Though Bannister or someone from his office would review the show before it went out, quite a lot of material was live and Morris always reworked and edited the shows to the last minute. Bannister remembers this meant he could drop in surprises which they might not have a chance to hear, ‘thereby pushing us all into a kind of hysterical situation where we had to agree the material or we didn’t and there would be no programme to go out’. Bannister listened to the 6 July show at 9 p.m. while driving home, and the first line was one he hadn’t heard before.
‘This is BBC Radio 1 FM and if there is any news on the death of Michael Heseltine in the next hour, we’ll let you know,’ said Morris.
‘Very, very quickly, the studio telephone rang and it was News, trying to find out if there was something we knew that they didn’t,’ says Oliver Jones. ‘And after that, it was a matter of fielding all the phone calls and explaining and all the rest of it.’
BBC News were on the phone to Bannister the moment he got through his front door, and calls continued to come in until late that evening. Recalling the tricky aftermath in interview, Bannister is characteristically good humoured and it’s only at one point that his voice – his tones inflected with classic BBC warmth and measure – registers irritation. He disagrees rather pointedly with the suggestion that Morris only implied the death by saying ‘if there is any news’, observing sharply that none of the callers he fielded were in the mood to argue the semantics. Particularly not 10 Downing Street. That Morris wasn’t making a serious attempt at a hoax became irrelevant in the storm that followed the broadcast, but there was only one occasion on which he explicitly said that Heseltine was dead, in the course of soliciting a tribute from ‘close personal friend and colleague and bass player of The Jam, Bruce Foxton’. There could be few listeners who wouldn’t have thought there was something odd about hearing the bassist asked for his reaction and giving a stunned ‘Really?’ while Morris adds with discernible glee: ‘hit the ground screaming, yeah’. There had been enough clues in the first few minutes of the broadcast alone, including Toni Basil chanting ‘Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine’. But the nuances of what Morris did were of little consequence as Heseltine – quite possibly for the first time in his career – found himself the subject of sympathy and spirited defence in the press.
An inquiry was launched: ‘Some of the pre-recorded material was heard in advance and some of it was not,’ the BBC said carefully. ‘That is the focus of the investigation.’72
Morris expressed surprise at the coverage and responded to the accusations of going too far: ‘If I thought that, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d do it again, only better.’73 Matthew Bannister was at heart a fan, but he knew that he would have to be seen to be doing something. Not for the first or last time, he went to Morris’s agent. ‘Matthew used to go absolutely mental with me,’ says Chiggy, ‘if something had gone wrong. There would be a major kind of shouting.’ But rarely did any action follow the bollocking – a feature of the telling off which Chiggy also recognized in Trevor Dann and others who were essentially Morris’s champions. ‘They’re the people who’ve got a little bit of Chris in them,’ she says. Even Morris, for all his Bannister baiting, admired him for having a ‘miscreant child inside him’.74
After Heseltine, though, Bannister was pushed to hand out a more tangible punishment. With some irony, the moment he had to deliver it happened to fall when he was on a particularly dull BBC management away day, feeling like the corporate lackey Morris always accused him of being on such occasions because he knew it annoyed him. He had to tell Morris over the phone that he was suspended from Radio 1 for two weeks and all future shows were to be pre-recorded.
‘He seemed kind of resigned to it,’ says Matthew Bannister. ‘He didn’t strike me then as being angry about it. He seemed to understand what it was that I was doing and why I was doing it.’ It was rather differently experienced in Morris’s camp, remembers Rebecca Neale: ‘Oh, Chris was furious that he wasn’t live,’ she says. ‘He thought it was ridiculous and he was pissed off.’
Bannister had to write a letter of apology to Heseltine and the Guardian reported, ‘“Dead” Heseltine gets BBC apology after Radio 1 spoof backfires.’75
‘Most of what I do isn’t that troublesome,’ Morris pointed out in an interview that marked his readmittance to Radio 1. ‘It’s just the one per cent. You don’t set out to run over 160 sacred weasels one by one, otherwise you end up desperately trying to shock, like Richard Littlejohn. They know I’m contracted to Christmas, I want to carry on and so I wouldn’t destroy my own rostrum. They probably sense that if I was forbidden to do something, a malevolent old man in my subconscious would goad me on to do it.’76 The pre-recording made little material difference to the production of the show, which was recorded the night before broadcast so it could be vetted, but they did it as if it were still live. ‘It would take about an hour and ten minutes to record an hour’s programme,’ explains Oliver, ‘to allow Chris to restart a disc or whatever … We would race through.’
The new regime didn’t guarantee the programme’s safety, though it was only towards the very end of the run that an item caused offence again – and it would be one of the shortest clips, a spoof of celebrity endorsements which would be played as programme jingles. Morris scripted phrases that he deftly re-edited to make the stars say things they’d never intended.
‘I’m Alice Cooper,’ he got Alice Cooper to growl. ‘Isn’t Sybil Ruscoe a twat?’
‘I’m Whigfield,’ explained Whigfield, ‘and I think Naomi Campbell has a gravel fanny disorder.’ Paul Garner went out hunting celebrities at an event promisingly entitled Night of Two Hundred Stars. His first attempt failed when actor Robert Wagner quickly scanned through the phrases. He declined to read them. ‘You’re trying to get me to say I take coke,’ the Hart to Hart man pointed out with some accuracy. With just 199 other stars to choose from, Garner zeroed in on Petula Clark. He improvised a few innocent lines that Morris later reordered into something far more suggestive that proved to be a cut-up too far. Clark sued the BBC over what the Mail on Sunday breathlessly reported was a ‘sex tape’.
The series concluded on Boxing Day with a two-hour festive special, and the shows were never repeated. The Heseltine and Petula Clark moments provided the most publicity, but overall they were among the least creative examples of a series that was characterized by ambitious invention. Morris had fused music, humour and reality into scenarios that were often beautifully grotesque. Unfolding in the chat between records over the hour, the tales were like miniconcept albums, and their subject matter would have given the moral guardians of the press far greater concern than the fake obituaries if only they hadn’t been so subtly introduced into the shows. But as skilfully as much of the material was often presented, there was also a strong current of basic delight in the tradition of smuggling rude stuff past the nation’s moral guardians, back to the 1950s and 1960s when the BBC’s list of proscribed phrases included ‘winter draws on’ and still further to the music-hall era when ‘I sits among the cabbages and leeks’ drew the attention of the censors. Morris was drawn to the instinctive, mischievous laugh. With Peter Baynham and Paul Garner by his side, he was able to cover all bases.
The shows also provided a useful signpost in their style to what Morris would later do with Blue Jam and in their choice of topics and celebrity interviews more immediately to what he was about to start working on for television. What became Brass Eye would prove tortuously difficult to create, a show that in many different ways should not have been filmable and was certainly not broadcastable.
8
BLATANTLY HIDING THE GROUND
THE CONCEPT BEHIND FEEDBACK REPORTS FORMED THE backbone of Chris Morris’s shows from his first starring role in No Known Cure all the way to Brass Eye. Their mischievous blend of elaborate fabrication and mockery flavoured everything he did. He could tell with a glance on the street who would provide a good response to what he made sound like a pressing so
cial question of the day without actually making the slightest bit of sense. When he gave the idea its first outing on television in an obscure and shortlived 1990 satellite TV show called Up Yer News, his high hit rate intrigued director Peter Kessler. He asked how Morris knew which member of the public would give the response he was looking for. ‘Just stand and wait and watch,’ Morris told him, ‘and when the right one comes along, you know.’ Kessler says, ‘He was very, very insistent indeed about picking the right people to talk to … And he basically stepped out and went for the right people.’
‘And if they’re unknown, it moves the focus from the person being set up to what the fuck is being said,’ Morris explained in 1994. ‘Part of the point is the sheer randomness of those people – from vicars to builders. You’re undermining any talking head on TV by showing them talking bollocks with apparent authority. And the whole of the media is a deception, everything that happens is a deception, cloaked in coded statements – a pay rise, a sacking, whatever. I can’t stand that high-handed attitude that there’s a proper way to behave. Everyone’s fucking about. You’re just displaying it.’77
Having refined his technique on the streets of Bristol and London, Morris used it in his celebrity interviews. Of everything he did, they attracted the most attention, whether praise or criticism. They were an exposure of sloppy thinking and self-promotion. Or they were cruel and cheap. His anger was scouring. Or he was a misanthrope who preyed mercilessly on those who gave their time to talk to him. Morris saw the set-up as very straightforward: ‘In everything I do there are enough clues, you’re challenging the situation to collapse by getting stupider. They’re given a fair chance to say “fuck off”,’ he said.’78 Few people did so at the time, although famous victims used their access to the media to say it loudly and publicly after they saw the shows go out. Accusations of unfairness dominated the headlines, obscuring what made his verbal traps so effective – their lining of rich and imaginative detail.
Virtually every premise Morris offered had at least one element in it that looked as if it might be true. And that was generally good enough for most people to overlook the fact that his questions were nothing more than gateways to a mad world – albeit one with its own internal and consistent logic. The breathtaking aspect of the interviews was the readiness with which people stepped into the alternate existence with him. His fierce criticism and satire on the media and its audience were the most discussed aspects of his work, but they would surely have been unremittingly bleak had it not been for the colourful absurdities he created in his least celebrated role – that of accomplished storyteller.
He had identified the way in which people can be susceptible to a mutant folklore, that they could be convinced to accept almost anything as long as it confirmed the long-held suspicions they’d always had about the way things were. His experience in local radio had taught him that even less encouragement was needed to get people to expound on big social issues, the instinctive collective fear that barbarians are around the corner. Morris was sparing in his suggestions, and respondents enthusiastically filled in the rest for him, condemning ‘gut festivals’ or the cruelty of ‘hinges on dogs’.
One couple expressed horror on his radio show about ‘this so-called fashion for blatantly hiding the ground’, and they were typical of his respondents. There was an easy laugh to be had at their expense, but what made the interview so memorable was how far they travelled down the rabbit-hole with Morris. He engaged with them sympathetically throughout and allowed their personalities to come through, she forthright, he slightly reserved. They need no prompting to declare it is kids who hide the ground. Somewhere in the murky confusion kicked up by Morris was a tethered sliver of a solid concept, unspoken, that even if the yobs who populate news headlines weren’t really out there hiding the ground, you felt sure they would if they could. And that was almost enough to make it true.
‘Let me put to you, at least in the mind, in this rather grim scenario,’ Morris asks them in Michael Buerk mode, ‘you open the front door, the ground’s been blatantly hidden … What could happen to you?’
Understanding exactly where he’s leading, she responds, ‘We should perish, shouldn’t we?’
‘Rather horribly,’ confirms Morris.
‘Yeah.’
Peter Kessler describes the quality that Morris was looking for in members of the public as that of ‘being vague enough in their mind to answer in the right way’, an echo of Robert Katz’s description of their monologue characters of GLR and Blue Jam as ‘fuzzy-headed’. Both the interviews and the stories explore in their different ways the arbitrary way reassuring smears of sense and logic are imposed on the terror and chaos of life and how easily that layer can be revealed to be a fiction. Few props were required for the feedback reports. The set-ups were more elaborate in Brass Eye, but basically Morris needed little more than the fig leaf of a microphone, a pleasant speaking voice and the natural presence which meant he could hold his subject through a mixture of willpower and sheer height. He exploited the natural willingness that people have to help and to feel useful, despite not knowing anything of what it is they’re talking about. His credibility was rarely questioned, no matter how far he pushed it, playing with accents and delivery, even emphasizing words with a little bleat – nothing broke the spell. The power of the pieces was all verbal, and no concessions were made to the visual format when they appeared on The Day Today as Speak Your Brains. Morris was always almost out of sight, or half visible from behind, always suited, occasional bow tie glimpsed. He seemed very reassuring.
Celebrities were no more resistant to the lure of his convincing storytelling. Gary Numan appeared on one of the Radio 1 shows to condemn fox-hunting, and Morris mentioned that his call would help provide protective clothing for foxes. Immediately, Numan switched from taciturn rock star to a delighted innocent, though he says he’s never heard of such fox-wear. Morris has a ready explanation – safety material as worn by chainsaw operators. But how do you get foxes to wear it? Morris likens the process to trout tickling – hunt saboteurs move in a circular fashion around the fox, so it can’t tell where they’re coming from. Numan audibly brightens at this notion, and there is something endearingly playful in the way he seems to have ended up in a better place at the end of his call, surrounded by bright-eyed fox cubs in sunlit meadows, gambolling safely in their extra-small-size Kevlar jackets.
Morris called on a seemingly limitless supply of such vivid imagery to slather his work in thick pseudo-authenticity. His scripted scenes were equally rich. In 1997’s Brass Eye there is the staged ‘modern drugs party’ which he wanders through, spilling out in a minute enough substance-abuse gags to keep most other shows going for a series. As he delivers his apocalyptic summary of drug-fuelled mid-1990s decadence you might even miss the final throwaway bilingual pun, ‘This decade is not so much the neinties as the Ja danketies’, if you were concentrating on the special effect of Morris being rolled up into a syringe and injected through the top of the screen into the next scene.
Even those ideas that came from contributors and colleagues rather than from Morris himself were, as writer Jane Bussmann points out of Brass Eye, all filtered through him so that however disparate the suggestions, they had a focus, what she calls a ‘clarity of voice, it has a loud voice. That’s the reason it stays good.’ He was open to inspiration from anywhere, though it was also true that there were certain areas that he would frequently revisit. When Peter Baynham had had to prove himself in his first The Day Today meeting, he had no way of knowing he’d done himself a great favour with his outbreak of horses on the London Tube. Zoology graduate Morris had long been obsessed with the comic potential of animals, particularly ‘the horse’ as slang for heroin. Bovine comedy was another fascination – spherical cows regularly rolled over his horizon, and in his brief guest appearance on I’m Alan Partridge Morris’s character is farmer Peter Baxendale-Thomas, furious at the inane slurs Partridge has made on the conditions in which
he keeps his cattle. ‘This is exactly the sort of rubbish you came up with the other day,’ he says, ‘when you talked about putting a spine in a bap.’
In Blue Jam, freed from the frameworks of interviews and parodies, Morris whispered his nightmare confirmation of the world being much stranger than it appears to be directly into the listener’s ear, giving his favourite preoccupations their fullest expression. Lions were set free in the suburbs by unconcerned residents. Neighbours fell out over the nuisance of a pet giant living in the garden. The quality of being ‘vague enough in the mind’ that Morris had used in Feedback Reports was taken to its furthest reaches: the unlikely notions that he once got real people to comment on could be performed by the characters in his sketches. The lines dividing what for them was real, what was imagined and what was a strong belief became ever more blurred until they disappeared entirely into the exploration of the powerful and persuasive imagery conjured by depression, illness and mortality. And for the GPs’ son the essential unreliability of figures of authority was characterized by regular consultations with a doctor whose ‘What seems to be the problem?’ presaged a diagnosis as sympathetic as it was complete nonsense.
The subtle skill that Morris showed in storytelling went entirely unappreciated by the celebrities he caught out. But their fury and sense of humiliation in some ways provided their own tribute to the strength of his stories. He didn’t hide behind a comic personality they could say they had felt they had to indulge. It was essentially his words and his lightning responses, leaving them raw and exposed from the mental equivalent of an abrasive rub-down with a wire brush. Very few celebrities would look back fondly on their experience. It was a contrast to the traditions of satire. Public figures lampooned on Spitting Image were said eventually to have asked if they could have their puppets to keep at home. Back in the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan regarded his tormentors with a tolerance that bordered on affection. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy asked him whether he thought the US should invade and Macmillan stalled for time. He later confided to his diary that but for the deadly seriousness of the situation the dialogue sounded ‘just like a revue called Beyond the Fringe which takes off the leading politicians’.79 There was no such cosiness with Morris. Even given the years that have passed since Brass Eye, no celebrity who had been successfully taken in would be interviewed for this book.
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