Unseen Brass Eye material to premiere at Bristol’s Cube Cinema
Posted on: 20 Jul 2017New footage from the anarchic newsroom satire, which ran for a series in 1997, has been unearthed by its director Michael Cumming and will be shown at a special screening at the Cube Cinema in Bristol on the 26th September.
A staircase which leads down to the smoking area of The White Harte on Park Row is decorated with likenesses of a number of Bristol’s favourite sons. The usual suspects are all present: there’s a black and white photo of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an action shot of Nick Park animating Wallace and Gromit, Banksy’s ubiquitous ‘Flower Thrower’.
One whose presence is somewhat less predictable is Chris Morris, the comedian represented by a still from his iconic newsroom spoof Brass Eye, which enjoyed an eyebrow-raising run on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s - when fake news and alternative facts were still things to be laughed at.
Morris, whose Bristolian heritage is slightly more hushed than those he shares the staircase with, graduated from the University of Bristol with a degree in zoology before infamously being dismissed from BBC Radio Bristol for filling the studio with helium during a live broadcast.
This prank-heavy and often perverse sense of humour heavily populated Brass Eye, whose lewd, rude and utterly on the money skewering of contemporary news programmes attracted fans and Ofcom complaints in equal measure.
The show only ever completed one series (and one special in 2001), leaving said fans perpetually wanting more.
Today’s news will come as music to these ears, as it was announced that Michael Cumming, the show’s director and Morris’s partner in crime, has refined some watchable material from hundreds of hours of unaired Brass Eye footage, which is to be shown at an evening hosted by the Cube Cinema.
The evening, entitled Oxide Ghost and described as ‘part documentary, part artwork’, will take place on the 26th September and be followed by a live Q+A with the man himself.
For more information and tickets, click here.
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An ardent Geordie minus the accent, Sam seemingly strove to get as far away from the Toon as possible, as soon as university beckoned. Three undergraduate years at UoB were more than ample time for Bristol (as it inevitably does) to get under his skin, and so here he remains: reporting, as Assistant Editor, on the cultural happenings which so infatuated him with the city. Catch him at sam@365bristol.com.
