The big themes provided rich inspiration for the show’s material which, when it didn’t come from Morris himself, was the result of sessions with Peter Baynham, shared with Armando Iannucci’s Armistice over the summer. ‘I find that writing is definitely made easier by having meetings with people,’ said Morris, ‘because you say things that you didn’t know you thought … In my experience anyway, if you sit and strain away at a blank sheet of paper on a desk, you know, you can get things out, but the type of things that come out are different from the sort of things you almost accidentally say.’82 There were also Monday-morning writing meetings with a wider circle. There was no set method for coming up with material. Peter Baynham particularly remembers being in a vague, hungover state the Saturday morning after they’d been to a Talkback party. It informed the way in which he and Morris were talking about an idea for a fox-hunting sequence in what would be Animals. At one point Morris suggested his pro-hunt spokesman might comment, ‘They say it’s cruel, but they wouldn’t say that if …’ Baynham added woozily ‘… if it was a little four-legged car …’ and Morris finished ‘… full of chips.’ And that was the defence his character used.
The other writers worked primarily to provide initial ideas. Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews came having evolved their own way of working in Father Ted, where they would write a couple of pages each, editing the other’s work as they went along. They settled into Morris’s looser way of talking around subjects, their suggestions including Egyptian pyramids being revealed as the ears of giant underground cat statues.
David Quantick had been working with writing partner Jane Bussmann when he was alerted to the existence of the new Chris Morris project. He brought Bussmann along. She had got into comedy after failing all her exams before university and had worked for Talkback and the BBC. Sharp and energetic, she had a filthy laugh and filthier sense of humour. The duo fitted in well. In the Brass Eye sessions, she recalls, she and Quantick wrote some material about a US army health film on gonorrhoea just to ‘out-disgusting each other with stuff coming out of your cock’. She was the only female writer on Brass Eye, but as with Doon Mackichan and Rebecca Front performing in On the Hour, there wasn’t any particular significance to a writer’s gender. It wasn’t the sort of show where there were female gags to be written and, referring to the general lack of women in comedy, she pragmatically describes her presence as over-representative if anything. She wouldn’t have had a female perspective to write from even if it had been required: ‘I never have had,’ she says now, ‘which is the reason I can write comedy, I think.’ But she did come to the sessions with some expectations of what the experience would be like, having been a fan of The Day Today: ‘Obviously, Chris is an amazing individual, so I always thought, Fucking hell, I wonder what he’s doing next? Everyone was in awe of Chris because he can say what he wants …’
It made writing for Brass Eye a liberating experience. ‘Nobody ever got the impression that he had to change what he was saying or kiss up or try and schmooze any of those cunts in commissioning. Chris was a bastion of free speech. From the outset he seemed to bypass all the haggling and explaining process when you have to say why people would like your stuff and then it becomes shit because you have to change it.’
When she and Quantick contributed material – such as the miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary driving a car – it would be taken on by Linehan and Mathews and refined further by Morris. ‘What you were doing basically was you were having the world’s greatest pub conversation,’ reflects Bussmann now. The process generally involved making each other laugh for long periods of time. She cites the discussion of how Victorians might have courted, something which didn’t make it into the show. They riffed on gentlemen wearing stovepipe hats which would rotate at the object of their desire to show a zoetrope – except instead of the classic scene of horses jumping it would be people having sex. Even at the early writing stage, it was clear the series would be special. ‘I just remember thinking, It’s like some fucking summit in space,’ says Bussmann. ‘It’s a period in history you can actually look around and think, This is fucking amazing and I hope I remember every moment.’
Radio 1 contributor Paul Garner also got a few pieces in and played a couple of parts, and – as ever – Morris gave him the jobs that most involved potential physical harm. He was to illustrate fear of science by jumping out at people on the street with a big sign saying ‘Technology’. Each take Morris managed to cue him as a particularly bad-tempered commuter walked by.
After The Word was finally axed, several members of its production crew joined Brass Eye, including Andrew Newman. The Word shared with Morris’s show a casual disregard for its medium, and Newman had worked on the prank set-ups which required a certain amount of ruthless character to carry out. He specialized in getting Brass Eye’s celebrities to do the interviews. Production manager Ali MacPhail returned from The Day Today to work with Morris again. Caroline Leddy had arrived at Talkback after working in BBC radio. She liaised closely between Morris and Channel 4, a job which became more tricky as the relationship deteriorated alarmingly towards transmission.
They had a fairly healthy budget to work with, particularly in terms of comedy production, but there was so much going on in Brass Eye that it was swiftly swallowed by a large cast, location shoots, elaborate sets and the secret office for the campaigns. The amount of time and money Talkback spent on Morris’s projects would always far outweigh any tangible financial benefit, but the company knew they were powerful shows whose importance wasn’t easy to price. Morris would go over budget in every series he made, and nobody liked to tackle him about it, partly because he could be ferocious in defending something he felt was integral to a show and partly because he was usually right.
When Talkback did have to step in, it would usually be Sally Debonnaire who was tasked with telling him to stop spending. Peter Fincham tended to avoid battles with Morris if he could, although he did offer the team a kind of back-up support on occasion. During the making of the Special in 2001, he wrote a stern memo to Morris on the subject. And asked Philippa Catt, who looked after day-today production, to hand it on. Later that day she and Morris were riding to a shoot with director Tristram Shapeero. Morris read the note as they set off and immediately ordered the car to pull over. He jumped out, grabbed his coat and bag from the back of the car and told them, ‘I may or may not be there this afternoon,’ before slamming the boot shut and striding off up Berwick Street. Shapeero and Catt looked at each other and wondered what they would say to the rest of the crew. They arrived at the location to find Morris apologetic and having got there before them by public transport.
Money seemed to have no further meaning to Morris other than getting as much of it as possible up on the screen. He was entirely unconcerned about making it for himself, to the point that a despairing Chiggy virtually had to do aspects of deals for him behind his back to ensure that he didn’t negotiate his cut away entirely in return for a bit of extra filming – while simultaneously trying to get Peter Fincham’s executive producer fee diverted to production. And during the making of the Special, he hit on the idea of getting the crew to use his house as a location base for a Brixton shoot. About twenty of them turned up, and production coordinator Holly Sait had the distinct impression that Jo Unwin, at home with the two young boys, hadn’t quite been briefed on their arrival.
Everyone was expected to help save where they could so that ever more footage could be shot. Crew checked out locations by public transport – when Morris received the memo from Fincham they’d all been sitting in Tristram Shapeero’s own car rather than a taxi – and during shoots for the original series Ali MacPhail, who lived near Morris in south London, remembers that he regularly hitched a lift back with her. Enjoying a good gossip, he relied on her to fill him in on any production crew scandal on the way. It was about his only distraction as he absorbed himself in the technicalities of production.
When he wasn’t involved in bat
tles about budgets, Morris’s charm and humour meant that the crew worked far harder than they might normally – without that goodwill, a show with the complexity of Brass Eye just wouldn’t have happened, no matter how much cash was poured in. More than anything, the ambition and boldness of the concept made everyone care about the show. ‘He’s hard work in terms of you’ve got to be prepared to put the work in,’ says Armando Iannucci, ‘but it’s always very rewarding. It does sort the men out from the boys. Because some people just want to do what you normally do for a show and don’t want the hassle. You find that he raises the quality threshold of anything you do. It makes you ask if something is good enough and if it’s not, then don’t do it. But it is hard, it’s very hard. It’s just sheer, gruelling, hard toil.’
Ali MacPhail likens Morris to a general leading from the front. When he marched smartly down the corridors at Channel 4, curly hair billowing, people would actually get out of his way. But then there was the weekend she had flu and he came over. By the time she had made it to the front door, he’d gone, leaving a little bag with a lemon, a jar of honey, a small bottle of whisky and a get-well note.
Charlie Brooker is one of those who saw a different Morris in production – his personality shifted into a grave and reflective mode, dwelling on everything that might go wrong. And the job was made trickier still for those around him because Morris actively enjoyed catching people out. You had to back up what you were saying and not waffle. He wasn’t looking to be surrounded by sycophants, and there was never any point in putting your point over half-heartedly. It was always good to take notes in production meetings with him, though you could never be sure whether he’d test you out because he was trying out every option or just because he wanted to see what you knew. There was a sketch in his later series Jam involving a television filled with lizards. What, he asked art director Dick Lunn, was the ‘operating temperature’ of a lizard? Having done a special project on lizards as part of his zoology degree, he probably knew more than most.
Just as on the Radio 1 shows, the production office fax machine whirred late into the night. Sally Debonnaire also received calls after hours, but more usually from tearful crew members for whom the constant demands had become too much. She acted as unofficial mentor– a role she would reprise in his other programmes – talking them down with ideas they might suggest to him for how things could be more reasonably accomplished.
Veterans of The Day Today had an idea of what to expect. Graphic designers Russell Hilliard and Richard Norley had left ITN by then and were building their company Jump. Money was tight and they used their old employer’s equipment during downtime. Their work was a key element of Brass Eye, which was designed to operate in a graphical environment that was rarely static, the viewer continually dropped in and out of reports which were framed in boxes popping up and down at speed. It was as if the documentary were the entire world and, having made you dizzy with confusion, Brass Eye held out its hand to be your only guide. The effects were complicated and, at the point of exhaustion, Jump eventually had to beg Morris to prioritize. He made an attempt – sort of – by faxing over a list of effects numbered by importance. The first was marked top priority. So were all the others.
Composer Jonathan Whitehead had initial idea sessions with Morris, after which he was largely left alone to produce the incidental music. He wrote to the completed graphics sequences in the shows to effectively suggest mayhem, panic and life-threatening urgency. Then the two of them refined or reworked the music – generally making it more rather than less overcooked. Briefed to write a main theme with the heartbeat of the inexorable progress of ‘Montagues and Capulets’ from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Whitehead’s production indicated how clever the show thought it was with a shifting time signature. Just as the ad break started, a brief excerpt would be repeated over Jump’s rushing graphics disappearing into a perspective point, giving an effective feeling of falling into a bottomless chasm with the brass section from an orchestra.
Actors were drafted into Brass Eye at an early stage to make even the briefest part seem believable. ‘Often things are best when they’re thrown at you and you have no time to prepare,’ says Doon Mackichan. ‘So Chris would often just say he wanted to do a particular character and would talk. And then I would go away and have time to come back with some ideas.’ There were often new bits of script to be learned at short notice or props were changed at the last minute. ‘You just don’t take it personally,’ she says, recalling the moments she grabbed to learn words while simultaneously feeding her baby in the dressing room. ‘It’s the people who think they’re geniuses who actually don’t come up to scratch when they tell you to do things. That’s when your hackles get up. Chris can kind of get away with murder.’
It was a restless approach Chris shared with his brother Tom. Then at the Battersea Arts Centre, Tom Morris had been in experimental theatre for most of his career. Composer Adrian Sutton worked with both of them: ‘Tom, in particular, during theatre shows is always very infectiously enthusiastic about trying things out,’ Sutton says. ‘You just can’t help but want to please them because they’re just so gracious and lovely about it.’
Not all the cast came to Brass Eye with experience of how Morris did things. New faces included Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap and David Cann, all of whom worked so well with Morris’s meandering approach that they became a core part of his unofficial repertory company for both Blue Jam and Jam. ‘Work-wise it’s rewarding being asked to contribute to the process,’ says Eldon, ‘and the preparation that’s gone into is a marked contrast to how TV works mostly; you don’t get directed. You don’t rehearse.’ Both Heap and Eldon had an understated way of approaching their parts which gave even the most extreme scenario a sense of realism. They had a quality of stillness which bordered on the eerie, suggesting a sense of otherness to even the most ordinary character. Their deceptive normality was matched by David Cann’s startlingly reassuring figures of authority. But Brass Eye was most strongly associated with Morris’s anchorman – bullying, sneering, Paxmanning. Its strength made it easy to overlook the twenty or so other characters he played over the course of the series. But while his scripted parts were mostly reporters, so essentially men all doing the same job, Morris lightly suggested individuality with a skilful touch which never allowed characters to obscure the jokes in the stories they reported. Ted Maul was an old favourite from The Day Today, still blazered and not quite able to hide his inferiority fears about his provincial roots. Austen Tasseltine was geeky and not as clever as he thought he was. Alabaster Codify was more occasional, a US reporter with the full permatan and gleaming teeth which made him seem much more of a developed character than his brief screen time suggested.
Others made up an array of varied experts and witnesses for each topic. A baseball cap and wrap-around clear glasses marked out earnest anti-drugs campaigner Lemuel Webb as overanxious to appear to be seen as cool by the kids he’s trying to warn off drugs. Showing them a jar containing the bloody contents of a coke-head’s sneeze, he thinks he’s impressing them in saying, ‘That man is lying on his back thinking, Where in shitting crikey is my nose?’ For Captain Clyde Jackson, Morris wore blue contacts with a jet-black centre and a thin moustache to create a modern borstal psycho-governor, demanding of a prisoner, ‘Where’s your self-re-cocking-spect?’ It was the sparklingly demented dialogue more than the subtle characterization which stayed in the mind, but each episode was scattered with those tight cameos. Greasy US talk-show host Chuck Fadanoid talked glibly about priests with guns and – strictly just an impersonation of Jarvis Cocker but as rounded as Morris’s radio Keith Richards – there was Purves Grundy, lead singer with Blouse.
Brass Eye was solid enough to pass for a documentary strand in its own right rather than trying to take off any one programme in particular. It had the feel of current affairs as macho eventing with bold and elegant editing and its emotive presentation of the big issues. The realistic presentation of the show suppor
ted its stylized dialogue and wilder invention – in a report on a detention camp, it’s somehow not surprising when one of the inmates is caught out during a regular dormitory inspection for not having polished a large brass moustache hidden behind a noticeboard. And as Gina McKee’s Libby Shuss concludes the scene with a voiceover explaining that the inmates will then have to strip their beds, bury the blankets and dig them up to sleep in them ‘all earthy’, the sense of indefinable menace is carried by the realization of the staging.
Throughout the series, even those props and situations which appeared fleetingly were sourced and worked to look authentic. In the sketch about Shaftesbury’s Jam, the company which allows drugs in its production meetings, the drugs drew praise in an article by Will Self: ‘Not only were all the paraphernalia and substances depicted with uncanny accuracy rare on television, but the reactions of the drugged executives were entirely credible.’ The marketing manager falls out of the boardroom as the voiceover intones, ‘Soon he will learn to maintain his levels.’ Will Self commented, ‘Maybe he will, but I doubt Chris Morris ever will. Put starkly, this man genuinely knows no limits.’83
It was an assessment that was most apparent in Brass Eye’s interaction with the real world. Morris had little time for other comic interviewers of the time like Mrs Merton, who appeared to mock their subjects. ‘So easily assimilated,’ he said of Caroline Aherne’s character. ‘People know how to play her, they just get their best grin on and come out stinking of roses.’ And the same was true of Have I Got News For You: ‘It’s the biggest warm handshake, glass of sherry, pat on the back, pair of fluffy slippers to the Establishment you could possibly dream up. It becomes mere court jester tittle-tattle which has no bite whatsoever.’84
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