Disgusting Bliss

by Lucian Randall

  But if there were tabloid headlines that went unused by either Iannucci or Morris, Steve Coogan was ready to take them up. For a while he was rarely out of the press, displaying a difference in personality which his colleagues regarded with a kind of awe and incomprehension. Patrick Marber and he were in outlook the complete reverse of their colleagues: ‘Were it not for the fact that he has this fantastic gift for comedy,’ said Iannucci, ‘Steve is fundamentally a guy who reads a lot of car magazines.’56 He and Marber were the most visible, very close and very eager to get on. ‘For a while it was kind of like a big brother/little brother relationship. I wouldn’t do anything without asking Patrick what he thought,’ said Coogan.57 And when Iannucci was being pulled between the radio Alan and The Day Today pilot, it was Patrick Marber who guided his friend and acted as a champion of the potential of Partridge. But as Alan peaked, their partnership, too, was beginning to wind down. Steve Coogan looked to Hollywood, and Marber began to concentrate on writing drama. ‘It’s been a great luxury to be able to think, Oh, I can write on my own,’ he said, ‘because when you’ve written collaboratively, you start to wonder whether you can do it any other way. I’m saying what I want to say about the world directly rather than filtering it through one of Steve’s characters, or one of my own.’58 By February 1995 he was directing his first play, Dealer’s Choice, at the National Theatre, whose Richard Eyre had been a fan of Alan Partridge and The Day Today. Eyre was interested in the transition Marber had made from comedy to drama. The play was first performed in the National’s studio and then transferred to the Cottesloe.

  ‘I know I couldn’t have ever written a single play had I not done On the Hour and The Day Today and Alan Partridge,’ says Marber. ‘It was all stuff that built up some sense of self in the world and a kind of confidence and a sense of who I might be as a writer which was absolutely formative in my brain.’ With Dealer’s Choice Marber had developed the writing voice he had always wanted, and its arrival was singled out in the Observer as a theatrical highlight of the year: ‘unbeatable ensemble acting’ and a ‘marvellous comedy debut’.59 By the time of I’m Alan Partridge, Marber was too busy with his theatrical career to work on it for long. With Marber on his way out, Peter Baynham was drafted in on the writing side.

  It was in I’m Alan Partridge that Morris at last made a guest appearance. Even then, Iannucci says, ‘It took a little bit of persuading,’ as Morris still wasn’t sure he’d be good at acting. But by then his own mark had been made with the safe engineering of Brass Eye into the world, and he had been developing his own material and style through three years of intensive work, operating undercover for most of one of them.

  7

  WHY BOTHER?

  THE RECORDING STUDIO IN WHICH PETER COOK AND CHRIS Morris sat was uncluttered. There were no scripts and no props, just the ever-present smog from Peter Cook’s cheap cigarettes and a couple of mikes on the table. The tape machines ran continuously in the control room where the sound engineers monitored the recording and Peter Fincham gazed through the window at the men whose expressions remained composed no matter how absurd their conversation. But of the two it was Peter Cook who needed the reassurance of an audience, glancing occasionally through the window to where the engineers, lost in the stream of invention, needed the prompt to remember where they were and smile back their approval. Morris never looked up. Still weeks away from the broadcast of The Day Today and by comparison hardly known, he was assured and confident even when the infinitely more experienced older comic tried a verbal ambush, which was quite a lot of the time.

  Why Bother? had been Peter Fincham’s idea. Peter Cook played his established character, dissolute rogue Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, discussing his life over the course of five conversations. The series went out over consecutive evenings from 10 January 1994, each broadcast lasting about ten minutes. Fincham did some preparatory work with Cook and played Morris a tape of him with comedy producer John Lloyd. Following an initial lunch meeting, work began at Aquarium Studios in Primrose Hill, north London. Cook travelled the short distance from his home in Hampstead, arriving on the first day with the address scribbled on the cover of a copy of Private Eye. The studio was in a mews with enough room for Morris to park his old Merc. And then they just got on with it.

  Accompanied by a supermarket bag of extra-strength lager, Cook ‘proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper’, Morris later told the Peter Cook Appreciation Society. ‘Really quite extraordinary.’60 A pilot edition was recorded at the beginning of 1993, with a handful of others taking place towards the end of the year. The sessions were all held in the afternoons, each lasting a few hours, and Morris remembered them as ‘very merry’.

  It was all improvised, though one of the initial areas for discussion had been around since On the Hour. It was an idea that had been taken on a particularly circuitous route in Morris’s imagination before finding its home in the third edition of Why Bother?, its journey providing an insight into how much development and reworking could go into Morris’s comedy. Steven Wells and David Quantick had suggested that the discovery of the fossilized remains of Christ as a small child would make a good headline for the Christmas special, for which it was smartly vetoed by Armando Iannucci.

  ‘You have to remember,’ said Iannucci as he discussed it with Morris. ‘I’m a guilty lapsed Catholic.’

  ‘But so am I,’ countered Morris.61

  Carol Smith remembers the disagreement. ‘Arm was adamant for it not happening – and not on Christmas morning!’ she says. ‘And I remember the two of them – and Chris is tall and Armando’s quite tiny – and Chris would argue that black was white if he thought it would get him what he wanted. And in the end I remember Arm going, “Just no.”’ So Morris made it a festive headline of his own for his GLR Boxing Day show in 1991. And yet there was clearly potential in the concept that went unexploited in such a brief news story. Where could Sir Arthur take the suggestion?

  ‘Now, in your address to the Royal Society tomorrow, you intend to reveal the fossilized remains of the infant Christ,’ said Morris. ‘How do you feel that will go down?’ Such a question could be a good way of shutting down many an interview. But while there was a pause – just a slight one – Peter Cook almost immediately leaped back to suggest that Jesus was ‘practising resurrection’, dropping dead and bringing himself back to life. Morris complemented the suggestion with: ‘A series of larvae?’ And then the invention really began. Each attempt at coming back to life would take the young son of God about six months; Japanese companies were interested in miniaturizing Jesuses so that anyone who wanted to find Christ but hadn’t got the time could get a real one posted through their letterbox. Predicting that the idea would lead to all sorts of BBC panics over blasphemy, Morris immediately decided, ‘That’s not going near anybody until seconds before transmission.’62

  Peter Fincham was thinking along similar lines. ‘I was listening to that going out on my car radio and thinking – I’ll never work again. The duty log at the BBC will be overwhelmed because it’s so blasphemous. But actually there were no complaints because I suspect hardly anyone heard it. It went out in a gap in the evening concert on Radio 3,’ he told Cook’s biographer Harry Thompson.63 And finally Morris had found a setting in which the once rejected notion could at last grow and an interview partner who could take it in surprising directions.

  Cook’s attempts to go off at tangents throughout Why Bother? were relentless, but Morris was drawn neither into attempting to outdo his ingenuity nor into indulging it. He cut those segments dead, playing the deadpan, brusque interviewer throughout. Rather than attempting to create a comic persona to play off Cook, he was efficient, busy and professional, emphasizing his youth and vitality over Sir Arthur’s declining powers. At times, Morris later said, he felt he was also interviewing Cook himself. And gradually a sort of narrative emerged, a sense of old Sir Arthur’s wicked life.

  Morris allowed Cook to invent the history th
rough his responses but also threw out blunt lines as a challenge. It was clear that Cook was not in the best of health – one day he had come in late to the session with a massive bruise on his arm following a fall at his home. Another interviewer might not have drawn attention to the condition out of politeness and a sense of deference to an ailing comedy giant; Morris made it an integral part of the interview, with frank references to the imminence of Sir Arthur’s death and the comic potential in the notion. ‘We did remark that you were never sure if he was going to turn up,’ Morris later said. ‘He always did, but you always thought you might just as easily get a call saying, “Sorry, he’s pegged it.” Because a knock on the arm doesn’t blow it up to the size of a leg unless the immune system is licking its wounds in its own corner.’64 Cook, no stranger to finding comedy in the human weaknesses of others, recognized the technique with a jolt, but he seemed to enjoy being so fully engaged and having to include his own mortality as part of the humour.

  Rather than record on digital tape, Morris preferred to use the studio’s few remaining reel-to-reel machines to record and edit the hours of material. The engineers watched him hacking away at the analogue tape, quietly horrified by the knowledge that no back-up recording had been made, on his insistence. Morris began work as soon as each recording session finished in the back of the studio, immediately discarding what he didn’t need on the floor around him. When he ran out of studio time, he took the tapes away to finish the edit.

  ‘ To some degree it’s Chris Morris’s construct … [He] turned often quite shapeless things into coherent pieces,’ Peter Fincham later said.65

  Each edition was shaped to focus on specific aspects of Sir Arthur’s life and work, including his stint as a Japanese prisoner of war, when he collaborated with the enemy and made himself rich through getting his fellow prisoners to build a railway for their captors. By the final episode, an expansive Sir Arthur had moved on to casually discuss his crack use: ‘The downside of this is you feel awful but the upside is you feel terrific.’

  The final session was devoted to recording introductions to set up the subject of each programme, and it was the only time when Morris worked out in advance what was going to be said. He spent some of the time in the control room, directing Cook to record links that would connect the various edits into complete stories.

  The shows were warmly received in the press. ‘Peter Cook impersonated a mad old peer so persuasively,’ said the Guardian, ‘that without forewarning I might have been fooled.’66

  It was a portrait that was as intimate and endearing as it was funny. And it felt true in the way that, rather than step around Peter Cook’s ill health, Morris had insisted so much on making it part of the comedy. ‘I like to meet somebody who treats me really badly,’ as Cook remarked at one point. Why Bother? concluded with the Radio 3 announcer saying, ‘Sir Arthur is not expected to live beyond May.’ Though Morris and Cook had talked of working together again, the prognosis proved to be only a few months out. Peter Cook died in January 1995, barely a year after the original broadcast. If Why Bother? then became one of the last examples of Cook’s vivid invention, it also showed him at his finest. Morris had elicited a classic performance and, though it’s probably just a hopelessly romanticized notion that simply comes as a result of Cook’s death, it seemed as if the broadcasts marked the stewardship of a certain kind of essentially English humour being passed down a generation.

  Following Why Bother?, Morris jumped BBC networks later in 1994, landing in Radio 1 for a series that marked his first appearance on the station since his one-off Christmas 1990 show. Back then, Radio 1 had been a rather conservative broadcaster, sticking with music and formats that hadn’t changed for years. But much had changed. Morris’s GLR boss Matthew Bannister had taken over as Radio 1 controller. Before he’d even started the job in November 1993, old-timers Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates resigned knowing, as everyone connected with the station did, that Bannister’s arrival was another salvo in the long-running battle to modernize Radio 1. The station was about to be remodelled into a younger, fresher, more innovative place that was better able to handle the likes of Blur, Oasis and Pulp, the harbingers of a resurgent mid-1990s music scene. In 1995 Chris Evans followed Chris Morris on to Radio 1, as he had on GLR, and was soon a national star, the perfect mouthy foil for the new wave of similarly self-confident musicians.

  Bannister’s strategy for the station included putting comedy alongside the music. It was a timely idea. In selling out Wembley Arena in 1993, Rob Newman and David Baddiel had prompted suggestions that comedy was the new rock ’n’ roll. The huge success of their generation of comics prompted greater interest in comedy throughout the country. And by the time it turned out that rock ’n’ roll was the new rock ’n’ roll, many acts would have been tried out on Radio 1 – with mixed results. Paul Merton, Angus Deayton and Lee and Herring were among those who had a Radio 1 slot, as did Armando Iannucci, his show including Dave Schneider, Peter Baynham and Rebecca Front. But the comedy was never fully integrated with the music. There was always a sense that the shows were made by comics who happened to be on a music station.

  ‘Matthew Bannister fired me at GLR, so he knows what I’m made of,’67 Morris declared at the start of 1994, which was at least half true. Bannister had left the station two years before Morris, but he did think of the GLR shows as a blueprint of how comedy on Radio 1 could be. But Morris’s light-hearted warning also proved to be absolutely correct. Bannister now says that of everything he faced at Radio 1 – listeners being lost as they had over the changes at GLR, increasingly public spats with Chris Evans and the often furious criticism of the new set-up – Chris Morris was always his single biggest headache and had far from the largest audience. And yet despite all the trouble, he was managing to do something innovative that Bannister recognised.

  Morris had usually worked his earlier DJ shows alone, but he had a small team on Radio 1. Producer Oliver Jones had been doing Danny Baker’s Radio 5 Live show a couple of years earlier when he got Morris in to provide cover. ‘I seem to remember in a rather pompous, self-important way that I urged people to get him,’ says Jones. ‘I certainly urged them to get him on Radio 5, but I must have said, “Look, if Chris ever comes to work at Radio 1 I want to work with him.”’ He’d played tapes of the show to his friend Rebecca Neale, a production assistant who offered to help out for free in the evenings on the Radio 1 show and was taken on for the whole run. Oliver Jones says, ‘My job was to make sure that management didn’t annoy Chris. Merely as a facilitator, mostly, and most producers in that kind of programme had a far more hands-on approach or would have to, and I kind of thought I’m not nearly as witty, not nearly as … I can’t think as tangentially as Chris can.’

  Morris had a regular foil for his most inventive material on the show in the form of Peter Baynham. After the initial meeting on The Day Today which had seemed to be so lacking in promise, the two had become friends and they created a succession of elaborate fantasies for the Radio 1 shows. Baynham would be deferential, frequently bullied and easily led, while Morris would deceive and hector him into getting in trouble, on the face of it a much less equal partnership than that which Morris had with Peter Cook, but no less hypnotic, and Baynham found it just as stimulating. Baynham and Morris gradually honed their material through informal chats which had a way of warping into disturbing imagery.

  ‘It’s very inspiring,’ says Baynham of the creative process. ‘Whenever I work with him, it makes my mind do that.’ He always felt that he could suggest anything and Morris would never make him feel foolish. There was never the macho atmosphere around their meetings which he had found in other jobs. ‘You get used to it,’ he says, ‘but I’ve never managed to develop a rhino hide when someone tells me something I’ve said is shit, but Chris doesn’t do that.’

  They had an easy bond together and a relaxed approach to working in Morris’s office, retiring to the roof when the weather was good enough. Morris worked up
the ideas later, pulling them together into more of a coherent form, and then they would go through them all again. ‘One of my happiest times working on anything, to be honest,’ Baynham revealed to the Evening Standard. ‘I do feel I ought to describe his office as a secret underground cave with dead writers nailed to wooden boards. But in fact we … have very enjoyable, demented conversations.’

  Morris reciprocated the compliment, calling Baynham ‘the funniest person I know. He probably roars perfectly formed jokes in his sleep. He’s an uncorkable geyser of nonsense, face bursting under the pressure of idiocy behind it. He’s extremely willing to go all the way down a dark alley and come out with his head dirty.’68

  In the show they would engage in what appeared to be unscripted DJ chatter that would quickly spin off into elaborate and highly polished comic riffs. On discussing a scientific report that had made the news by revealing that asteroids strike Jupiter with a force equal to 100,000 times that of a nuclear bomb, they agree that it’s hard to imagine what that must be like. They decide to think of a way of expressing it that makes more sense and Morris creates an extraordinarily vivid scene:

  The best way to do it is to think of it in human terms. I mean, if you imagine an 18-year-old girl in the Fens towards the end of the last century and she’s on the cusp of womanhood, yet retaining the natural beauty and God-given fragrance of Persephone. Her flaxen tresses are tugged playfully by the light June breeze which carries to us her coy, giggling, girly, gosling girl-giggles, like the sweetest mountain brook chattering over its pebbles. Imagine her standing on a bridge waiting for the 4.15 from Norwich. Blast of warning horn it comes. Girl body jump. Little child yet woman bump and splatter all over hot metal. Massive iron smash and pulp. Icky, ick it fly. Little brainy piece of purest teenage jelly meat flying across a whole field and landing on a squirrel’s face.