Comedy: Laugh? You nearly could have done

The show they don't want you to see: a sneak preview of Chris Morris's `Brass Eye', mysteriously dropped from the C4 schedules last week

The advance publicity for Brass Eye - the eagerly awaited new show from The Day Today's Chris Morris, which was hastily removed from Channel 4's schedules last Thursday - had a suitably overstated feel about it. According to C4's press release, Morris would not only "take media terrorism to a level never seen on British TV before", he would also "smack the issues till they bleed".

A sample selection of fake headlines from the show ("Police have confirmed that all of Britain's women priests died yesterday - they are not treating the deaths as suspicious") seemed to offer little new: Morris was, after all, the man who once announced the deaths of Jimmy Saville and Michael Heseltine. But a series of incendiary statements further down the page raised the stakes. Morris's scathing reference to "feeble, under- realised prankster-drivel" (a jibe at C4's lesser lord of misrule, Mark Thomas) was accompanied by splenetic exhortations to his imitators to "top this, you Quisling f***s" and stern advice to viewers to "watch this programme now because it will never be allowed a repeat".

Curiosity as to the exact nature of Brass Eye has run high ever since a pilot version was turned down by the BBC. But Morris has imbued all those working on Brass Eye with a healthy respect for secrecy. "It's a sitcom," maintained two of the writers, Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, with just the faintest of twinkles in their collective eye. "A very bad sitcom." Others suggested that Morris had pulled off a series of situationist pranks so devastating that even thinking about discussing them would bury the show in an avalanche of writs.

So, back to the press release. A finished copy of the first show, it said, wouldn't be ready until the day of transmission (originally planned for next Tuesday). But there was a compilation tape of clips from the series, which came with an intriguing cover note. "Please be aware that the last scene, where the person being interviewed has been blacked out, is not part of the show. In the transmitted version the identity of the person will be revealed". Going to the end of the tape, there is Morris - looking uncannily like Michael Hutchence in designer glasses and comedy goatee - introducing his unidentifiable pop-star victim with the words: "He's the puff-pastry hangman", before asking him such penetrating questions as : "You sing all the notes. That's A to G, right? So you've never sung, like ... an H?"

This is fine example of what tomorrow's media studies students will no doubt refer to as The Chris Morris Method: cloaking oneself in the robes of broadcasting authority, then leading unwitting accomplices into a nightmare world of nonsensical humiliation. Some balk at the obvious relish with which Morris beguiles his victims into stripping themselves of their dignity; but there's no denying his commitment to this one- man satirical suicide-mission.

In one of the best bits of the preview tape, Morris is clandestinely filmed approaching a series of street-corner drug-dealers. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary about that, you might think - except that Morris is wearing only a nappy, a combat blouse and a large orange sphere attached to the top of his head. He proceeds to bamboozle the bewildered and increasingly hostile dealers by barking at them, in absurdist drug slang, "Jessup! Jessup! Jessup!". Such demonstrations go some way to redeeming the odd moment - a Pulp-ish love song to Myra Hindley, a Kilroy spoof debate about the difference between "good Aids and bad Aids" - when Morris's devotion to satire temporarily overwhelms good taste.

Early this week, a harassed-sounding Channel 4 press officer communicated the exciting news that the reclusive Morris would come out of hiding to discuss Brass Eye, on the understanding that nothing he said would be printed as a direct quotation. The appointed day (Thursday) dawned with a Channel 4 "statement against enquiry" (media legalese for "we didn't want to tell you this, but since you've asked") as follows: "Brass Eye is a bold, innovative, satirical format, and the channel needs more time to review the series before transmission so that we can screen the strongest possible programme". In other words - for the moment at least - bye-bye Brass Eye.

Recently, someone asked David Cronenberg, the director of Crash, about the nature of paranoia. He quoted the William Burroughs definition, which is "seeing things as they really are". Whatever terrible things it is that Chris Morris has done in our name, we should be allowed to judge them for ourselves. Not because they will be good for us, but because they will probably be very, very funny.