Fleapit revisited:Oxide Ghosts:The Brass Eye Tapes.

"Institutionalised cruelty is one thing, but the twisted brain-wrong of a one off man-mental is quite another"

"The orgy of sly winking usury was only brought to an end by a stairwell nonce bashing - which left North braindead and quadraspazzed on a life glug"

"People say that alcohol's a drug. It's not a drug, it's a drink!"

"When you're fighting a weasel, it's bigger than a man"

Men fighting weasels, kicking otter's faces off, being tracked by the police for buggering herons, dressing up as schools and wearing 'trust me trousers' so they can prey on young children, and wearing nappies and spacehoppers on their heads as they try to score drugs. Dressing up as little city gents, taking class A drugs at business meetings, singing pop songs about Myra Hindley (while dressed up as Jarvis Cocker-alike Purves Grundy fronting the band Blouse), and making musicals about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

Brass Eye was groundbreaking, and controversial - it's hard to see it airing on terrestrial television now and easier to see its creator Morris being cancelled, work that skewered both the media and the public when dealing with the era's hot button topics. It ran on Channel 4 for six episodes (Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime, and Decline) in 1997 and returned, over four years later, with a Paedogeddon special which certainly got the more sanctimonious tabloids drooling.

Many of us hoped for more but it never came. Morris, instead, going on to appear in The IT Crowd, work with Stewart Lee on his Comedy Vehicle, and direct the films Four Lions and The Day Shall Come as well as a few episodes of Armando Iannucci's Veep. But, for me - and many others, Brass Eye is his best work - and remains so.

So many brilliant lines, so many wonderful ideas, so much outrageous hilarity. After so long with nothing on the Brass Eye front, apart from drunken late night YouTube viewings and me quoting scenes to assorted shrugs from friends, I was surprised to read that Oxide Ghosts:The Brass Eye Tapes was touring and would be ending its tour at the Brixton Ritzy, a cinema within walking distance of my home, on April 1st.

With a Q&A, as had happened throughout, the rest of the tour with series director Michael Cumming (who has gone on to work on Toast of London, Toast of Tinseltown, and Stewart Lee's recent King Rocker film). It seemed too good to be true, and luckily wasn't an April fool, so I got tickets and headed down to sit in a room of like minded fans and wait to see scenes we'd been promised had never been shown in public before and never would be again.

Not on TV, not on streaming, not online. Never ever again. For that reason, and because we were asked, I obviously can't divulge too much except to say the scenes you didn't see on television were, with a few exceptions, equally funny and equally outrageous as the ones you did.

It seems that Morris and his team (which included the likes of Charlie Brooker, David Quantick, Peter Baynham, Arthur Matthews, Graham Linehan, and Jane Bussman) submitted to Channel 4 some scenes, for example - a family happily playing a Nazi themed board game while sieg heiling, that they felt would never be allowed to be aired.

These were to soften up Channel 4 so that they could slip other scenes, like the Sutliffe musical, through. The technique worked though there were other mishaps en route. Morris found that wearing a spacehopper on your head made it very difficult to get into cars, the hire of a mandrill proved very costly and potentially dangerous, and a spoof on Reggie Kray nearly backfired when, despite Kray still being in prison, he sent some heavies round to threaten the Brass Eye team and demand the footage be removed.

Which it was - but not because he threatened them. But because it wasn't really that funny. They showed it at Brixton and it wasn't. Neither was a spoof in which boxer Nigel Benn was made to read a pre-prepared script that made him, like the show's other victims, look a bit gullible, a bit stupid, a bit too eager to appear on the telly. According to Cumming, the celebrity that took it in the best spirit was Tommy Vance and the one who refused to read the script because it was silly, instead improvising her own words, was .... Toyah Wilcox.

Noel Edmonds and Bruno Brookes (not a well remembered man - although Brass Eye fans may not agree) took the trolling most personally and others who became victims, especially Rolf Harris, are difficult to elicit any sympathy for these days.

As Oxide Ghosts played out, and during the Q&A with Cumming, I chuckled, I giggled, and I howled with laughter. As did nearly everybody there (including, only on screen sadly despite being a Brixton resident, Morris who, warmly, sometimes struggled to deliver his lines because he was giggling so much). I wished for something as funny and as cutting edge to appear on television again but I can't see where it's coming from.

Brass Eye was very much of its time. Celebrities are too tuned in to be taken in by such things again and in age of fake news and QAnon, the world we live in is almost too weird to be spoofed by Brass Eye. Perhaps that's the ultimate proof of the success of Brass Eye. Though the likes of Bruno Brookes and show jumper Oliver Skeete are hardly part of the national conversation any more, Brass Eye appeared to predict the future, now the ghastly present we live in, in ways that were all too real.

By the end of the evening I was beginning to wonder if over the last few years I had been on an extended cake trip and everything that had happened was, in fact, merely a result of Shatner's Bassoon.