But he was less successful in an attempt to get the Today programme to feature an item about cows coming back to life – it was close, though. Morris called the Radio 4 news programme early one morning shift posing as a freelance reporter from the West Country. His Ted Maul-style character was very much like one of the many real-life local reporters who would try the Today show in the hope that selling a story would be a way out of regional broadcasting. It was quite a good way of sneaking an item on the programme, as the approaches tended to be looked on favourably by the show’s editors as a way of deflecting criticism of the BBC as being London-centric. Morris and other cast members reported on a herd of cattle which had mysteriously revived at an abattoir after slaughter. No cause was given and the dread acronym ‘BSE’ was never mentioned, but it didn’t need to be. An inevitable, if unconscious, link would be made over the panic about British beef which was still in the headlines when On the Hour was recording in May 1992. From mad cow disease to undead cow sickness – not so far-fetched in twitchy times. It was a bank holiday, a thinner day for news, and the night editorial team were convinced.
Then assistant editor Rod Liddle arrived. He was later an editor himself of the show and someone who would become involved in his own brand of BBC controversy during the second Gulf War. But he took one look at ‘undead cows’ on the running order and spiked the story – he had no way of knowing who was responsible, that he’d outsmarted the man he would himself later cite in a Time Out interview as the ‘only genius’ working in broadcasting.
The fake eventually entered Today legend and was still being talked about when the 1992 team gathered for the retirement of their former editor, Phil Harding, in 2007, when the reminiscing turned not to the end of Communism, the first Gulf War or any of the other global stories of the time, but to the ghostly cows from the West Country. Editor Harding could look back on a thirty-eight-year BBC career during which he’d run the World Service, but he himself admitted while laughing that he would have had to resign from Today had the story made it through.
The series finished in the only way it could, with Morris’s announcement that the show was taking over Radio 4 entirely and for ever for 24-hour ‘permanews’. On the Hour had immediately established itself as a classic. ‘The most brilliant radio comedy to emerge in the last ten years,’ said the Independent in May, which highlighted the way it combined ‘flashes of hallucinatory wit with dazzlingly plausible imitations of the tropes of radio news’.27
‘I should really remember the date: it was a Saturday morning last summer. I was in bed, dismal at the prospect of Loose Ends,’ wrote James Hepburn in The Times. ‘As I reached for the “off” button, a voice like Trevor McDonald’s on the plains of Armageddon announced that this was On the Hour. Thirty minutes later, I was gazing at the radio with much the same feeling that Keats must have had on first reading Chapman’s Homer.’28 To the delight of doomed, consumptive poets everywhere, On the Hour won in the Best Radio comedy category of the 1992 British Comedy Awards.
In the wake of the series the long-running disagreement between Morris and Victor Lewis-Smith reignited. It was claimed that Lewis-Smith had complained to the controller of Radio 4 that Morris was being given more freedom than him to do pranks that pushed at BBC guidelines. Morris obligingly did his bit to keep the bad feeling festering: ‘He’s like an unofficial publicity agent who takes great pains to put my name in print whenever he can. It will run and run until he has a heart attack,’ he said that summer, ‘and falls flat on his fat face.’29
The mutual dislike had previously bubbled up into public view in Time Out’s letters page in late 1990 in a spat over who had originated comic broadcasting techniques and ideas. Lewis-Smith declared in one of the broadsides, ‘It is an ineluctable fact of media life that for every Coke there is a Pepsi. While I am the first to admit that I am no Château Margaux Premier Cru, I like to think of Chris Morris as the Babycham to my Mateus Rosé.’30
‘I object most strongly to Victor Lewis-Smith’s recent use of the word “ineluctable”,’ began one ‘Massingberd Stitt’ from W1 the following week. ‘Such magniloquent gasconism frankly raises the dander and my fellow symposiasts agree that this whimwham of an adjective sounds spoony and sticks in the craw like a probang.’31 Matthew Bannister observed the skirmishing from a safe distance at the top of GLR. ‘It definitely seemed like a passionate feud, six of one, half a dozen of the other,’ he says now. Like others, he heard stories of Lewis-Smith scrawling Morris-unfriendly graffiti outside the station, but he had never seen it himself.
After On the Hour, Lewis-Smith said he was resigned to never receiving a sympathetic hearing from bosses. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘You take a tape into somebody’s office and say, “Listen to this – that man’s a thief!” And they look at you and think, This is somebody with an obsession.’ The Guardian featured the rivalry in its Feud’s Corner column in June 1992.
But the arguments between the two were harmless by comparison with another, potentially more damaging, disagreement which was opening up closer to On the Hour’s home. The root of the problem was also partly what helped the show to be so remarkable – the collaborative, improvisational approach. Collectively, everyone did well, but individually it was harder to credit each contributor.
This was increasingly a worry for Stewart Lee and Richard Herring who, together with their formidable agent Jon Thoday, wanted to clarify credits. If the show went on tour, then they should be able to say how much they owned of such characters as Alan Partridge. The situation was further complicated by a personality clash between the pair and Patrick Marber, who had started to contribute his own material to the show. Yet over the summer the three were still getting on well enough for them to collaborate on what would be called the Dum Show. They took it to the Edinburgh Festival with Steve Coogan and fellow comedian Simon Munnery.
Morris, meanwhile, showed no more desire than he’d had in his early twenties to perform comedy live. While the others prepared to storm Scotland, he released a record of a few sketches on a Select music magazine freebie. He often included music parodies on his DJ shows, and among the offerings to the magazine’s indie and alternative readership was an affectionate Pixies take-off – the incestuous tale of ‘Motherbanger’. Although he always wrote the words and music himself for such items, they were often recorded in the studio of former Bristol University student Jonathan Whitehead. They had got to know each other better over the years and Morris had often stayed at his place in Shepherd’s Bush when he’d been commuting from Bristol. Whitehead would work with him throughout the 1990s on the musical aspects of his shows.
Jonathan Whitehead had started his career harbouring a desire to be a serious composer, influenced by Stockhausen and John Cage, and also made an abortive attempt at establishing himself in the pop world. Realizing he was never going to write a chart-topper, Whitehead learned music production techniques and set about building a career in broadcast music. His background and training helped his role with Morris, assisting with the technical aspects of capturing the feel of a band. Just as it was all about close observation in Morris’s news parodies, here it was all about the detail of the sound, referencing at least two or three songs. Morris didn’t see a comic song as a quick filler. His songs sounded like something the target artist might do on a particularly demented day in the studio, suggesting their essence with little more than a brief sketch.
‘Musically, they somehow got compressed,’ explains Whitehead. ‘There would never be a whole verse just to get it to a certain length. It was always cut up, so you had very fractured structures that were very compact, just to get across the maximum amount of gags in the shortest amount of time.’ In ‘Motherbanger’ there was a brief ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ vocal breakdown: ‘My mother gummed my weapon.’ Like many of the bands Morris picked on, the Pixies were a real favourite of his and the affection helped to underpin the spoof with a sense of authenticity.
While Select was running Morris
’s work on its front cover, the Dum Show was making its way to Edinburgh, ‘and therein begins the nightmare,’ says Patrick Marber. ‘There was a violent disagreement between me and Richard Herring. I thought he was a brilliant writer, but there was one sketch in which I thought Steve should play the part that Richard was playing. He got very upset, very angry with me, understandably, because it was hurtful, what I said, but I just felt it was true. I thought he was ruining his own sketch … Anyway, it all kicked off.’
The Guardian review was almost literally correct in observing of the show, ‘Inside this imaginative yet fundamentally flawed showcase are two incisive writers (Richard Herring and Simon Munnery), a pair of adept stand-ups (Stewart Lee and Patrick Marber) and an amusing impressionist (Steve Coogan) all fighting each other to get out.’32 It didn’t help, as far as Herring was concerned, that Marber spent the rest of his time directing Coogan’s show Steve Coogan in Character with John Thomson. Coogan had a well-rehearsed show, designed to showcase his character work, which won that year’s Perrier Award. Having struggled for so long to define himself as more than an impressionist, he had finally arrived.
Their colleague’s success did nothing to dissipate the rancour between Marber and Herring and Lee. For a while Patrick Marber was a frequent target in their double act. ‘I still see him every now and again,’ says Herring now. ‘He’s not someone I have great affection for, but I don’t hate him as much as we make out.’
Lee and Herring were still on good terms with Armando Iannucci and back in London got him to appear on their Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World that autumn. For his part, Iannucci enjoyed appearing in a show he wasn’t writing, so he could just turn up and be funny, ‘just the opposite of thinking about everything’. On the Hour had been such an intensive project that many of its participants went with relief to shows that lent themselves more to being performed than assembled. For Morris the reverse was true. He actively preferred to be away from it all in the studio. ‘He enjoyed his writing and he does his stuff himself,’ explains Iannucci, ‘but it takes us to tell him that he’s actually very good at all the voices and characters he does. He just feels that’s something he does.’ The GLR shows were all he needed.
Morris was absent from Knowing Me, Knowing You … with Alan Partridge, which began on Radio 4 in December 1992. Lee and Herring’s falling out with Patrick Marber and the dispute over credits meant they weren’t involved either. Yet it would be Alan more than anyone else who facilitated the team’s crossover from admired cult comedy to mainstream success. Alan was put forward for his own series even before the TV version of On the Hour.
The tone of Knowing Me … was lighter than On the Hour, a welcome relief for its performers. If anything, the audience took the show more seriously than its creators, with several listeners assuming that the show was real. In the last episode, Patrick Marber’s Lord Morgan of Glossop dies mid-interview, and the dismayed complainers included a headmaster of a public school. Knowing Me, Knowing You won Best Radio Comedy in the British Comedy Awards in 1993 and won a Sony award that same year. Of all the cast, Steve Coogan was the most obvious contender for stardom. On the Hour’s sports reporter had effortlessly passed his anchorman in the celebrity stakes – which suited them both fine.
Chris Morris was absorbed in The Day Today when he returned to GLR for six Saturdays from April 1993. Those shows – his last ever for the station – were his equivalent of the lightness of Knowing Me, Knowing You. He was confident and playful, displaying no apparent hint of effort in the endless stream of ideas and gags. There was plenty in the shows that would make it into Morris’s 1994 series of Radio 1 shows, and there was also a precursor of the later Blue Jam series in the form of a monologue with a strange and desolate tone. The pieces were called Temporary Open Spaces and were read by Robert Katz. It was the start of an occasional writing collaboration that would last for years. Katz had come to Morris’s attention through what he describes as a ‘vaguely surrealist column’ he wrote in London listings magazine City Limits. The two met through Jo Unwin, then sharing a house with Katz’s girlfriend of the time. The stories they came up with had a distinct flavour that was unlike anything else Morris did.
They would be delivered in a flat tone, the backdrop London as an alien landscape peopled with heartless media drones and depressives seen through the sinking eyes of an everyman disassociated from everything he encounters, exploited by those he meets and adrift in the city. Robert Katz says that it was Morris who was interested in exploring the downbeat comedy of a ‘fuzzy-headed’ figure, someone running at a different speed from the world around him. The inspiration was ‘partly the result of banging on my “fuzzy head” to see what thin noises might come out’, says Katz, ‘but also developed from one or two other bodies we stole from the morgue of real-life characters’. The GLR pieces were sculpted by Morris to bring out that quality of otherness: ‘I seem to recall that Chris edited every intra-vocal breath out,’ Katz recalls, ‘so that there’s a strange hiatus between each single word.’ Morris had been thinking of a way in which to change the jaunty tempo of the GLR show, and Robert Katz fitted the bill to work with, although he downplays his contribution to the process. It was certainly an important shift in mood, flavouring much of what Morris would do towards the end of the 1990s with Blue Jam and its offshoots. In conversation by email, though, Katz is not unlike Morris himself, witty and friendly, but nevertheless guarded and considered in everything he discusses. He gradually opens up over time in a series of observations that are as thoughtful as they are frequently tangential, occasionally acerbic and entertainingly gnomic.
Emphasizing Morris’s ‘galaxy-sized mind’, Katz says that he ‘always had the vision and wrote and recorded the things to his satisfaction, and because he’s a genius 99 per cent of that is perspiration. His, not mine. It’s not false modesty; I was just thrilled to be able to do stuff with him.’ And yet even in such casual correspondence, Katz has a precise and evocative style which could itself be straight out of a Blue Jam sketch. Asked if he agrees that something of the flavour of GLR’s Temporary Open Spaces is at the core of the later shows, Katz says, ‘I guess you could say the monologues in Blue Jam formed a centre, but only because that’s where they physically are, in the middle of the shows, like a slow movement in a symphony, or a dead body lolling in the middle of a pond.’ It’s hard not to come away from a – typically oblique – email conversation with him without concluding that he was more central to the process than he admits.
Their work was going out on a station that was changing. For those who loved its bold remit and chaotic creativity, it wasn’t for the better. Matthew Bannister had left GLR in 1991 to develop the BBC’s royal charter renewal and Trevor Dann became the managing editor. But the BBC were determined to standardize regional stations and had enforced speech-only segments of the day.
Trevor Dann took redundancy in May 1993. It was the month in which Morris’s last few shows were going out, as he and Armando Iannucci continued to work on The Day Today over the rest of the year. Dann knew full well what he was letting himself in for when he invited Morris to talk at his leaving do. ‘I suppose you’re all expecting something funny,’ Morris said, ‘but I don’t do stand-up.’ He played a pre-recorded phone call he had made to the director general of the BBC, John Birt. ‘Could you take a message for him, please?’ he said in Trevor Dann’s distinctive Midlands tones. ‘Could you tell him I think he’s a big load of sloppery old bollocks.’ The following day Dann had to make a conciliatory phone call to Birt’s PA, who had been entirely convinced it was the genuine article.33 There was a similarly painful call to Radio 1 assistant controller Chris Lycett, who greeted ‘Trevor’ with a matey ‘Doctor Dann! How the hell are you?’ But as ‘Doctor’ Dann bid ever more shamelessly for the inside track to becoming what he called a ‘waggish’ Radio 1 DJ, an increasingly unhappy Lycett attempted to shuffle out of the brittle conversation, which seemed for tortuous minutes to prefigure the classic desperate
programme pitches of Alan Partridge’s. At length Lycett clambered out. ‘This isn’t Trevor Dann, is it?’ ‘You may be clever,’ said the counterfeit doctor over his victim’s repeated demands to know who he’s really talking to, ‘but you’re ugly.’
5
FACT X IMPORTANCE = NEWS
THE 1994 TRANSFER OF ON THE HOUR TO TELEVISION SHOULD have gone smoothly. The BBC had a proven hit on their hands, but BBC bureaucracy got in the way. They couldn’t possibly allow Iannucci and Morris the same sort of control over the show when it left radio. It would be out of the question, the duo were told, that they could run their own programme when they had no experience of television. It didn’t matter that much of the success of On the Hour had been down to their iron control – though as a concession, management told a distinctly unimpressed Armando Iannucci, he could have a script editing role. Morris and Iannucci decided they would rather take their show elsewhere than watch it slip away from them. It was a decision that the strengths of their partnership made far easier. ‘I’m not sure that I would have said “no” if I hadn’t been doing it with Chris,’ says Iannucci. It was a risk, because although they knew they had a good and tested format, they couldn’t be sure they would get someone interested to do it in the way they wanted. But if they were ever going to make the move away from the security of the BBC, now was the time. Chris Morris was only just thirty and neither of them yet had children.
But the hardest part of the decision for Armando Iannucci was leaving the organization he had worked for since university, where he had built a reputation as an excellent comedy producer. Now he was being effectively told that everything he did was somehow less accomplished because it was just radio and that television involved complexities that he just wouldn’t be up to. It was a short-sighted attitude, but one that was then commonly held at the BBC about radio production. Iannucci pointed management at the example of Dan Patterson, who co-created Whose Line Is It Anyway? on BBC radio and then took it to Channel 4. ‘Yeah,’ came the dusty response that was a clincher in Iannucci’s mind, ‘but if you look at the lighting on some of those Channel 4 shows, it’s not quite as good.’
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