When John Stapleton was ambushed on live television

Broadcaster John Stapleton has died, aged 79. In this piece, which was first published in 2022, we revisit the moment in 1996 when an incognito Chris Morris snuck into the audience of Stapleton’s long-running chat show The Time, The Place. His mission? To bamboozle the presenter with a bizarre theory about sex in the Saxon world. But in the unflappable Stapleton he had met his match….

As Brass Eye dropped celebrities into a steaming, self-humiliating vat of pure hot topic – see Phil Collins talking “Nonce Sense” about paedophilia, or Noel Edmonds warning ravers about the dangers of Cake (“a made-up drug”) – Chris Morris, Brass Eye’s chief architect and Paxmanian prankster, also set out to sabotage a cosy bastion of Middle England: daytime television.

His target: audience participation chat show The Time, The Place. The topic: “Are British men lousy lovers?” Posing as an academic named Thurston Lowe, Morris attempted to bamboozle the show’s presenter, John Stapleton, with amusing twaddle about ancient Saxon sex and four-legged breasts – until Morris was hilariously rumbled on live TV.

The episode aired in June 1996. Stapleton remembers it well. “I couldn’t forget it, could I?” he laughs. “Forty-five years in television, covering wars, elections, tsunamis… but the thing that gets tweeted and played most of all is bloody Chris Morris. There you are, that’s television for you.”

Two years earlier, Morris had played a sneering, pompous anchor on the spoof news show, The Day Today – a predecessor to Brass Eye, Morris’s merciless current affairs satire. A Brass Eye pilot was in the works at the BBC as early as 1995. But the BBC didn’t have the nerve for a whole series, so it was picked up by Channel 4.

Brass Eye tackled big subjects: current affairs favourites which included sex, drugs, and science. Public figures were roped in to support fake campaigns, such as A.A.A.A.A.A.A.Z. (Against Animal Anger and Autocasual Abuse Atrocities in Zoo), and unwittingly spout drivel. The point, perhaps, was not to ridicule celebs personally, but the outsized authority given to their voices.

“I remember Chris saying quite early on that he wanted to do a show focusing on a different subject every week,” says co-writer Peter Baynham. “When he said we’re going to do these campaigns, I thought that was so exciting. It was so much fun thinking up the campaigns – an elephant with a trunk stuck up her arse [Paul Daniels pleaded help for that poor elephant], or a girl who got squashed by heavy electricity [which was falling out of power lines in Sri Lanka and squashing people, so the celebs explained].”

Brass Eye was underway when Morris invaded The Time, The Place. Stapleton thinks the stunt was intended for Brass Eye – though it isn’t featured in the finished series. Running from 1987 to 1998, The Time, The Place came from a different city each day and drew up to two million viewers. “We did some good stuff,” says Stapleton. “We did war, education, political issues – it wasn’t all fun and froth.”

At the end of each episode, the host invited calls about one of the following week’s topics (“Have you had a face lift? Why did you have it? Did you feel under pressure to hang onto your looks?”). From those calls, a handful of people were picked as nominated speakers for the on-air debate. “He must have called in,” says Stapleton about Morris. “I’ve no idea what he told the researcher who picked up the phone – presumably it was a load of nonsense! They should never have allowed him to get on and say what he said on air.”

During filming at a Nottingham studio, Stapleton set up the “Are British men lousy lovers?” debate with Alan Partridge-esque panache. “Have you ever fallen for a Frenchman’s flattery? Lost your heart to a Latin lover? Or been swept off your feet by a sweet-talking Spaniard? Yes? But you married a Brit. Why?”

After Stapleton turned the discussion to Morris – who was using the pseudonym Thurston Lowe – the prankster launched into what the presenter now calls, rather diplomatically, “a lot of bewildering nonsense”. Morris explained how Roman women shipped themselves to Britain to be serviced by wild native Saxons; that the mythical minotaur was sometimes depicted as a giant boob with four legs; and why Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, was considered wise – because she had a brain in her breast.

“I was standing there thinking, ‘Is this guy for real? What is this guy on about? Brains in their breasts?’” recalls Stapleton. “You’ve got a lot to think about on these shows – a lot of guests to get to. I thought, let’s just listen to the guy and move on as quickly as I can without appearing rude.”

Watched back, it’s the unsuspecting audience members that really make it – a befuddled woman sat behind Morris, and a man sniggering to his left, clearly sussing that it’s all a big wind-up. “The best moment of all – brilliantly done by our vision mixer – is when he started talking about women having brains in their breasts,” says Stapleton. “There was a cutaway shot of one of our agony aunts, who was a lovely lady, looking down her blouse to see if she could see anything. It was TV gold.”

Morris’s waffle is straight out of the Brass Eye play-book, which confounded celebs and participants with concepts, imagery, and verbiage so preposterous, that they’re impossible to unpick in the heat of discussion. “I’m always wary of saying what the intention was – it should speak for itself,” says Peter Baynham. “On the other hand, you’ve got a sense that these people should do a bit more checking before they go along with this stuff.”

But, on The Time, The Place, Morris was well and truly busted after someone on the crew thought “Thurston Lowe” looked strangely familiar. “When we went to a commercial break, the producer was down my ear going, ‘We think this guy is called Chris Morris’,” says Stapleton. “I’d never heard of him! So, what do I do? Do I go into the second half of the show and take him apart? In which case, if he is who says he is, I’ll look stupid. Or do I ignore it, go back to him, and get more of this nonsense? In which case I’ll also look stupid. I decided on a middle course.”

“You’re very familiar,” said Stapleton, at which point Morris revealed another alias. No, he wasn’t really called Thurston Lowe, he admitted, but “Peter Davis”. He claimed to have a book coming out, and his publisher had asked him not to use his real name on the show – a fact he’d supposedly told the show’s researchers. Stapleton wasn’t convinced. “Christopher Morris, does that ring a bell?” he asked. Morris denied it.

It’s amusing to watch Morris’s backpedalling when he knows the game is up, momentarily rattled by Stapleton. “He’s stammering a bit,” laughs Stapleton. “Not as confident as he was on the previous take.” Morris would feign outrage at being outed on live TV, calling it “a disgrace” and branding The Time, The Place “a cheap show”.

“He went into all this nonsense about ‘this is outrageous, how dare you, I’ve got a new book, it was one of the conditions of me coming on,’” says Stapleton. “Complete b–––––ks. The audience must have been pretty bewildered.”

Stapleton confronted Morris afterwards. “I was pretty pissed off, I can tell you that,” Stapleton says. “I explained to him that I wasn’t too pleased. It was probably an overreaction on my part. Because at the end of the day, does it matter? Of course it doesn’t. I just felt a bit used and abused, as it were. Also, you don’t want that sort of thing to start a trend because it undermines the programme. But we all laughed about it afterwards.”

If the stunt was intended for Brass Eye, it wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make the broadcast. The series was briefly delayed while Channel 4 boss Michael Grade fretted over its controversial content – pushed back from November 1996 until its debut on January 29, 1997. A skit about Peter Sutcliffe, in which Sutcliffe is released from prison to star in his own West End musical, was removed before broadcast – Grade’s reaction to a Daily Mail campaign against Brass Eye. Morris responded by sneaking a subliminal message into one frame of the episode: “Grade is a c–––”

When Brass Eye returned in 2001 for a special about paedophile hysteria, its skewering of moral panics almost started one. The Mail branded Brass Eye “the sickest TV show ever.”

“It was bonkers after the paedophile special,” says Baynham. “It was clear that it was satire. I remember the News of the World printed a centre spread saying ‘these people must never work in television again’. They’d just gone through the credits of the show. Sound supervisor, catering. They included Peter Fincham who went on to become controller of BBC One! I took it completely seriously at the time. It was almost like their attempt at cancelling before cancelling came along – they tried to cancel us all.”

Morris’s appearance on The Time, The Place became a small cult moment within the notoriety of Brass Eye. Now, Stapleton takes it all in impeccably good humour – there’s an amusing coda, too. “Years later, my son, who lives in London, advertised a bike for sale – and guess who knocked on the door?” he says. “My son said, ‘I think you know my dad!’ He never came back to buy it… No hard feelings, it was a bit of fun. Not TV history – that makes me sound too pompous – but quite a moment.”

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