Chris Morris feels the programme didn't go far enough. Which is grand news for the Daily Mail. Good news for all of us, in fact, who make a living from swift opinionating. Morris's Brass Eye programme spoofing the demonisation of paedophiles, broadcast by Channel 4 on 26 July and repeated the next night despite a record number of complaints, provided Middle England and its liberal enemies with a handy midsummer bandwagon, and on it we all leapt with abandon.

The Mail went loco, calling it The Sickest TV Show Ever. The red-tops followed, as 'outrage' mounted. Back bit the Guardian , pointing out that a satire on the media's treatment of paedophilia did not mean Morris was condoning paedophilia: the Times and Telegraph similarly attacked the rubber logic of the Mail , praised the power of satire and warned of the dangers of censorship.

Then it got sillier. Government Ministers condemned the programme, only to admit they hadn't watched it. The papers which were frothing most exuberantly began quietly shooting themselves in the feet. One Mail splurge on the programme (headed 'Unspeakably sick', the words of one of the Ministers who hadn't watched it) was preceded by close-ups of Princesses Beatrice (13) and Eugenie (11) in their bikinis; in the Star , beside a shock-horror-sicko Morris story, sat a picture of singer Charlotte Church in a tight top ('She's a big girl now ... chest swell!'). Church is 15.

He's gone too far, even for him, said some Morris-watchers. He'll have to back off. He must be delighted, said others: the lunacies of the reaction must reinforce every point he hoped to make. Morris himself remains, officially, silent, but both sides were quite wrong.

He won't back off, far from it. This is the man who, in the week of Diana's death, was fervently wishing he was still at the helm of a radio programme in order to make the jokes that weren't (then) being made, so worried was he by the wave of censure against anyone who wanted to challenge pious media orthodoxy.

Not repentant, then; and not ecstatic either. 'If I was happy at the result I'd need to have had my brains sucked out through a straw,' he told a colleague last week. 'Because the only conclusion is such a depressing one - that the standard of public debate is so lamentably low; what's good or satisfying about that?'

He was mildly depressed, too, at the predictability of reactions; for the debate often nosed towards a simple argument over censorship, or a discussion about the media. It wasn't intended as a satire on the media. Well, in part, of course, for every Brass Eye spoofs the media, - but it had two other main intentions. Firstly, to make people laugh. Morris is an anti-polemicist: if he sets out to make a Big Point, he has insisted, then tries to make it funny, it won't work; the recipe must be reversed. Secondly, the intention was to make us think not about the media, but our own laughably confused attitude to children.

The idea had been fermenting for years. Morris was becoming increasingly frustrated at the way children, and the idea of childhood, had become deified. Inviolate. A golden, innocent, fenced-off part of society full of tow-headed little angels - until the minute they pass 16, when the fence crashes down and they want us to tear their clothes off and roger them senseless.

He had been worried for years, as his friends preceded him in having children, by the fact that this apparently conferred on them a divine right to make endless pronouncements unfettered by such restrictive critical considerations as logic, fact or honesty. After he had his own two children - he has insisted they're 'nothing like these mythical angels, they're great but they're bloody complicated human beings' - he was worried by his own confused thought processes, the heightened senses of love and worry and genuine fear that every parent feels.

Morris was coldly angered at the deliberate stoking by the media of a culture of fear: as if a parent didn't have enough to worry about without being told at at every turn, to the strains of mawkish melodrama, 'This could be your child - your child could be next .' These illogical, visceral fears brought with parenthood, incidentally, are what Morris blames for a couple of back-backlash pieces in the Guardian condemning the programme as degrading to children; he was as perturbed by these pieces as anything in the Mail , but then remembered his visit earlier this year to the Balham march - so-called Posh Paulsgrove - and the discovery that liberals' arguments, when shorn of their caring finery, often conceal exactly the same atavistic thoughtless fears as the Paulsgrove demonstrators.

And he wanted to rattle the liberals too, shake their sense of taste, make them think again about their attitude to children: it's in this that he worries the programme may not have gone far enough.

So the idea had been there for a while for a Brass Eye on the idolisation of children, focusing on one of its offshoots, the manufacturing of monsters as scapegoats for our sexual confusion - monsters worse than the cars that kill or maim 5,500 children in Britain each year, worse than child poverty.

Three factors convinced him to go ahead. A couple of years ago there was an investigation into child abuse by the Jesuits at his old school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. Morris was contacted, and became increasingly bemused by the investigation. Offences there almost definitely were, he feels, but he had no concrete evidence, only hearsay. But he realised that the police were asking all the wrong questions, driven by hysteria and prejudice. In the end, £3 million was spent on a worldwide investigation. There were no convictions.

More recently he was infuriated by two television programmes. One was the David Jessel Dispatches on Sidney Cook, refulgent with what Morris has described as 'camp relish'. The other was the Tonight with Trevor McDonald in which Carol Vorderman walked arm-in-arm into the sunset with a 'victim' of child abuse. The 16-year-old boy had, eventually, after five meetings, had sex with a man he'd met on the internet, while he was technically under age. It was all Carol could do to get him to admit he was a 'victim' ('well ... I s'pose I minded') before taking his arm, having triumphantly established another case of tragic victimhood.

This is something else Morris despises; the idea that you are, once a victim, a victim forever, and can never define yourself in any other way - at least not if our moral healers have anything to do with it.

And so the programme was written, the jokes tested, re-tested, cut and refilmed again - Was this one just labouring the point? Was that one too wry, or too obvious, or too knowingly satirical? Was it funny ? - and celebrities successfully gulled into reading nonsense on the autocue. This astonished Morris: he was convinced, after the publicity over his Cake drugs spoof in 1997, that no one with a brain would ever again agree to read tosh for him on camera.

And then Channel 4 put it out, twice. Morris is still not a wholehearted fan of the channel; he's thought to feel that executives are just too cynically pleased with the press cuttings which show them to still be radical and leading-edge. The BBC called his agent last week and said they'd be delighted to have Morris back. Would they have broadcast that Brass Eye ? 'God, no way !' came the happy reply.

It's unlikely Morris will return to the same subject; not, of course, because of the furore - there is nothing he wouldn't touch, and he is a firm believer that jokes should be as extreme as possible to have the effect of changing anyone's mind. The truly telling laugh, he feels, is the laugh that escapes us despite our better judgment. The instinctive belch of realisation, be it from liberal or reactionary, that shoots from the fast part of our brains through the cloying fog of what we think of as taste.

Moral outrage, as we are used to it today, is nothing more than acute self-indulgence. Sending flowers to the roadside for Sarah Payne is self-indulgent, if done by those who didn't know her; it's a meaningless convulsion, emotional onanism.

No, he won't return to children because the process of making a programme is, in part, his own working-out of his stance on a subject, and by the time the months of work is done, little curiosity is left. He admits that doubts remain - he will always prefer there to be doubts rather than lazy certainties - but the curiosity has diminished.

Morris is dismissive of those making grand claims for what he has done - he was, after all, making a comedy show, not trying to change the world; and jokes, while weapons, are still pretty small weapons. He would hate to be elevated to the status of grandee satirist, for he dislikes the term satire, and its clubbable connotations; he just wants to make people laugh, and maybe, just maybe, begin to change their minds.

And he will do this in the strong intellectual conviction that there is intrinsic value in abhorrent, appalling jokes, if they make people think, and that, as long as you have rigorously analysed the purpose of saying something, there is nothing that cannot be said.

Which is good news for his enemies. And even better news for all his friends.

The Observer on the Brass Eye row

Michael Jackson of Channel Four hits back at the critics as ministers attack Brass Eye special, 29 July

Kathryn Flett's review of Brass Eye, 29 July

Profile: Chris Morris