Brass Eye S1 Ep7 "Paedogeddon!" REACTION!
Added 2025-03-14 16:00:16 +0000 UTCHere we go...
Comments
The American segments on Brass Eye are always the best. They completely capture how US tv looked to the average Brit. That Gunishment line was glorious.
Cheeky Jab
2025-06-06 14:34:18 +0000 UTCSydney Cooke is still in prison still alive aged 97. He was convicted of murdering two children, but probably was involved in killing many more.
John Cartwright
2025-05-17 00:36:23 +0000 UTCBTW not equating Trans with paedophile just about the tabloid froth that it generates, always looking for something to point at and blame while the world is on fire due to tabloid owners who once triumphed a Page 3 model had turned 16 so now we're able to legally show her full tit's. And yes they really did that.
Graeme Robertson
2025-04-03 15:49:27 +0000 UTCIf you weren't around at the time of what he's satirising you won't get it. Tabloid media anyway have moved on. It would be Transageddon nowadays.
Graeme Robertson
2025-04-03 15:45:35 +0000 UTCThe trick is to remember that Brass Eye isn't really about the things in the title. It is about the way celebrities jump on any issue, despite not knowing anything about it, it is about the hypocrisy of the media and politicians (who are some of the least moral people around), it is about the way news has been turned into drama and sensation rather than facts. The theme of each episode is mostly incidental.
Ash X
2025-03-18 19:03:38 +0000 UTC33:51 "Nonce Sense"
JimmyThis
2025-03-16 17:47:22 +0000 UTC"the idea that kids can't leave the house for fear of predators sneaking around looking for prey" I also wanted to highlight this because it's something that actually makes it far easier for children to be abused. "An Evil Nonce In The Park Will Steal Your Child" makes for more exciting segment graphics than 'most children are abused by people who are close to the family' and so it's the version that gets pushed.
Martin Clarkson
2025-03-16 13:37:43 +0000 UTCI thought it was pretty clear that they were satirising the fact that the media loves to push this insane Evil Pedos Are Pouncing Children In Every Park while at the same time absolutely slathering over young girls.
Martin Clarkson
2025-03-16 13:32:46 +0000 UTCI think it's a misreading of the episode to say that it claimed "mostly hysteria by the public". It doesn't say there is no pedophilia problems, it says that the stuff the media chooses to focus on is unfounded hysteria. Remember, this is the same time that The Sun was running wild pieces about Evil Nonces WHILE AT THE SAME TIME running a countdown to Charlotte Church being 16 and thus Legal.
Martin Clarkson
2025-03-16 13:29:57 +0000 UTCI'd argue it's probably equally relevant now post-Savile. Think about how much mileage broadcasters have got out of the Savile thing and how many documentaries have been made about it; Channel 5 seems to make a new one annually, every true crime podcaster has done an episode about it, very few of them actually tell you any new information, it's just to farm engagement. And the internet is full of bloggers writing about it, scratching around for flimsy connections between notorious abusers and trying to perpetuate Pizzagatesque conspiracy theories (some of which have been debunked) that people unflinchingly accept to be true regardless of how much basis they have in reality. We are again a nation morbidly obsessed with child abuse.
Charlie
2025-03-16 12:23:17 +0000 UTCI think that's exactly why Boomer didn't react to the joke. It's the stand-out joke of the whole show, and it's a shame that because of the subject it's unlikely to get a laugh these days. That segment seemed to be like a continuation of the NASA sketch in one of the main episodes of Brass Eye (forgot which one). it was where they deliberately sent a mentally disturbed man into space so that the astronauts could fuck him - Boomer reacted to the presenter character that Morris was playing in that instance, rather than to the hugely disturbing subject matter of the joke!
Richie
2025-03-16 11:33:57 +0000 UTCIt's a funny episode but manly cause it's so off key, it is in very poor taste and much more offensive than any other shows plus ironically trying as they did to claim it was mostly hysteria by the public didn't age well considering just how many nonce's were hiding in the tv biz
452b
2025-03-16 00:24:19 +0000 UTCAnother mad one.. again after months of media hysteria and court cases while they allowed thousands of kids to be abused today. Like South Park ahead of their time
rtkeane
2025-03-15 14:35:12 +0000 UTCThis was my first time seeing this in more than 20 years, and I have to say much of it falls flat. Especially, as you say compared to how funny the the rest of the series was. And for me it's difficult to see what they're actually satirising apart from celebrities being gullible again. In retrospect it seems like it's just being shocking for the sake of it.
ben smith
2025-03-15 09:41:58 +0000 UTCIt's one joke - It's just not that funny. Got bored can't be arsed to watch it all
Mark Jephson
2025-03-15 08:10:59 +0000 UTCYes, you describe it perfectly. Extreme doesnt mean its automatically funny, exactly. It could have been better.
Lorna B
2025-03-15 00:23:38 +0000 UTCYeah takes ages to get out my err your sheets lol
John Hamblett
2025-03-14 23:58:38 +0000 UTCI don't agree with it being the best joke in the series, but it made me laugh!
Will
2025-03-14 23:50:50 +0000 UTCHa ok Sea Man Staines
Mark Jephson
2025-03-14 23:20:21 +0000 UTCI was in Britain at the time and I do get all the jokes, but… I just honestly feel the same as KB.
Will
2025-03-14 22:41:17 +0000 UTCWell, I agree! Extreme doesn't necessarily mean funny. I think this one could have had the same subject matter and have been as funny as the rest of the episodes.
Will
2025-03-14 22:31:58 +0000 UTCI wasn't really referring to the huge toaster sized mobile phones though, obviously they go way back to the eightees, but some people think the basic soap bar sized ones, a typical Nokia type thing, didn't come out till 2005 or something which is way off.
R Lawrence
2025-03-14 22:15:18 +0000 UTCThis episode feels more like a special extended Jam sketch than a brass eye special. It’s so dark and pushes it so far it’s borderline scary. But it is an amazing satire of the hysterical media frenzy at the time around topics like this.
Spoingus
2025-03-14 22:10:30 +0000 UTCMy dad had one in the 80s when he was a self-employed electrician, and he wanted to be contactable while he was out on the road.
Will
2025-03-14 22:05:17 +0000 UTCIf you didn't live through the context that this is addressing, I can see how it might seem a bit limp compared to the others. The attack on a man named "Peter File" would have been the sort of thing that was very close to reality back then. There were vigilante mobs attacking homes of paediatricians, it sounds like a gag but it was real, in Gwent in 2000. It was all very odd because at the same time as that stuff they had countdowns to child stars 16th birthdays, next to topless models in the big newspapers. The work of actually catching all the nonces like Saville and Harris etc started about a decade after the hysteria died down.
Kirk Deighton
2025-03-14 21:36:17 +0000 UTCNot the funniest episode, but fuck me, Chris Morris proved his point after the backlash!
AdamMcAdamface
2025-03-14 21:33:09 +0000 UTCYou hit the nail on the head perfectly.
Jay
2025-03-14 20:47:53 +0000 UTCChris Morris wrote and directed a short film called My Wrongs #8245–8249 & 117 around this time, which may or may not be worth watching, I can't remember.
Jonny
2025-03-14 20:42:28 +0000 UTCHoly fucking shit! 12:08 in your video, the "before and after" paedo in disguise is Hall And Oates! Hahaha, never got that the first time round. This was actually better than I remembered, the quality of it is really high, especially the Eminem spoof and the bit where he reads the nicknames to a real (i think?) paedophile, eg. Shrub rocketeer, small bean regarder... It's more edgy than funny though, to me. It still comes across as cutting edge satire and is just as shocking now as it was then, but it's hard to raise a chuckle at some of this stuff. Best character: chris morris as the American presenter who shot himself in the head to kill the paedophile in him, then it cuts to chris morris lurching away down a dark alleyway, firing shotguns into the air. He's a genius.
Jonny
2025-03-14 20:39:45 +0000 UTCYou really have to have been around in the late nineties/early noughties to understand the premise behind this episode. It is not laughing at paedophilia, it is mocking the British media's response to it, whilst highlighting its hypocrisy. Some MP's denounced this episode even though they admitted that they hadn't seen it. This episode is satire at its finest and most brutal. It held a mirror up to the British media at the time, in particular the tabloids.
Steve Moppett
2025-03-14 20:35:11 +0000 UTCThis is very important context. Both The Day Today and Brass Eye were about how the media uses issues, and how others use the media. In the media frenzy that led up to this some newspapers were effectively calling for vigilante groups to go out and find paedophiles. I remember a Paediatrician's office being sacked because there was a sign saying paediatrician.
Stephen Morris
2025-03-14 20:25:07 +0000 UTCThe British establishment is full of nonces. Their private corruption is mirrored by their public failure.
Colin R
2025-03-14 20:22:02 +0000 UTCApologies for the long comment but I fucking love comedy. I always seem to subconsciously assess the “victim” of the joke and either find it funny or don’t depending on who suffers for the punchline. here the victims are coppers, paedos, and journos. So different from jokes that could (potentially) endanger children by minimizing the seriousness of the crime. The kid in space with the paedo is a great example of how the hilarity of the joke doesn’t land for many people cause they can’t shift focus from the darkness of pedophilia to the piss-my-pants absurdity of the joke. If the joke had instead centered around I dunno, sending Harold Shipman up in a rocket to stop him killing old people, and a coffin-dodger snuck onto the spaceship, the police would also conclude that it’s “the last thing they wanted to happen” It’s hilarious (IMO) because of its improbability. In the thought experiment where it’s easy to send a Paedo to space; it’s really easy to check for a stowaway child in a small capsule that should only contain 1 paedo. A child in the spacecraft wouldn’t happen without willful levels of incompetence, a reflection on how; for all the hysteria and panic of the times, the measures used to protect kids are often restrictive and rarely effective. While response to comedy is subjective, I think the taboo of the subject matter here prevents most people from finding this as hilarious as it should be.
Greg Moakes
2025-03-14 20:10:22 +0000 UTCStill hoping to see Little Britain someday lol
Jonathan Giles
2025-03-14 19:30:35 +0000 UTCIt’s by far the worst episode for me, there’s a couple of funny moments but it’s overall it’s just not a subject matter that i can easily laugh along to, or want in my comedy. Above all else the quality of the jokes are a considerable step down from the rest of the series. Just my opinion, i know some people love this episode. It’s been a long time since i seen this, my opinion hasn’t changed, i hoped maybe it was funnier than i remembered but nah, i can’t see myself watching this again. Looking forward to This Time with AP next week, i love that show.
James Ellison
2025-03-14 19:11:09 +0000 UTCIf anything it's become even more unhinged now post-Savile and with the emergence of the whole QAnon thing in the States, the media really made the most of lurid stories about elite cabals of Satanic paedophiles who were coming for your children, and people ate up the insane conspiracy theories; stuff like Dolphin Square and Elm Guest House turned out to be hoaxes, but people still talk about them as if they were real. I mentioned it further down but it's why the press loved Sidney Cooke so much 25 years ago, he was basically a cartoon paedophile and it was easier to whip up hysteria - and crucially, sell newspapers - about a creepy little man who snatched children than to take a nuanced view about the realities of child abuse. I think there are some academic papers on the whole moral panic.
Charlie
2025-03-14 19:09:41 +0000 UTCOK - watched now - and others have sort of touched on what I wanted to say. Apologies, but this a bit of long one - if you can't be bothered, just skip it. Really for me, what really made this, was because I watched it on broadcast, knowing what was going on with the British tabloid newspapers at the time, and just saying to myself - YES. It's about far as Chris could push this, and well, he never worked in television again, well, apart from his small role in The IT Crowd. The hypocrisy of those publications at the time was obvious. You would have the likes of, well, any of the tabloids at the time demonising this episode, yet on the other page running articles "waiting till *insert underage girl* is 16! So we can show her tits!". They were grooming girls. The "News Of The World" was a paper that basically championed a campaign against paedophiles, to the point of naming and shaming. Unfortunately, this led to a horrific incident where a vicious mob completely misread a name, and then targeted an innocent man, dragged him out of his flat and burned him. The "News Of The World" was eventually shut down because they had illegally accessed the messages from a phone belonging to a murdered teenager, prolonging her parents hope that she might be still alive. THAT, is the type of monsters we are dealing with. There was also a mob that firebombed a house, because they couldn't tell the difference between a paediatrician and the other. Even after a small period of screaming from the media c**ts who didn't like being called out for their damaging approach - the idea that kids can't leave the house for fear of predators sneaking around looking for prey - that threat has always been there, it never goes away. I remember sat cross legged, on a cold primary school floor back in 1985, big TV in front of us, telling us "Say No". Chris Morris made this episode to completely call out the media in terms of how they deal with paedophilia, and it completely burned their arse, and rightly so. I'm glad he did it, I'm glad it caused an absolute shit storm, and I'm glad Channel 4 allowed it to be broadcast.
Phil Robinson
2025-03-14 19:04:40 +0000 UTCGood job. Hyped for 'This Time with A.P.'. :D
Jason Scade
2025-03-14 18:32:54 +0000 UTCCan't you do this time with Alan Partridge now....most of my shows are finished, I haven't seen most of the ones you're uploading reactions to now though they're said to be good and i do plan on watching things like the thick of it but I don't like watching something for the first time in a reaction video though some people do but this times probably the best Alan Partridge (at least S2 anyway).
R Lawrence
2025-03-14 18:27:18 +0000 UTCIs that Dawn from Gavin and Stacey / Four Lions? Never recognised her before
makadeni123
2025-03-14 18:12:56 +0000 UTCthe best episode by far, a great commentary on society and the media.
Dave Roberts
2025-03-14 18:01:30 +0000 UTCI agree that it's not as sharp as the original 6 episodes, but even in just those few years in between, things had moved on a lot (not least, widespread use of the WWW), and also, Chris Morris wasn't the sort of person to simply repeat what he'd already done. A lot of good lines and setups went under the radar here, but regardless, it's brilliant that you saw this one through. The most famous episode of the whole show.
Richie
2025-03-14 17:47:38 +0000 UTCThe show was produced in a response to the hysteria around, basically expecting to find the boogeyman under every child's bed. The UK press at the time was relentless. And while some of the jokes in this episode were a bit OTT for me personally, I agree with the point they were trying to make. Just look at how helicopter parent-y parents are these days. When I was a kid (I'm just a couple of years older than you KB), we were out playing most of the day, without phones and such, and our parents were not stressed out all day worrying about our safety. Most attacks on children are committed by a family member or friend. And it's very rare a stranger poses a risk. Terrible, yes, but so is when they drown or get hit by a car. It's still rare, though.
ThetaSigmaTheOriginal
2025-03-14 17:45:38 +0000 UTCId rather have a mass debate than a mixed one tbh
John Hamblett
2025-03-14 17:42:19 +0000 UTCDon't mix the debate, it's complicated.
Mark Jephson
2025-03-14 17:34:53 +0000 UTCIt's worth noticing that Gary Lineker said kids have mobile phones these days and its 1997 because people have a really faulty idea of how new mobile phones are and they also confuse the time when everyone started to have one with the time that they became available to own to those who wanted one, say if they had a job that required alot of travelling on the road for example. In other words the small handheld mobile phone became AVAILABLE a good fifteen years before they became POPULAR.
R Lawrence
2025-03-14 17:28:02 +0000 UTCThis should be interesting 😬
Tom Clancy
2025-03-14 17:27:38 +0000 UTCHaha not quite! I just dont get the hype compared to the others. Its funny, but not that funny.
Lorna B
2025-03-14 17:14:59 +0000 UTCYou thought 'that' was boring?! Wild nights at Lorna B's house.
Jamie
2025-03-14 17:05:51 +0000 UTCEasily the best joke in the entire series, didn't even get noticed.
Jamie
2025-03-14 17:03:32 +0000 UTC"its the one thing we didnt want to happen" lmfao
Inter Malager
2025-03-14 16:55:26 +0000 UTCThe discomfort was palpable. Just what brass eye set out to do for UK viewers when it came out. The secret was to be in on the joke. It did however lead to dark humour Vs bad taste debate which is now why we can't even watch only fools and horses, bottom, Fawlty towers etc because the bad taste brigade won. Not politics btw just an observation. Shows like the Inbetweeners will be next in line to be cancelled for being too laddy and vulgar etc. can't have any fun anymore. Glad you did watch it though.
John Hamblett
2025-03-14 16:55:22 +0000 UTCMmm i dont think the humour is clever enough in this one to be the best. I think its actually a bit boring in relation to the others! The best part for me is the pedo disguised as a school 😂. I'll never not laugh at that. But yeah KB, i get your reaction 100%
Lorna B
2025-03-14 16:50:30 +0000 UTCI wrote on episode 6 last week something to the effect of "this episode is not optional, you haven't finished the show yet", after you appeared to suggest you weren't sure about watching this one. Now we are here and I'm nervous to watch you react to it!
John Moore
2025-03-14 16:36:31 +0000 UTCPeople said it's the worst?!
Jamie
2025-03-14 16:31:56 +0000 UTC"Its the one thing we didnt want to happen" - line of the series there!!
Craig McCulloch
2025-03-14 16:31:32 +0000 UTCI still quote "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"
Joe Blakeley
2025-03-14 16:31:28 +0000 UTCThis is easily the best episode. Sad it's so fucking stigmatised
Jamie
2025-03-14 16:31:07 +0000 UTCHere we go, the main event. In the late nineties and early noughties there was genuinely a huge amount of television about paedophiles, hence the episode, and several documentaries from this era on Sidney Cooke - who is unfortunately very real - that were parodied pretty unsubtly in this. Some of the documentaries are genuinely eye-opening albeit harrowing stuff, but others were very much like Paedogeddon, and the tabloids created a huge and macabre moral panic surrounding paedophilia; those same tabloids and their readership did not take kindly to this episode. Oh, and "Peter" the paedophile that Chris Morris calls a small bean regarder was also real and I believe his responses weren't scripted. He was a member of a now infamous paedophile advocacy group a la NAMBLA.
Charlie
2025-03-14 16:30:22 +0000 UTCYeah man, I wasn't sure
Jamie
2025-03-14 16:30:07 +0000 UTCJust leaving this quote here where it can be found with no context whatsoever: "Queen Boomer like stopped after four minutes when we first tried it two years ago."
Z is for Zed
2025-03-14 16:26:50 +0000 UTCHa! Can't wait to watch this. I first met Chris when this came out on DVD and we did the special features. Not everyone's cup of tea but an absolute classic in my book. He's a hero and a genius. Genuinely lovely and fiercely intelligent. Haven't watched it in a while. That's my evening's viewing sorted!
Duncan Hart
2025-03-14 16:25:10 +0000 UTCHuzzah!
Neal Murdoch
2025-03-14 16:18:39 +0000 UTCYESSSS😬😬😬👌👌😂😂😂can't wait to watch this in a bit!!💜
Adam Hale
2025-03-14 16:16:31 +0000 UTCFor better or worse, here we are... I've a lot to say about this. I'll give it a watch later this evening...
Phil Robinson
2025-03-14 16:15:02 +0000 UTCI say pee dough, you say pie dough, let's call the whole thing off.
Pat Chapman
2025-03-14 16:13:41 +0000 UTCBALTIMORA!! I've been hoping this would happen
Domlaaa
2025-03-14 16:10:08 +0000 UTCDamn, he actually did it.
Will
2025-03-14 16:03:45 +0000 UTC
