Disgusting Bliss

  Radio seemed like an appealing place in which to get back to work in a more immediately creative way. He returned to Radio 1 free of the constraints of creating accurate parody with what would become Blue Jam, late at night, approaching delirium, something of a reflection of how Morris himself was feeling: ‘It was so singular and it came from a mood, quite a desolate mood. I had this misty, autumnal, boggy mood anyway, so I just went with that.’107

  11

  NOW, WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?

  CHRIS MORRIS AND MATTHEW BANNISTER MET BY CHANCE on a Soho street in early 1997. It was the first time they’d seen one another since Morris’s Radio 1 series in late 1994, but they hardly needed to ask what each other had been up to in the intervening time, both having in their own way reached a certain level of public notoriety. The coverage of Brass Eye’s controversies had familiarized even Daily Mail readers with Morris, though that was largely limited to disapproving of him as a concept. Bannister’s ruthless remodelling of Radio 1, undertaken with fellow former GLR manager Trevor Dann, had been played out on the front pages to pantomime boos and hisses as the nation’s favourite DJs quit or were abruptly removed to make way for a new generation who were less predictable and whose record collections hadn’t stopped in 1985.

  Comedy on Radio 1 had not fared so well since Morris and Bannister had last worked together. It had only been Morris who had managed to combine humour and music with the fluidity that Bannister had wanted to bring to the station. The comic presenter experiment had been shelved. And people had stopped saying comedy was the new rock ’n’ roll. But Bannister was nevertheless intrigued to hear that Morris was thinking of following up Brass Eye with a return to radio. ‘I’ve been working on a programme which is sort of like the nightmares you have when you fall asleep listening to the BBC World Service,’ Morris explained.

  He had a similar idea back in the GLR days, when BBC2 still closed down for the night with the picture fading and a long tone playing for those still dozing in front of their TV. It was then that Morris imagined a sinister voice enquiring, ‘Are you still out there? Let’s have a little story …’ To deliver it, Morris enlisted his childhood favourite, former Bonzo Dog Band singer and artist Vivian Stanshall. Morris had seen him perform live and thought his rich, sepulchral tones would be perfect drifting unannounced into the half-dream state of the audience. But the recording session didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

  Morris smuggled them both into GLR late one night, Stanshall late in his career and fragile. As they approached the studio, Morris accidentally let go of the heavy studio doors. It was, he says, an anxious moment: ‘Fuck, I nearly killed a legend,’ he remembers thinking at the time. When they came to record, Stanshall, then in one of his attempts at sobriety, seemed to be lacking in confidence. Morris later had his part re-recorded, but the BBC were sufficiently unimpressed not to acknowledge receipt of the resulting tape.

  What became Blue Jam was in some ways a development of that indefinable sense of being awake when you should have long been asleep. ‘It’s going to be a spooky-woozy kind of thing,’108 Morris later wrote to a cast member. The exact shape would only emerge from experimentation in the studio, but Bannister instinctively felt that Radio 1 should be supporting it. He waived the ban on comedy just for Morris’s new show. It was to start broadcasting in November 1997.

  Blue Jam bypassed the rational mind of the day to speak directly to the nearly unconscious, as music and humour oozed together, grotesque concepts surfacing into the slick and away almost before your mind had a chance to register them. It was also Morris’s creative response to being what a colleague describes as ‘deeply, deeply terrified by the dark’. If Brass Eye loudly cracks open the brightly lit armour of professional life, Blue Jam examines in microscopic detail what happens at the most disorienting time possible, when defences are at their thinnest and even the familiar seems distorted, sinister – and hopeless.

  The programme seemed unlike anything else around, to have come fully formed from nowhere, though the basic elements were exactly those that Morris had developed over his years in radio. The difference was he had freed them from the traditional hand-holding of the audience which he’d found so agonizing in his early career. Blue Jam had eliminated news, weather, jingles to remind you whose show it was and where you were listening to it, trails and chat. Listener interaction, always minimal with Morris, had also gone completely. What remained was comedy linked by DJ’ing without the admin. Morris drew fully on his wide-ranging taste in music to create a playlist that leaned towards the more interesting areas of dance and electronic music at a tempo that suited the lateness of the hour.

  Warp Records tracks featured regularly, which wasn’t that surprising. There was a more than superficial similarity between Morris and the artists on the pioneering label. The likes of Aphex Twin, Plaid and Squarepusher were as accomplished in the use of their technology as they were in writing – and as a breed they were also artists with a reputation for being obsessive, experimental, uncompromising and reclusive. Many at Warp itself were confirmed fans of Chris Morris, among them Greg Eden, whose roles for the small and tight-knit company included business, internet and A&R. He followed Blue Jam’s broadcast with interest, and when one of Morris’s team phoned for a CD he took the opportunity to arrange a meeting. What started as informal chats about music would become a long and productive relationship between Warp and Morris.

  More like the work of a cross between the kind of cutting-edge electronic music producer who might be on Warp and a club DJ than a traditional radio show, Blue Jam was an uninterrupted, hour-long mix of music, fracturing and dissolving into sketches. The comedy developed from the style Morris performed with Peter Baynham in the 1994 shows. Updating the cut-up celebrity quotes of the earlier series, Blue Jam had subversive jingles in the form of vivid mini-stories. ‘I can see Steve Lamacq as a frail old man in a wheelchair,’ says a computerized voice, ‘trying to shake hands with an elephant.’ Other Radio 1 DJs would be caught in their jingle just at the moment of committing a, usually unmourned, suicide.

  And Michael Alexander St John was another old friend who returned to deliver a round-up of club culture, lending his unmistakable regal solemnity to Morris’s nonsense genres and hot venues. Blue Jam provided their last opportunity to work together, as St John died in August 2002 aged sixty-six, but his delight in the material was evident as his resonant voice lent credibility to such top-ten dance hits as Gloop Mongy Mong’s ‘Fat Bleeping Bitch’.

  Having removed all the unnecessary explanatory parts of traditional music and comedy shows, the elements that remained were completely reconstituted through Morris’s enthusiastic use of the computerized audio processing which had come to dominate music production: ‘You can mix music until it’s coming out of every pore of your body,’ he later said. ‘You can do things that were unimaginable on tape. It seems to be a fantastic opportunity for people to do funny things in a new way.’109

  Manipulating audio on screen had become as easy as word-processing text. You highlighted sections of sound and applied effects such as time-stretching – altering length without changing the pitch – something that Fatboy Slim was just over a year away from having a huge hit by doing with ‘Rockafeller Skank’. In the late 1990s, you would scarcely be able to go in a club or turn on the radio without hearing songs made almost entirely of simple words and musical phrases repeated, filtered and stretched. Blue Jam seemed at once to be at home in the scene, part medicated dance mix and part original, innovative electronic creation, but it also stood on its own ground, luring loved-up clubbers on to its pitch-black dance floor late on Radio 1 and then brutalizing them.

  Morris needed more than a conventional postproduction facility to get to the innards of Blue Jam and give them a visceral twist. It was via a friend of Caroline Leddy, then just a few months from leaving Talkback to become a commissioning editor at Channel 4, that he was introduced to Natural Sound in Soho and Adrian Sutton. Born in 1
967, Sutton was a classical musician with a music degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. He had just the sort of background that Morris was looking for, having been a lecturer in computing and electo-acoustics in music. He had covered everything from synthesizers to using computers to manipulate sound directly. Sutton had also edited PC Direct magazine before becoming an adviser on the technical aspects of producing music for adverts. At Natural Sound he started writing music full-time, and he was as enthusiastic about audio experimentation as Morris.

  Together they worked on Blue Jam for some three or four months. Morris came in twice a week for three-hour sessions, when they pushed the capabilities of the equipment more as if they were an updated version of Pink Floyd mid-1970s, creating some exotic genre-defying concept album rather than a radio comedy series. They built up layers of sounds until the whole audio picture was in a state of constant dreamy shift. Voices in the foreground were contrasted with sparkles of filtered sound mixed back to create a sense of distance. Jingles were created from scratch, and Morris also sequenced his playlist mix into a seamless whole in the studio.

  But even Natural Sound’s state-of-the-art equipment had trouble keeping up with what Sutton calls Morris’s ‘firehose of ideas’. He was used to the days of analogue, when he could instantly hear the results of his edits once he’d spliced the tape together. You could accomplish far more elaborate effects with a computer, but they would often sit there for a frustratingly long time, whirring away as they applied the complicated calculations necessary to alter each selected portion of audio. And Morris was keen to try out alternatives, each of which would have to be saved separately on disk by Sutton. When they’d done them all he’d have to go back and locate Morris’s preferred take. It was a laborious process, one big experiment, and the results would be as much of a surprise to Blue Jam’s cast as it would to their audience: ‘Until the pilot I didn’t know what it was going to be like. Then it all made sense,’ said actor Amelia Bullmore. ‘During the recording he was telling us to become more detached, more stoned, slower, dreamier. He obviously had a rhythm in his mind. He had a pulse. After that it made sense. It was thrilling to hear it. I had never heard anything like it on radio. I had never been in a mood for an hour. Clearly in his head he was mixing it.’110

  Bullmore and the rest of the cast of Blue Jam had come together when Morris directed the pilot episode of Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’ sketch show Big Train that summer. She and Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap had also been in Brass Eye, but in Big Train, alongside Simon Pegg and Julia Davis, they gelled into a tight unit who could react plausibly to each other in comic situations where there were often no conventional set-ups and punchlines. For the show’s creators, it was an approach to writing that went all the way back to The Day Today: ‘We were huge fans of Chris and Armando,’ says Mathews. ‘The idea is stupid, but it’s played really straight.’

  Linehan adds: ‘We just were wondering if the effect of that would be one that would eventually make you just get the giggles.’ He introduced Simon Pegg to the show after seeing him do stand-up, but otherwise Morris brought everyone on board. He was able to spot and develop a particular ability in an actor in audition – sometimes a character might end up being created around it. Rather than simply doing read-throughs and discussing the back story of a role, Morris often used the casting sessions to suggest something completely unexpected. When it later came to Nathan Barley, Charlie Brooker remembers Morris working up such scenarios as one in which the actor had to agree warmly and sincerely with whatever Morris said, which turned out to be a series of increasingly appalling statements. On occasion Morris’s auditions grew into new comic situations which would later be used in the show itself.

  Morris also started to work with new crew members on Big Train, some of whom would go on to work on Jam and the Brass Eye Special. The show was produced by Talkback, where Morris’s appointment in his first role as director generated a faint odour of foreboding. With Brass Eye still fresh in their memory, they imagined long and arduous days of filming in which only tiny amounts of footage would be completed. But, directing for someone else as a favour, Morris seemed to delight in not having to fight for everything and was content to bring all of his considerable natural enthusiasm behind the camera as well as a sensitivity in the way in which he elicited performances. And his first stint at directing would be useful experience for him when he later decided to make his own version of a sketch show with the television version of Blue Jam.

  It wouldn’t always be so easy for Morris to step back when he worked on other people’s projects. When playing Denholm Reynholm in the later Graham Linehan show The IT Crowd, he would be doing his usual debating and questioning of everything, whereas Linehan was ready to leave jokes as they were without examining them for clues to the characters. It wasn’t made any easier for Linehan having taken on board Kevin Eldon’s description of Morris as ‘officer class’. Denholm was killed off early in the second series of The IT Crowd when Morris was too busy to come back for the full run, though Linehan confided in him that he’d also found doing the first series with him hard work. It was clear when he returned for the spectacular suicide of Denholm that opened the second series that Morris had taken all the concerns on board and unplugged his brain entirely from creative concerns. He swiftly and brilliantly rattled through his lines – though when it came for Denholm to jump out of the window at the back of the set, just a few feet off the studio floor, Morris still asked the art director if they could build it higher to make it look like he was really plunging. No, he was told, health and safety wouldn’t allow it. Denholm proved such a favourite that Linehan brought him back to provide a malign ghostly influence in the third series.

  Simon Pegg was the only member of the Big Train cast not to join Blue Jam, and David Cann, who had provided such congenial figures of authority in Brass Eye, augmented the line-up as sessions began in the grubby basement at Talkback. Morris returned to the instant creativity of radio with a small cast who knew each other well and could develop their roles. The only other staff were a studio manager and Rebecca Neale, returning from Morris’s Radio 1 shows as production assistant.

  Morris would shout out suggestions as they worked; there was no fixed way of producing the sketches. Sometimes they veered wildly from the script for hours, sometimes they would nail it as written. The tape ran all the while and the performances were carefully logged and script changes noted so that Morris could find his way when he took the recordings away for reworking.

  It was later rumoured that the show’s mood had been conjured by recording in the small hours, but though taping might run late, the sessions were in regular time, and rather than being infused with dread purpose they were frequently broken up by outbreaks of hysteria. It was sometimes apparent in the show – particularly in the ‘Bad Sex’ series of sketches in which lovers engage in increasingly bizarre pillow talk with laughter never far from the actors’ voices, Kevin Eldon and Julia Davis particularly prone to cracking up. The crew would also have to stifle giggles or quickly look away from the actors while the tape was running. The genuine sense of enjoyment gave the performances an energetic life that made them far funnier and if anything contributed more to Blue Jam’s disturbing quality than if the cast had deliberately set out to do weird and shocking. Though some critics would accuse the show of setting out to break taboos simply for the sake of it. ‘It just seems like the laziest criticism,’ says Peter Baynham, who was again Morris’s main writing partner. It was more, he says, that they ‘allowed’ themselves freedom to go where they wanted.

  The writing meetings were as loosely structured as the recordings. It helped, Morris explained to the Guardian, to ‘evolve things casually. It proceeds almost like a conversation.’111 Most of the supporting writing team, largely unchanged from Brass Eye, were as enthusiastic as the cast about the creative possibilities that this offered. David Quantick and Jane Bussmann were relatively fresh from the heady live chaos of The Election N
ight Armistice with Armando Iannucci. They had also appeared on the show, Quantick causing some slight awkwardness for Iannucci and producer Sarah Smith when he said something to the effect that they were ‘spurting the jism of news over the hard stomach of fact’. He and Jane Bussmann took the Blue Jam ‘woozy’ briefing to mean it would be trippy, that you wouldn’t be sure of what you’d heard, and set about coming up with the nastiest ideas they could, concentrating on relationships going bad. The writing meetings were as lively as the recording sessions, on occasion continuing at the upstairs bar of the John Snow pub in Soho late into the night with Baynham, Quantick and Bussmann joined by fellow comic Peter Serafinowicz and later Blue Jam cast member Sally Phillips.

  Graham Linehan found the writing brief less inspiring. Preparing to direct the first series of Big Train, which would go out a year later, he nevertheless contributed material throughout Blue Jam and Jam, including some fine moments such as a sketch for the TV version written with Arthur Mathews in which Mark Heap’s mumbling, embarrassed security guard never quite manages to warn the staff of an office against leaving for the evening via an open lift shaft. But while he shared Quantick and Bussmann’s analysis that the show would have a hallucinatory feel, for him it was a ‘bad trip’ that Morris was making in which people were given moral dilemmas with increasingly bleak resolutions.

  For the listener, it was partly that complexity which could make the show such a rich and resonant experience, particularly in the monologues. They came from Morris’s writing partnership with Robert Katz, and the longer form of the stories gave them the space to develop character in a way Morris hadn’t done before.

  The pair evolved the monologues from the Temporary Open Spaces pieces on GLR, with a flavour of Morris’s fictional listener letters of the Radio 1 show. The media remained a target for Morris, though here it was accompanied by an exploration of depression. The flat-voiced narrator of the monologues seems once to have been a member of London cliques whose fringes he now haunts, a medicated observer of their absurdities. Each story stood alone, though they were characterized by invariably climaxing in a finale of humiliating slapstick for the narrator while all around him narcissistic dregs of the more vapid reaches of the creative industries climb over one another in ceaseless comic efforts to be top dog.