Brass Eye, Jam, Nighty Night and Middle-Class Anxieties

Despite the fact that I wasn't yet born to experience the UK in the late-90s, very-early 2000s, it always seemed like the best period of time to live through. Nearly two decades of Tory leadership had come to an end, and in came a youngish, shiny new Prime Minister with Tony Blair (nevermind the fallout that we’d see from his steering the Labour party towards neoliberalism, and the unlawful invasion of Iraq) and 9/11 hadn't yet ruined it all. Most importantly, the cultural output of the time was fantastic. To me, it's epitomised by the Chris Morris, Julia Davis, Mark Heap, Kevin Eldon, Amelia Bullmore, Rebecca Front, et al. sect of comedy shows. Amongst these, three in particular stand out as being right on the pulse of (specifically middle-class) anxieties in the UK at the time - these are Brass Eye, Jam, and Nighty Night. All of these series utilise dark comedy to various degrees in order to touch on different social issues - media sensationalism, loss of trust in authority, homophobia, and anti-social behaviour, just to name a few.

The earliest of these programmes is Chris Morris’s Brass Eye, a parody of popular current affairs shows at the time like Panorama, Crimewatch, and Newsnight, playing off of their tendency to fearmonger and create moral panics amongst their middle-class audiences. The show covers (and mocks) a vast array of topics - such as sex, drugs, science, and crime - using irreverent, absurdist humour. Brass Eye takes aim at how oversensationalised these types of programmes were, with their overwrought transitions, meaningless graphs, and barrages of misinformation that falls apart after a few seconds of scrutiny. The idea that these polemic issues could ever be adequately digested in a 30-minute timeslot to gain a nuanced perspective is derided by the show, as Chris Morris (as the presenter) says in one episode ‘[f]ind out exactly what to think next’ and tells the audience ‘[y]ou haven’t got a clue, but you will if you watch for 30 minutes’. Because of their very nature (trying to tackle hot-button issues for a wide audience in a limited timespan) the programmes that Brass Eye satirises relied on shock value and the exploitation that comes with it. At the end of the Drugs episode, Chris Morris’s character is seen shooting up, but asserts that his use is fine and instead opines about drug use amongst those ‘less stable, less educated, and less middle-class’. Here, Morris addresses the middle-class audiences of these shows, acknowledging that their viewership is based upon gawking at the most exaggerated portrayal of the issue at hand whilst ignoring their own part in the problem.

Distrust in public figures is another key aspect of Brass Eye, as well as the shows we’ll go onto discuss. It’s possible that this aspect of the series was driven by the fact that, by the time it was released in 1997, there had been so many scandals during John Major’s premiership that the term ‘Tory sleaze’ was coined for it - for example, the 1994 ‘cash-for-questions’ scandal where it was discovered that private companies were bribing MPs to ask questions in Parliament on their behalf. We see this scepticism towards blindly trusting those in power reflected in the overall format of the show as, on the surface, it seems like something we should trust - taking on the appearance and superficial qualities of a factual documentary series. Chris Morris asserts authority as a presenter, with his suit-and-tie and commanding tone, but the content of what he’s saying undercuts absolutely any faith the audience would have in him. The various celebrity PSAs throughout the episodes are also crucial to this point, as they expose just how gullible

public figures can be, and what they’ll overlook in order to get their moment of virtue. Two particularly egregious examples of this can be found in the ‘Drugs’ episode and the infamous ‘Paedogeddon’ special. In the former, the celebrities are espousing the horrors of a fictional drug called ‘Cake’ - Bernard Manning says, memorably, ‘[o]ne young kiddy on Cake cried all the water out of his body. Imagine how his mother felt. It’s a fucking disgrace’. The celebrities even recite ‘Cake is a made-up drug’ (presumably thinking it means something like ‘designer drug’) from their scripts without once realising that that is quite literally the case. In the latter, the stars are duped into talking about a ‘Hidden Online Entrapment Control System’ (HOECS, pronounced ‘hoax’) game, with presenter Richard Blackwood delivering the line ‘HOECS games make your child smell like hammers’ with full sincerity. As hilarious as they are, these moments serve as a stark reminder of how easily moral panics are made - you just need a few famous faces to be paid enough to say what you need them too - and the necessity of questioning authority.

Jam, another brainchild of Chris Morris, is a surreal, oftentimes disturbing sketch comedy show that places its characters in unfamiliar, confronting scenarios. The very first sketch of the show is of a married couple propositioning their friend to sleep with a gay man they know to prevent him from turning their son gay, with the wife saying that she’s ‘doing her bit’ by dressing up in disguise and having sex with the son herself - which sets the bleak, unsettling tone for the rest of the episodes perfectly. Many of the sketches could be said to deal with specifically 2000s anxieties. The aforementioned gestures towards the stigma associated with being gay at the time - instances of queerbashing had increased throughout the 90s (Severs, 612 - 13) and Section 28 had been in full force for over a decade, only repealed in 2003, 3 years after the series premiered. There are also two sketches involving missing children. One of them takes place during a press conference featuring the distraught parents of a missing child, wherein they start singing ‘please bring him back’ to what sounds like a prerecorded keyboard melody. In another, we see the parents’ of a kidnapped child lack of interest towards what’s happened to their son. When they’re called about a body, they’re nonplussed, claiming to be ‘in the middle of something’ and suggest ‘bunging him in a cab’ so that he can come to them. These sketches perhaps speak to the desensitisation towards these events during the 90s, as caused by extensive media coverage - for example, the 1993 James Bulger case. Interestingly, the sketches prefigure the proliferation of high-profile child abduction cases during the 2000s, with the murder of Sarah Payne occurring just a few months after the series aired. Many of the sketches employ ambient music and odd visual effects - such as slow-motion or using entirely freeze frames - exacerbating the sense of detachment displayed by these characters through distorting the ‘reality’ on screen.

In fact, the only time that characters can be said to react with appropriate anger to what’s going on is when their possessions are being tampered with. In one sketch, Kevin Eldon plays a man walking down the street, ranting about having taken his car to the garage, and it seemingly having shrunk when he picks it up, with the mechanics having no explanation for this. At the end he cries ‘[w]hat do I look like? Fucking noddy?!’ - which echoes several times. Another one, also starring Kevin Eldon, shows a husband and wife who have called a man to fix their TV, which inexplicably has lizards coming out of it. The repair man (Mark Heap) offers nothing in the way

of help or comfort, and outright seems to ridicule them as he claims that both he and his boss are called ‘Mr Lizard’ - prompting Kevin Eldon’s character to have a full-on mental breakdown. The prioritisation of objects over other human beings speaks to the fact that the 90s (and very early 2000s) was generally an economically prosperous time, with more disposable income allowing for more spending on consumer goods, which provided comfort to soothe the uncertainties of the era (such as the Y2K crisis, increasing societal division, and anti-social behaviour). As in Brass Eye, Jam also pokes fun at public figures. One sketch shows an old man (meant to be broadcaster Robert Kilroy-Silk) going on a nude rampage in a shopping centre - trying to steal a woman’s buggy, urinating on a TV set, and lying down in a supermarket freezer before being apprehended by the police. Another presents itself as CCTV footage of Richard Madeley attacking a cleaner and attempting intercourse with a coffee machine. Again, these serve to undermine public figures, harkening back to the anti-authority sentiment of the time.

The final show we’ll be talking about here, Julia Davis’s Nighty Night, is narrative series where Davis plays a West Country-accented interloper (Jill) who terrorises a middle-class family that’s just moved into her cul-de-sac in order to get her hands on the husband, Don (played by Angus Deayton). Deayton’s casting is significant, being somewhat of a middle-class sex symbol for his ‘suave’ manner of presenting on Have I Got News For You during the 90s (even being crowned ‘TV’s Mr Sex’ by Time Out in 1995. His role as Don, a sort of inadvertent womaniser, also plays off of his 2002 sex scandal - the fallout of which was severe enough to his middle-class audience that he was sacked from the aforementioned show, again highlighting the growing distrust in public figures. However, more central to how Nighty Night invokes middle-class anxieties is in the figure of Jill and what she represents - as Laura Minor writes she is an ‘unruly’ (31) woman, one who ‘embodies a specific form of femininity from the 1990s and early 2000s’ and ‘accomodate[s] the male gaze in a hilariously brazen manner’ (45). Jill’s ‘trashy’ femininity, which was equally demonised and sexualised at the time, immediately presents her as a threat to the middle-class, with her bright pink, revealing outfits putting her at odds visually with the more conservative attire of the rest of the cast. Throughout the show, Jill attempts a series of outrageous schemes - faking her husband’s death (before offing him anyway), trying to impregnate herself with Don’s sperm before he has a vasectomy, and then claiming that Cath and Don’s adolescent son is the father when she fakes her pregnancy. Despite how blatant her lies are, Jill moves through the show largely unquestioned and unscathed. In one scene, she manages to pass off offcuts that she bought from a butcher as her husband’s remains, to a dumbfounded funeral director.

In these scenes, we see that it's not necessarily a lack of intelligence from the middle-class characters that stop them from querying Jill, but rather their inability to confront as caused by the quintessentially British stiff upper-lip. This is most apparent with Jill’s main adversary, Cath (Don’s wife, played by Rebecca Front). Cath is a perfectly lovely Christian housewife stricken with MS who is aware of Jill’s insanity, as seen by her nervous laugh when trying to, very politely, challenge Jill and assert her boundaries - which is always promptly bulldozed over by Jill. Leon Hunt posits that Cath is difficult to sympathise with because of this meekness, saying ‘[t]he more Cath plasters that smile on her face or laughs as though everything is fine, the more

we might be tempted to think that this is what such politeness deserves’ (198 - 199). The rivalry between Jill and Cath could even be viewed as a representation of fears at the time of anti-social behaviour invading and destroying polite society. Over a decade prior to the show’s premiere, there had been concerns about where British society was heading, as evidenced by John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, which upheld the importance of ‘neighbourliness, decency, courtesy’. By the time Tony Blair became Prime Minister, concerns about disorderly conduct had crystallised to the point where he infamously introduced the ‘anti-social behaviour order’ (colloquially known as an ASBO) in 1998. In this light, the stand-off between Jill and Cath in the last couple minutes of the show epitomises the defeat of (or triumph over) so-called traditional values, as Cath ends up arrested whilst Jill escapes on a boat with Don in tow - getting exactly what she wanted.

To summarise, Brass Eye, Jam, and Night Night can all be considered as responses to British middle-class fears of the late-90s and early-2000s, in similar and different ways. One common thread that stands out is the lack of faith in celebrities and those in power, but each programme has its own individual concerns too - media sensationalism in Brass Eye, detachment in Jam, and traditional values vs. anti-social behaviour in Nighty Night - demonstrating how, even at a time as seemingly relaxed as when these programmes were made, there was still plenty of anxiety to go around.

References

Hunt, L. 2013. Cult British TV comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Minor, L. 2024. Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK Television Comedy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

Severs, G. J. 2024. Queer citizenship in 1990s Britain. Contemporary British History. 38(4), pp. 612 - 632.

Lara Abbey is an aspiring culture writer, having graduated last July with a degree in English and Film Studies from the University of Leeds. You can find her ramblings at @alltheprettystarsfilms on Instagram and Medium.