was the journalist we needed to pit against some TV folk for an invigorating debate. We asked if he'd do it. There was silence. And then, in a hushed voice, he said, `Well, you know all that stuff I write? Well, I don't actually believe it. If you want someone to articulate those views you'd better go to someone else in this office.' We made our excuses and left. Did the journalist conjure `fake concern' then? If we're to believe the journalist, and we have no reason not to, this full-on TV outrage article was, in effect, a hoax. The Morris programmes reveal themselves, on broadcast, to be hoaxes. And they're funny. But the journalist arguably perpetrated a far more malicious hoax by never acknowledging his `fake concern'. Who takes responsibility? The journalist for writing an hysterical polemic without believing it, or the newspaper for breeding an environment where the demand for moral panic isn't quite met by supply? Perhaps the journalist's defence is that he was writing in a professional not a personal capacity. He was representing the paper, not himself. An orchestrated media panic - a professional job. The Morris programme might lay the blame for that article at society's lust for hysteria and moral panic. But above all the programme was `an anti-hysteria show' says one person close to it: `It was about placing doubt. Doubt about you see in the media. Doubt about what people say'. And though we assume that the Mail's turbo-charged moral outrages are conducted with the utmost integrity, this journalist has, since that conversation, always gone armed with a large bottle of doubt when invited in to the high-pitched moral frenzy that characterises TV outrage stories. Which brings us back to the Mail. Eventually it ran a story about how the Metropolitan Police were monitoring the show. The Morris team knew nothing about this, but the Mail wrote that `The Metropolitan Police's Clubs and Vice unit confirmed it had received a complaint and would be monitoring the programme.' The police evidently were not too exercised by this since they hadn't bothered to inform anyone in the Morris team but, nevertheless, monitoring they were. By Monday of last week Grade was beginning to have second thoughts. He spoke to the C4 lawyers and told them he'd sleep on it and let them know Tuesday. But by the time he awoke in LA on Tuesday morning another senior executive at C4 had taken two or three phone calls from families of Ripper victims. C4 went through the defences, explaining how it was intended as a mirror held up to reflect society, that it wasn't something that took relish in detailing any of the crimes. Can countless documentaries and newspaper articles be similarly excused? Once Grade heard that victims' families had contacted C4 it is thought he immediately ordered the Sutcliffe sketch to be removed. There was no room for discussion. Faced with this information and in the knowledge that it could provoke a savage attack on his station from the footsoldiers of the outrage army, Grade declined to proceed. Some at C4 saw it as a capitulation (one senior executive apologised to Morris), but others felt Grade could not countenance placing his channel in the kind of jeopardy which might result from another vicious newspaper onslaught. In the midst of the frenzy, with each paper trying to outdo the other with ever more outraged quotes, the niceties of C4's intellectual defence wouldn't stand a chance of being aired. Sure, more reasoned debate would have ensued, but the agenda would have been set. An MP, a pressure group, screaming headlines, outrage. You could have reacted to the agenda but you could not set it. Maybe they were right to pull it. Maybe not. Maybe the Guardian and others are wrong to indulge in the vicarious pleasures offered by the recounting of a juicy murder yarn. Maybe not. The tragedy is that though this programme was intended as a commentary on a hysteria-filled, panic-fuelled media (not to mention one which is prone to not knowing what it's talking about) it never stood a chance of having its case debated in anything like a mature fashion. And that's hysterical.
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