Back in January 2020, The Sugar Club hosted Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes – a night dedicated to material Channel 4 was probably right to fear and absolutely wrong to bury.
We screened Michael Cumming’s cult film Oxide Ghosts, built from hundreds of hours of unseen and behind-the-scenes Brass Eye footage, followed by a live Q&A with Michael himself, interviewed onstage by Arthur Mathews – Father Ted co-writer, professional straight-face, and ideal man to gently poke a live hand grenade.
Oxide Ghosts was created to mark the 25th anniversary of Brass Eye – that six-week blast between 29 January and 5 March 1997, when Chris Morris’ “this can’t really be on television” masterpiece quietly rewired British comedy. Cumming directed the series and both pilots, watching it all unfold over two intense years from point-blank range. The film carries Chris Morris’ blessing and offers exactly what fans secretly want: a look at the methods behind the madness, without defusing the bomb.
Crucially, Oxide Ghosts only exists in rooms like this. No DVD, no streaming, no handy illegal upload – just these live events. If you weren’t in the room, you don’t see it. Which, in a world where everything is endlessly replayable, feels appropriately wrong and therefore correct.
On the night, the film played like a classified training tape in weaponised satire. You saw the corpsing, the deadpan endurance tests, the odd moments where the show nearly tipped into chaos and then somehow came out sharper. It was less a blooper reel, more a field report from a cultural ambush.
After the screening, Arthur steered Michael through the myths and the reality. Cumming talked about holding tone on a knife-edge, about making something that looks reckless but is actually obsessively controlled, and about the thrill and cost of pushing television that far off the rails. In the process, he managed to both build and shatter Brass Eye lore – exactly what you want from the person who was there when the fuse was lit.
The wider context doesn’t hurt either. Brass Eye was the launchpad for a directing career that’s touched pretty much every corner of modern comedy: Stewart Lee, Matt Berry, Mark Thomas, Jo Brand, David Walliams, Matt Lucas, Sir Lenny Henry, Rashida Jones, Omid Djalili, Mark Steel, Doon Mackichan, Jon Hamm, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Larry David – and that’s just the short version. His back catalogue includes The Mark Thomas Product, Snuff Box, Mark Steel Lectures, Rock Profile, Toast of London, Toast of Tinseltown and, with Stewart Lee, the breakout music documentary King Rocker.
In other words: this isn’t some dusty archive curiosity. The person walking us through those tapes is still at the sharp end of the form.
Critics have already nailed what Oxide Ghosts does. Chortle’s Andy Murray called it “a very rare insight into [Brass Eye’s] making… encapsulating the fun and covert excitement” of the project while it was still under wraps. The Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe noted that the show has been “quietly selling out in independent cinemas across the land” – which is what happens when you build something genuinely cult and then actually treat it like a cult object.
For us, that January 2020 screening of Oxide Ghosts at The Sugar Club was exactly what a good room is for:
a crowd who know what they’re looking at,
a film that shouldn’t really exist,
and the director onstage calmly explaining how they got away with it.
A must-see for Brass Eye obsessives, sure. But also for anyone curious about how great comedy is actually made – and how much trouble it has to cause on the way.