On occasion, Chris Morris’s supporters would invoke the name of Jonathan Swift in the press in defence of what he did, but if this was intended to reassure those who were already feeling foolish, it had the opposite effect. It invited the response that Swift’s subjects were more worthy, more appropriate, and that his style was better formed – altogether more acceptable. It seemed a rather pointless argument on both sides which didn’t go much further than to note that other people had done satire, too – Morris’s work by its nature would never be justified in terms of earlier writers. It had to stand on its own merits in the context of its own times. A more useful comparison to be made between the two as writers was in their lithe use of language and their ability to make scenes of fantasy live in the head as if they were real. And those were qualities that were more impressive and, in the end, made for more durable work than even the most fearless satire.
9
NOT SO MUCH THE NEINTIES AS THE JA DANKETIES
IN THE 1990S CHANNEL 4 BECAME ACCUSTOMED TO BEING accused by middle England of defending the indefensible. Minorities, sexuality and explicit foreign films (flagged up on screen with a red triangle) were served up with a teasingly obnoxious side order of The Word to earn boss Michael Grade the title of Britain’s ‘pornographer-in-chief’ in the Daily Mail. When Brass Eye began in 1997, the press needed little prompting to step up and take their partners for the Channel 4 moral-outrage two-step. Yet Brass Eye was different – though even its most outspoken critics didn’t seem to realize why. They hadn’t noticed that they didn’t need to construct an argument for the prosecution. The show simply broke the broadcasting code. Programme-makers were not permitted to mislead interviewees for entertainment. Channel 4 knew it when they commissioned it. Talkback knew it when they made it. And Chris Morris knew it when he conceived it. Brass Eye was his first solo TV show – and it really shouldn’t have been allowed.
Only news and current affairs could deceive interviewees and even then only if their makers could show it was part of an investigation in the public interest. The options in entertainment were much more limited. It was OK to set people up as long as your presenter confessed at the conclusion – what was called doing a reveal. Even then, you had to get people to sign a release form for the footage. Morris’s typically ingenious way around this was to prove that there was a public interest in exposing the way in which celebrities attached the respect and reputation of their names to anything that would get them on the television. In other words, there was no reason why a comedy couldn’t adopt the justification used by undercover journalism. Every aspect of the Brass Eye campaigns would be as ridiculous as possible and vulnerable to exposure by the most rudimentary checking. If a celebrity still willingly appeared on the show, they’d only have themselves to blame. That would – he hoped – provide the defence, albeit retrospectively. It was a high-risk strategy.
‘That was the rule: the letters we sent out, the letterheads, everything was stupid,’ said Morris.80 The tools of the deception were all shown on screen – the badly designed press releases of the bogus organizations, their T-shirts and coffee mugs with their inept logos. Even the names of Brass Eye’s campaigns were in themselves clues – Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and British Opposition to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs (FUKD and BOMBD). Its letterhead featured a huge syringe skewering three unhappy cartoon figures, the last of which was a glum little skeleton.
The letters were packed with spurious jargon – more clues – such as ‘zoochosis’ as an explanation for the plight of Karla the elephant, which had wedged her trunk up her own bottom. Morris was, he told colleagues, being generous to his interviewees by giving them the chance to read about what they were getting themselves into. They had more time to reverse out than was allowed by most prank shows. ‘Chris asked me how many people I thought genuinely gave consent,’ says controller of Channel 4 legal compliance Prash Naik of other shows. ‘They approach subjects on camera as soon as they’ve revealed. Some of those people feel under pressure to say “yes”, to appear to have a sense of humour.’
And the logical conclusion – at least for Morris – was that his setups were more honest in that he didn’t even ask permission. It would be argued instead that appearing on camera implied consent for broadcast. Only those interviews conducted in studio discussions had release forms, and even those said only that they would be used in an unspecified late-night Channel 4 show.
The case for justifying the show, if defence itself was impossible, was built slowly over the months of the show’s production. The question was: would it be convincing enough? They would know only when the series was broadcast.
It was a long time coming. The pilot was begun in early 1995, just after the conclusion of Morris’s Radio 1 shows, and absolute secrecy about the true nature of the show would have to be preserved for almost two years. Most importantly, the crew had to avoid interviewees making a connection between the various campaigning organizations and Talkback. For the most part, they were successful, after an initial hiccup involving the Kray twins. The pilot was then in the early stages of production for the BBC under the name Torque TV. Much of the material in the show formed the later Animals episode. As Morris had previously explored in his Radio 1 shows, it was a subject that could be relied on to make anyone go gooey and drop their guard – even Reggie Kray. From the phone on his landing in Maidstone Prison, he recorded his support for WOFDCAP (World Organization for Decreasing Captive Animal Problems), incorporating AAAAAAAZ (Against Animal Anger and Autocausal Abuse Atrocities in Zoos). Morris told him he wasn’t sounding the ‘aaa’s long enough. He got him to repeat it again and again, Kray preparing with wheezy deep breaths.
Late the following afternoon, researcher Andrew Newman opened the door at Talkback’s office in their Percy Street house to a large gentleman from the Krays’ organization. The man was holding the letter Reggie had received from WOFDCAP and was very angry. ‘I seem to remember him having a baseball bat,’ says Newman, ‘but that might be just embellishing the story.’ He pretended he’d not heard of the campaign or of Andrew Dean, the pseudonym under which he worked. Talkback’s receptionist had gone home and there was nobody to pick up calls. ‘If I ring this fucking number,’ his visitor roared, the letter in one hand and Newman in the other, ‘will your fucking phone ring? Because if it does, I’m going to break your fucking head.’ Newman assured him it wouldn’t as well as he could while being pinned against the wall, waiting uncomfortably for the switchboard to light up his desperate lie. Another member of the production crew came downstairs and disappeared into the back office, where Morris and a few others stayed rather than riding out to rescue Newman. Whether distracted by the interruption or having concluded, correctly, that frighteners had adequately been applied, the visitor left, warning, ‘And remember there are three Kray brothers – and only one of them’s dead. Do you know what I’m saying?’
It was a mystery how the Krays found Talkback. Morris’s own office had been given as the correspondence address, but only Talkback’s number was on the letterhead. It shouldn’t have been possible to find the production office from that – apart from anything else, directory enquiries weren’t supposed to give out addresses from phone numbers. The reach of the Krays was evidently still rather impressive. Morris and Newman came back later in the evening to move sensitive material out of the building, and everyone made a mental note to run the campaigns out of an entirely separate location when it came to making the full series. Always assuming, of course, that it was commissioned. It hardly felt like an act of overconfidence to think that it would be. BBC2 had provided funding for a very strong pilot, and the channel’s controller, Michael Jackson, had overseen The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You. And he did admire the pilot when it was completed late in autumn 1995. But admiration wasn’t the same as commissioning. Jackson quickly came to the conclusion that the BBC wouldn’t be able to support the celebrity interviews and the treatment of the subject matter.
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bsp; Torque TV coproducer Duncan Gray says, ‘We were utterly shocked when Michael Jackson turned it down. We couldn’t believe it. This is the man who’d done The Day Today. How could he turn that down?’ Peter Fincham was the angriest of anyone. It was the BBC’s public funding system which allowed people like Morris to develop his work in all its complexity. The corporation should have been his spiritual home. More practically, the pilot had been stamped rejected – and many, including some of the crew, thought that would be fatal. But Talkback weren’t ready to give up. While Fincham, Morris and Chiggy acted quickly to open up negotiations with Channel 4, Talkback’s head of production, Sally Debonnaire, took on the complicated and time-consuming work of buying back the footage – all owned by the BBC – at under the cost price to ensure the pilot remained intact.
Peter Fincham spoke to Seamus Cassidy, a senior commissioning editor at Channel 4 who was immediately intrigued – not least because, like everyone in the industry, he wanted to know what Morris would do next. Cassidy knew people who worked on the show but, sworn to secrecy by Morris, they had said nothing of what they were up to. They didn’t even discuss the project with other colleagues at Talkback – even Fincham preferred not to be told the details of what they were up to. The intrigue and mystery added to the appeal of the show and, in real terms, the effect of the BBC’s rejection was negligible – if anything, it helped. Channel 4 liked the idea of poaching talent that the BBC couldn’t handle. It was more than enough to ensure that they would at least give the pilot a watch.
For Cassidy on a personal level, Torque TV came at a point when he had become disillusioned with Channel 4 and had all but decided he was going to leave. But then he saw this show. It was like nothing he had ever encountered. He still vividly remembers taking it home and watching it with his girlfriend one evening. Neither of them could quite work out how Torque TV could have been made with its deceptions, its focus and originality. They ended up both laughing and gasping at the same time, howling together helplessly. The programme was compulsive, ‘almost narcotic’, he says, faith in television and Channel 4 restored. The feeling was shared throughout Channel 4, up to John Willis, director of television. Torque TV – eventually renamed Brass Eye – had come home.
Michael Grade approved of the decision to acquire Brass Eye in a broad sense but wasn’t directly involved in the production process. While he declined to be interviewed for this book, colleagues at Channel 4 say that his awareness of the show would have been limited to a belief that he had got something like The Day Today II. And it was true to say that Brass Eye shared the same news-parodying DNA. But Morris was busy making a new mutant strain out of it, and by the time Grade realized the true nature of what was lumbering around in the Talkback laboratory, the Daily Mail would already be handing out free pitchforks and lighted torches and pointing the way to his office.
‘Brass Eye was scarier [than The Day Today],’ confirmed writer David Quantick. ‘It would be, “We’re doing this thing about a priest wanking himself to death.” You’d go, “OK – Armando’s not here, is he, Chris? It’s just you, isn’t it?”’81
Recording of Brass Eye took place over 1996. Complete secrecy had been restored after the Krays interlude, and Morris himself anyway always maintained the lowest public profile he could get away with, something that was reflected in the quiet family existence he led, a marked contrast to the daily pressures of Brass Eye. By the time production started, he had been settled for a number of years with Jo Unwin, the actress and performer who had made such an impression on him when he had been in Edinburgh playing bass on the Footlights tour back in 1984. When Morris moved from Bristol to London on a permanent basis, she was sharing a place in Holland Park with Caroline Leddy and Jonathan Whitehead. On hearing that Jo and Chris had got together, Bristol friends immediately recalled The Millies in Edinburgh. ‘Oh, my God! He’s going out with Cat Woman,’ Hugh Levinson said with some admiration to Jonathan Maitland.
The couple went on to make their home in south London, where they would have two boys. It was a comfortable existence, but not showy, completely out of any celebrity spotlight, and they had a low-key marriage many years later. Morris kept up with his old circle of friends and interests that continued to include a passion for cricket.
He never showed interest in corporate work or adverts, though he did confess to one friend that thinking about the sums he’d been offered for commercials and the difference it could make to family life, he’d had the odd night that, if not exactly sleepless, was at least slightly disturbed. But he never seriously wavered in his opposition, and requests to do ads virtually dried up entirely when agencies at length realized that his management company would always turn them down. Not only that, but they would be warned as a matter of course that PBJ lawyers would be watching with interest to see if an advert would appear based on Morris’s work without his involvement. It left him free to spend much of 1996 in varying shades of lunatic undercover disguises as Brass Eye interviewers, reporters and characters – everywhere but nowhere.
He kept up as much of a normal routine as the workload allowed. Friends recall that he remained very caring and was always closely interested in whatever they were doing. He carried on the same kind of intense conversations and debates as he always had, an experience which, as Jonathan Maitland remembers, was for others ‘like being interviewed to go into university’. The reputation that continued to build around him, says Maitland, ‘didn’t even register. He would genuinely spend as long talking to the sound technician in the corner as anyone else.’ His thoughtful attitude was summed up for production manager Ali MacPhail on one of the rare occasions when he had been at an award ceremony. Armando Iannucci had just made a speech in which he thanked her. The next recipient remarked that he would thank his production manager, but he wasn’t sleeping with her. MacPhail was furious at the false implication, and Iannucci’s wife Rachael was loading a glass with red wine to chuck over the culprit. Morris was the one who talked them both down.
And yet he could also be both energetic and loud – not least in the check shirts he favoured and anything with a leopard-skin print on black. He would regularly hold meetings in coffee bars or restaurants, sushi being a favourite, and he was often on health kicks. The old Mercedes had at last died, but he regularly used public transport or cycled to Soho. His kit would be familiar to anyone who saw his performance as Denholm Reynholm, stridently promoting less stress through fitness to his long-suffering employees in 2005’s The IT Crowd. Reynholm’s alarmingly tight-fitting outfit might have been a disturbing vision of Lycra bondage by way of Tron costume, but Morris’s own commuting gear was not so different, topped off with a pair of distractingly oversized goggles. Both Reynholm and Morris clearly relished the disconcerting effect their appearance could have, but the on-screen caricature belied a personal warmth to Morris that he never allowed to show through in his work. The creativity he put into his friendships was typified by his startling Christmas cards, which are mentioned in interviews by almost all of his close friends and colleagues with something approaching reverence.
For years, from his early days in radio onwards, he had sent his own designs that incorporated metal and wood, sometimes barbed wire and even bone. They included a fly on a fob in a test tube of formaldehyde (Sally Debonnaire muses in a Morris-like fashion on its meaning, ‘Maybe it buzzed itself to death?’), a container with yellow liquid on one side with some dirt on the other (and the message ‘Piss ’n’ earth’), a sculpted skull and blocks of wood with wire on them. The cards were, says Graham Linehan, a particularly personal gesture, something that could have looked positively threatening if you didn’t know their sender. They seemed to be an expression of creativity for its own sake, worlds away from the increasingly single-minded focus that would characterize Brass Eye. That came from somewhere completely different, according to Matthew Bannister. ‘He’s on a one-man mission to expose the hypocrisy of the media. That is his moral crusade,’ he says. ‘It’s an act, but
the reason comes from the core of his being.’ Doon Mackichan, who joined Morris from The Day Today for a few appearances in Brass Eye, feels that his aims were more general, that his motivation came from whatever was in the air that needed cutting down to size. And writer David Quantick similarly says, ‘Chris’s thing is that he seems to me to be really outraged that the world is not the way it should be.’
Brass Eye explored that sense of outrage by taking six perennial favourite documentary subjects – the sort of topics that were just too difficult to cover in thirty minutes but which the media regularly tried to simplify to the point where they didn’t make any sense at all: Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime and Decline. ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ Morris admonished the viewer from his position behind the sickbed of British culture in Decline, ‘but you will do – if you watch for thirty minutes.’Was the decline of morals in the country irreversible – the country’s ‘The-moral-mometer’ reading just two morals per head – or was everything just great? Was science good or bad? These questions would be asked repeatedly throughout the show in varying ways as if there were some actual progress in answering them. Test tubes were shown in a courtroom to illustrate the trial of Science, ‘accused of going too far; of befouling, pollutement and the intoxifaction of men’s minds …’ There was a relentless rhythm to the shows, punctuated by the questions, without the respite that The Day Today had in the shape of its soap The Bureau and its mini-documentaries on the office and the swimming pool. At the end of each edition, Morris would curtly summarize the big issue before dismissing the viewer, but not the vague sense of disquiet that the constant interrogation of the show created.
Disgusting Bliss Page 15