Brass Eye aroused considerable controversy when it was first broadcast, primarily because prominent public figures were fooled into pledging onscreen support for fictional, and often plainly absurd, charities and causes.
The second episode was called "Drugs", and is considered by many to be the most successful of the series. In the opening scene, a voiceover tells viewers that there are so many drugs on the streets of Britain that "not even the dealers know them all". An undercover reporter (Morris) asks a purportedly real-life drug dealer in London for various fictional drugs, including "Triple-sod", "Yellow Bentines" and "Clarky Cat", leaving the dealer puzzled and increasingly irritated until he tells the reporter to leave. He also asks the dealer if he is the "Boz-Boz", and claims that he doesn't want his arm to feel "like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon". Later in the episode, in the same area, Morris, dressed as a baby with a nappy on and a red balloon-like hat on his head, again asks for "Triple-sod" and then says "last time I came here a friend of mine just got triple-jacked over a steeplehammer and jessop jessop jessop jessop". He also explained that possession of drugs without physical contact and the exchange of drugs through a mandrill were perfectly legal in English law.
David Amess MP, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Basildon, was fooled into filming an elaborate video warning against the dangers of a fictional Eastern European drug called Cake, and went as far as to ask a question about it in Parliament[1]. The drug purportedly affected an area of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon" and was frequently referred to as "a made-up drug" (a drug, they were told, not made from plants but made up from chemicals). Other celebrities such as Sir Bernard Ingham, Noel Edmonds and Rolf Harris were shown holding the bright-yellow cake-sized pill as they talked, with Bernard Manning telling viewers that "One kiddy on Cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It's a fucking disgrace" and that "... you can puke yourself to death on this stuff - one girl threw up her own pelvis-bone... What a fucking disgrace". Manning, along with other participants, told the public that Cake was known on the street as loonytoad quack, Joss Ackland's spunky backpack, ponce on the heath, rustledust or Hattie Jacques pretentious cheese wog, and then informed anyone offered it to "chuck it back in their face and tell them to fuck off".
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