Brass neck

HOW far can you go? With sex, with art, with newspapers, with television, the boundaries are pushed ever further, sometimes dangerously, sometimes in a truly liberating way.

Chris Morris has gone very far indeed with television comedy. A media prankster and just about the most uncompromising comic talent around right now, he is a satirist turned media-terrorist.

Picture the scene: a new Channel 4 investigative series, complete with flashy graphics, tackles outrages in a number of areas. A distressed elephant in a zoo is so traumatised that she sticks her trunk up her bottom; magician Paul Daniels and writer Carla Lane are roped in to back a campaign on her behalf. A drugs special reveals the horror of a new Czech narcotic called "cake" - a ridiculous-looking huge yellow pill-thing - and public figures including Noel Edmonds, Claire Rayner, Sir Bernard Ingham, Rolf Harris and Bernard Manning lined up to damn it. MP David Amess even raises the matter in parliament.

In an expose of "bad science", theatre director Steven Berkoff smashes tiny replicas of people and animals with a lump hammer to demonstrate the effects of "heavy electricity" falling from the sky, resulting in "the squashed people of Sri Lanka".

Horrifying stuff. Only, none of it is true, and the eloquent rubbish spouted about such horrors is a vicious con trick, designed presumably to point up the way people latch onto something they know nothing about, sometimes well-meaningly, often self-promotingly. As one of the real life, ill-informed commentators unwittingly says, "Cake is a made-up thing. It's made in a kitchen." As you watch Brass Eye, the new Chris Morris series on Channel 4, your jaw drops. Plenty of programmes and presenters, from Candid Camera to Mike Murphy to Jeremy Beadle, and, indeed, Noel Edmonds himself, have kidded the unaware.

But Brass Eye is far from that kind of gentle, affectionate spoofery; it enters a dangerous world where famous people are duped into spouting gobbledegook and saying the most ridiculous things and the interviews are then broadcast on television to make them look like idiots who believe anything written down in front of them.

It has been denounced in the British press, and many of those who were fooled and made to look silly are ripping. It means, as Claire Rayner says: "Because of this series fewer and fewer honest people who speak on TV out of conviction will agree to do so in future." And that may be the case.

So where did all this madness come from? Chris Morris is a writer/ presenter who started in radio news, not stand-up comedy. His early career in broadcasting is the stuff of urban myth. He never seemed to respect a truth/fiction demarcation and often made up the news; he doctored the Queen's speech, he filled a studio with helium so the reporter sounded like a cartoon character. Of course he was sacked, many times.

BBC Radio 4's spoof news current affairs programme On The Hour was a huge success; it led to the television version, The Day Today (also featuring Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber), satirising media excesses. Most infamously, on a BBC Radio 1 programme he told luminaries that Michael Heseltine, who had recently suffered a heart attack, was dead, and received the usual sanctimonious tributes. Sacked again.

Now he seems to have brought things about as far as they can go, and beyond the bounds of what many consider acceptable, where real life and fiction meet and the distinctions are blurred.

Indeed Channel 4 (and specifically Michael Grade) was concerned that the series - which reputedly cost £1 million to make - might contravene broadcasting standards and regulatory guidelines, and it was pulled from the schedules at short notice last autumn.

Morris is a gifted talent, whatever the ethical considerations in some of his antics, and Brass Eye does succeed in pricking pomposity. Very sophisticated satire, it fits in with the trend where life and art seem to meet (or do they? and what's real anyway?); David Cronenberg foresaw it in Videodrome in the 1980s. The spoof as post-modern artform means we can never be sure what is real and what is not.

FOR example, the latest cool film mag on the newstands, Neon, is an indicator of where we're headed - it has lots of joke features and pranks, including a feature about an attempt to get Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon to endorse a brand of rashers, a piece which bears all the hallmarks of Graham Linehan, who incidentally also has a column in the current issue. And `tis all of a piece: Linehan and Arthur Mathews (his Father Ted co-writer) are credited with additional writing for Brass Eye, a further indication of where they stand at the cutting edge of British TV comedy.

Brass Eye is shocking and funny, and the questions it raises about society and the media are disturbing. But almost as disturbing is the vision of a world of self-referential comedy, consisting of nothing but shows where pranksters relentlessly play jokes on each other, eventually disappearing -

Brass Eye's unfortunate elephant - up their own rear end.