Over the summer of 1984 Morris got a gig playing bass for the Cambridge Footlights Revue. The four-piece band featured a number of different drummers and Cambridge students Hugh Levinson and Roy Margolis. With his red-spotted necktie, which he said was a family heirloom, Morris fitted in well with the university crowd and could easily have passed for one of its posher members. The show they accompanied, directed by Nick Hancock and featuring Steve Punt, was called The Story So Far, a series of sketches with the common theme of a setting in a futuristic Britain led by a president. The band swiftly got to grips with the repertoire, and doing a proper sixty-date tour of the country was another blast of fun for Morris. If churning out the same numbers got a little dull on some nights, the musicians would amuse themselves by swapping instruments or trying to make the cast corpse by wearing wigs and delivering comic asides during scene changes, and Morris was invariably at the centre of the mischief. He would make up nonsense words and phrases, which he dropped randomly into conversations, and was particularly fond of impersonating a cast member who sang with a noticeably warbly vibrato.
The climax of the tour was at the Edinburgh Festival for a three-week run, which was sold out despite a very bad review in The Scotsman. The glory of the Footlights had faded somewhat since a high point in 1981 when Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie had been principal members and taken a career-launching show to Edinburgh which included Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. But it was still a prestigious name, and some of the 1984 cast members were very aware of being in the boiler room of comedy and were determined to make it. They swapped notes with Footlights alumni Slattery and Neil Mullarkey and would sit around plotting strategies and having intense discussions about what constituted a joke.
Not Chris Morris. He showed no interest in using the festival or the band as a way of getting into comedy. He was enjoying just being the hired musical help for the summer. Morris’s former university housemate Caroline Leddy was also at the festival. She performed in The Millies with Richard Vranch, Donna McPhail and Jo Unwin – who almost a decade later would become Morris’s partner. But as early as that trip to Edinburgh, Chris confessed to his Footlights friends that he had ‘a thing’ about Unwin, and all agreed she looked particularly spectacular on stage in The Millies when she and Leddy came out in slinky catsuits. The seats in the venue were just loose chairs arranged in ranks, and Morris, startled by the vision, shifted his chair sharply and fell over backwards.
But the Footlights tour would be Morris’s last major musical adventure. His interest was beginning to be diverted elsewhere. Back in Cambridge, he contributed bass and ideas to Steve Breeze’s main project, a band signed to RCA. Morris just didn’t have the time for the sessions in Breeze’s mum’s garage. His replacement was Neill MacColl, half-brother of Kirsty.
Morris’s attention had been diverted to Radio Cambridgeshire, where Somewhere in the Foreign Office’s other singer, Jane Edwards, had been working since the station started back in May 1982. Underfunded and staffed by just twenty, Radio Cambridgeshire was already struggling. Edwards worked there casually, more for fun than anything else, just another outlet for a creative musician. She worked on Stop It I Like It, hosted by a presenter named Nick Barraclough and broadcast from the station’s radio car, as well as making up silly things in the studio. As Somewhere … started their Scottish adventure, she heard she’d got the chance to play with the founders of Squeeze and knew that she couldn’t continue with the radio work.
Morris was impressed by the way she juggled a music career with radio and liked the idea of doing something similar himself. Jane offered to introduce him to the station. She’d already got jobs there for sixth-form college friends Rachel Sherman and Dawn Burford. None of them was paid, and it was all rather basic work, but for young people exploring their options it felt like a great creative freedom. It was arranged that Morris would spend an early morning watching Nick Barraclough and his breakfast team.
Barraclough was a smart, talented broadcaster who was passionate about his folk and country-based music. Articulate and warm, he had been brought up locally and played professionally in bands for ten years before making his radio debut with Radio Cambridgeshire. He regularly had people in on work experience but the arrival of Chris Morris was memorable. For the whole morning Morris sat in, Barraclough felt he was being watched with unnerving intensity. Most young hopefuls concentrated for a maximum of fifteen minutes before the glamour of BBC local radio wore off and they began to fidget, glaze over or read the morning papers. But as they chatted after the show, Morris quizzed Barraclough on certain techniques he’d observed. He was soon invited back. Nick was an encouraging figure who liked to see what people could do, and Morris demonstrated attractive qualities – he was bright, eager to learn and young. In other words, cheap.
Well-spoken Morris was soon recording ‘packages’ – two-or three-minute local stories. It was something like an apprenticeship. He read the news, made documentaries and learned how to edit. Everything was on quarter-inch tape, which would be marked with a wax chinagraph pencil before a razor blade was used to cut the tape and it was spliced back together – the basis of all the techniques he would use, from building up basic packages to later more complicated editing for comic effect. And until digital technology took it all on to computer, it was the only way of doing things. ‘You could sit in that station all night and just fiddle about in the production area, turn tapes around, speeding stuff up and down,’ says Nick Barraclough. ‘Frankly, the technical side of radio is easy, if you’ve got common sense. But to do it the way that Chris did it, to think of it …’ The process of editing was physically demanding. Robert Katz, who later wrote with Morris, creates a vivid image of how advanced his skills would become when they worked together in London, talking of an obsessive approach to the art of editing: ‘the sheer complexity of his audio montage style used only analogue technology. Sometimes his fingers would be covered in dried blood the next day.’
Dawn Burford had taken over from Jane Edwards in the radio car and Morris joined as her driving partner, working out how everything functioned and checking for overhead power lines so that the cumbersome telescopic aerial was extended up to something like twenty or thirty feet without causing unnecessary electrocution to either of them. His progress at the station was monitored by its managing editor, Ian Masters, and Morris was taken on as a freelance with rolling short-term contracts of around three months.
The greatest chunk of output at the station was chokingly parochial, and there wasn’t enough of it. The BBC provided funding for only six hours of broadcast time and, in order for the fledgling station to have any chance to establish itself, it needed to stay on air from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It was not unusual for staff to work an eighteen-hour shift, which was if nothing else an opportunity for someone starting out to find inventive ways of creating programmes of a higher quality than the budget allowed. Morris, absorbed in the work, regularly stayed into the small hours.
He graduated to presenting a drive-time show, having begun to fill in for absentees after six months at Radio Cambridgeshire: ‘I can remember tuning in one Christmas time,’ says Ian Masters, ‘listening to him and thinking, Yeah, that was good. That was a good show. This boy will go somewhere providing he perseveres and is willing to step along the hard way.’
Morris got to know his way around the studio so well that presenters would come to him for tech support before they went to the BBC engineers. Colleague Jonathan Amos remembers Morris using rather unorthodox methods to solve a problem during an outside broadcast one freezing February. ‘The mast on the radio froze solid – it couldn’t be raised to send a signal back to base,’ he says. ‘Legend has it that Morris climbed up on the top of the vehicle and pissed on the mast to release it.’ He was also beginning to pick up on the gulf between news and every other type of programme. ‘News regard themselves as the anointed ones, the real reason for the existence of the radio station,’ says Nick Barraclough, ‘and they see local radio as
news bulletins with some waffle in between. So they were incredibly puffed up, self-important … and Chris was watching.’
In 1994 Morris told Melody Maker about a journalist he called Pat who ‘knew all the tricks, how to chat up the police, etc. One day, he came rushing into the studio, shouting, “Chris, Chris, you’ve gotta listen to this: ‘Police are out in force today as the county’s roads serve up their traditional pre-Christmas cocktail of carnage.’” I said, “Pat, you can’t say that.” When he did the news, he read, “The roads have served up their traditional pre-Christmas menu of mayhem,” smiled at me through the glass, and carried on.’16
Nick Barraclough promoted Morris’s promising show to Trevor Dann, who presented a Sunday-night show on Radio Cambridgeshire for new and alternative music. At thirty-five, he was an established name with a career including stints as a Radio 1 producer and on BBC2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. Within five years, as one of the managers tasked with founding the BBC’s London station GLR in 1988, he would be on the lookout for DJs with distinctive styles – by which time Chris Morris would have stepped a considerable distance along the hard way.
Even at Radio Cambridgeshire, Morris was evolving a clear idea of how he wanted to work, as fellow presenter Valerie Ward discovered when they briefly collaborated on an arts programme. ‘I think they thought that, as I wanted to produce and Chris was keener on presenting, we would make a good team,’ she says. ‘We didn’t. I wanted to write everything, script it, time it, craft it, include interviews and location packages. Chris just wanted to go with the flow.’ They tried to work separately and bring their pieces together. But by the time they met, Morris had often still not decided what he wanted to do. ‘I was reduced to tears,’ says Ward. Ian Masters recalls, ‘Even then Chris’s approach to broadcasting was out of the ordinary. Some people asked me if he was a little too “zany”. My response was always that I would rather have broadcasters who tried new approaches – even if those approaches failed sometimes. I liked his bright tongue-in-cheek style and his wry humour.’
Morris would use listeners who called in as props for his own sense of humour, rather than draw out their own stories. He wasn’t unkind, but he wasn’t patient. ‘I think he did find it hard to put himself in other people’s shoes perhaps,’ says Rachel Sherman. ‘He was always one step ahead of them, but that wasn’t always funny. Sometimes that was a problem. He can make you feel stupid even though he’s not meaning to. If you aren’t very secure in yourself, if you don’t feel up to matching what he’s doing, you could end up feeling a bit pathetic.’
His style was more readily understood by his colleagues. Morris would enthusiastically bound around the studio and had a flippant, public-school sense of fun which made him a popular figure. The absurd constraints of time and budget on the station encouraged a black humour in the creative teams which, as he had on the market stall, Morris fitted into comfortably. He employed his observational skills to capture almost everyone in the station perfectly and without mercy. Ian Masters’ headmasterly style and tendency to be pompous made him a particularly rich source of humour for Morris in evening pub sessions. It was only a year or so after Morris joined that he gave a devastatingly cruel and accurate impersonation during a speech on the occasion of Masters leaving, which marked him out among such colleagues as Trevor Dann as someone brimming with comic talent and potential. His confidence was reflected in his appearance, which was usually relaxed and individual, and even when he seemed more interested in what he was wearing he never tried to make a statement and was certainly not a follower of trends. He favoured Harris Tweed jackets and pinstripe or sometimes outlandish paisley shirts, occasionally with bow ties and a blazer, Viv Stanshall-style. He was engaging with friends and always wanted to know what they were doing, why they were doing it and who they were doing it with. ‘Which is a rare thing in his business,’ says Nick Barraclough, who had quickly established what would become an enduring friendship with Morris. ‘Normally people just talk about themselves.’ Chris was genuinely curious. But when he opened his mike to address, largely, the housebound and afflicted of Cambridgeshire, all of that remained hidden.
‘He could never let down the front,’ says Barraclough. ‘He was always playing a part when he was broadcasting. I don’t think he could ever just be him, really. The thing about local radio is that you’ve got to put your personality across and you’ve got to disrobe everything. If you don’t open up, then you’ll be no good at all, and Chris is by definition any number of people except himself.’ It would always be hard for close friends to work out how much of that broadcasting persona was worked out in advance and what was simply down to how he felt on any particular day. Perhaps he didn’t even have it all figured out himself. ‘They just thought I was being ironic,’ he later said of those early days, ‘and I don’t quite understand why.’17
Dawn Burford was not won over by his style. She thought her driving partner was full of himself. It wasn’t right that he was so offhand with the public, she insists – that despite the fact that many of the audience had, even in her own words, the intelligence ‘of a broom handle’, the staff should make allowances. She remembers being dispatched in the radio car to cover a craft fair where stallholders would be eager to discuss their crocheting and knitware with the smart young types from the BBC. Morris was horrified. ‘What are we doing here?’ he said to Burford despairingly. ‘It’s full of smelly old women. I can’t do this.’ He dumped the recording gear on her and, she says, ‘sodded off for a bit’. It was almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whatever his destiny held, he seemed to know even then, it wasn’t smelly old ladies, although they would provide material for On the Hour. The ‘Look Around Your Region’ sections would be the heartfelt pokes he delivered at the parochial stories he was doing for real as a young journalist in Cambridgeshire, featuring ‘Bang on Target’ with ‘Michael Bang’ and headlines such as ‘Hopping lessons for Timmy the amputee badger’ and ‘How far are we from Kent today?’
A phone call to Radio Cambridgeshire from anyone who appeared to be more on the wavelength of the young staff was always a cause for celebration in the studio. Morris had been at the station for something like eighteen months when a sixteen-year-old named Paul Garner called in to a competition. He sounded naturally funny and was soon helping out in the studio. It was the start of a friendship and occasional working association between the two that would last years. Garner’s primary interest lay in music rather than comedy, and as he planned to make it in the music business he was far from overawed by what Morris was doing and brought an unaffected freshness to his weekend job. But he quickly learned to respect Morris’s professionalism. He once came in with a tape of something stupid he’d done and mistakenly played it on a tape machine that interrupted a serious programme. Always imposing, Morris was suddenly a furious figure. Though the storm passed quickly, Garner says, ‘I remember being quite frightened of him.’
In later years it would be reported that Morris’s own tendencies to cause mischief started at Radio Cambridgeshire. But he was still learning. There simply wasn’t the scope to mess around at the under-resourced station and though friends and colleagues have heard all about the stories – often repeated in press profiles – of him filling studios with helium and being fired, in interview they all say that while they are sure it happened, it wasn’t there. But it was only a matter of time before he broke out from the budgetary and creative limitations of his first proper show.
In the spring of 1987 Morris sent a reel of his best work off for a position at the BBC station located, coincidentally, in his university town. Radio Bristol advertised for a ‘bright and lively broadcaster who can produce and present weekend sequence programmes with flair, pace and imagination … Salary around £10,000–£11,000’.18
In another coincidence, Morris already knew the man who would hire him, David Solomons, programme organizer at the station. The former sports reporter’s daughter Jane was a station assistant at Radio
Cambridgeshire, where she was going out with Morris. Yet though it was an appointment which might appear to be a clear case of industry nepotism, quite the reverse was true. Morris’s engine was fuelled by a powerful dislike of unfairness and hypocrisy in all their forms. Colleagues at Radio Cambridgeshire remember that he took against his fellow young recruit Emma Freud simply because it was said she’d got work experience at the station only after her father, local MP Clement Freud, had asked Ian Masters. It seems a minor offence – the media is after all rife with far more breathtaking crimes of family, and Emma Freud became a talented broadcaster in her own right – but it was enough to ensure that Morris never quite got on with her. Some years later he contributed an occasional column for the London Evening Standard, then edited by a relative of his later partner Jo Unwin, a fact picked up on by Private Eye and reported by them in typically arch style. He immediately wrote to the magazine to confirm the piece and volunteer the story of his earlier connection with his employers at Bristol. ‘Mr Yentob!’ he added in a plea to the controller of BBC1. ‘Have you a child for me?’19
Quite apart from anything else, Morris’s ability and potential on the demo tape were proof enough of his capability. David Solomons had told Broadcast magazine that he was looking for someone ‘able to take a sideways look at life’.20 Morris’s style – edgier and more irreverent than most – was exactly what they were looking for. Jane remembers that her father was impressed by Morris as a broadcaster: ‘I think he greatly admired his imagination, daring and creativity,’ she says.
Jane Solomons was born in Yeovil, Somerset, and studied at Reading University. She was also new to the industry and at Radio Cambridgeshire had become aware of Morris gradually as he took on more shifts before they started to go out together. In interview she is guarded in her description of their relationship, almost as if it were one in which there was more companionship than passion, though they were committed enough to remain a couple even after he got the job at Bristol. For a while it would be a distance relationship, as Solomons had to get work in the area and to sell her Cambridge home before she could move to be with him in the West Country.
Disgusting Bliss Page 5