Brass Eye Season 1 quotes

Boo-hoo about calves! They do that with crabs, I don't see you weeping about crabs.

Well, I think every animal has as much right decent treatment as we do.

You're wrong, and you're a grotesquely ugly freak! Thanks. [leaves the table]

[describing a tradition in Tripoli] An outdoor celebration in which the men of Tripoli have a great time - but the same cannot be said for their cattle. At the climax of the feast, a cow is rounded up and driven into a metal tube - a tube which is charged with explosives. The cow is fired through the air and lands in a crunched-up bone heap. Running men then clobber any remaining life out of it with their fists and feet and sticks. The body is dragged about and then left for the dogs and jackals. And possibly scorpions if they eat meat, I don't know...

Over the centuries, man's relationship with animals has been complex. In ancient Egypt, felines were worshipped because the Egyptians thought they were funny. Many of today's familiar relics are cat monuments. [pyramids are shown as the ears of huge cat statues] These vast cat heads were built underground and seen by no one. Europe, too, has its animal traditions. In Zaragoza, the streets still get crazy with the annual running of the wasp. In Britain in the last century, it was quite acceptable for a young gentleman to lose his virginity to one of London's many whore dogs. Dickens and Prince Albert both boasted of their experience. Today animals are used more discreetly, as a vital lubricant in the wheels of government.

There are many legal sports that kill animals too.

[a fox hunter] I think the thing that people get fussed about is that a fox is a small brown furry animal, very much like a dog. Um, I don't think they'd be nearly so worried if it was a little four-legged car... full of chips.

The evil of our relationship remains a paradox. If you plot "Number of animals abused" against "What makes people cruel" versus "Intelligence of either party", the pattern is so unreadable that you might as well draw in a chain of fox heads on sticks. And if you do that, an interesting thing happens: the word "cruel" starts flashing. So, are we cruel to hunt foxes?

The fox feels nothing. It's made of... string.

Institutionalised cruelty is one thing, but the twisted brain-wrong of a one-off man-mental is quite another. Ted Maul disturbs.

Ted Maul

What sort of mind would do this? We contacted a huge bank of psychiatrists in the States. They told us: "The guy's a homo!"

[tormenting a cow] You don't even know what electricity is, do ya? Little planets in the wires...

Ted Maul

These docs show that Hottrin had been driven nuts because the land on which he lives is owned by the cow. In the will of Edith Bates, a local crone who loved cattle - then eccentric, now dead - the cow inherited the land, and a special bank account for stockpiling rent. Meanwhile for the beast, which knows nothing of money or bitter mankind, life has become a living cow-mare, thanks to the thoughtless beneficence of a mad old woman.

Here's a point. We execute wasps, but we don't execute dogs.

We execute wasps because they sting us, and dogs give us pleasure.

The effects of a heroin overdose are lethal. Yes, in the short term, but there's been absolutely no research into the long-term effects.

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

The biggest problem of all is the law. It is legal to carry drugs if you're not actually touching them. These men avoid contact by using helium balloons attached to little drug baskets. It's also legal to buy and sell drugs if you do it through a mandrill. Typically mandrills work at night, approaching the house of a client with a drug pouch and returning with the money. Mandrills are intelligent and vicious, capable of throwing a 12-stone man over 40 feet, but mandrills have been protected by law ever since Queen Elizabeth I gave birth to a child resembling a mandrill by mistake.

What is Cake? Well, it has an active ingredient which is a dangerous psychoactive compound known as "dimesmeric andersonphospate". It stimulates the part of the brain called "Shatner's bassoon", and that's the bit of the brain that deals with time perception. So a second feels like a month. Well, it almost sounds like fun, unless you're the Prague schoolboy who walked out into the street, straight in front of a tram. He thought he'd got a month to cross the street...

[about "Cake"] You know, they've even tested this stuff on rats. Turned them into bloody space hoppers, for God's sake! Come on!

[to a classroom of kids] Drugs need you. [underlines the "U" on a blackboard and crosses it out] If you take the "you" out of drugs, what have you got? Drgs.