‘Drug use among children has for many an education and with obvious alarm for both parents on the increase almost yearly.’ Try reading that again. Maybe in the style of Huw Edwards. By all means, try it a third time but it’ll only give you a headache. It has the appearance of sense. It makes the same noises as normal sentence. But it’s not normal. It’s a Brass Eye sentence.
Last night, at the Curzon cinema in Soho, 20 years after Chris Morris’s comedy masterpiece was first broadcast, there was a sell-out crowd who wanted more. And another sell-out crowd at 9.15. They were there to see Oxide Ghosts – 60 minutes of unreleased Brass Eye material screened by director Michael Cummings with the permission of Morris.
I remember the first time I heard that Brass Eye sentence in January 1997, delivered by a darkly-lit Paxman-esque anchorman with all the boyish vim and optimism of Macbeth in Act V.
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