Disgusting Bliss

by Lucian Randall

  But then photographers came to doorstep him with partner Jo and their children. It was the only aspect of the media coverage which genuinely upset Morris – otherwise he might even have appreciated the irony in the press claiming to defend the children of the country while sticking long lenses into the Morris family buggy to get a story. ‘Everyone felt very protective towards Chris,’ says Jane Bussmann. ‘Because the idea that someone as nice as Chris would be regarded as a bad person was just ludicrous. People standing outside his front door … the malevolence … it was insane.’

  Co-host Doon Mackichan was also targeted. ‘He was holed up in his house,’ she remembers, ‘and we were kind of talking each other down because our anger was so high we did just want to go and smash their cars up.’ Morris sent her a case of champagne.

  The women connected with the show were particularly vilified, painted by the Mail as somehow betrayers of their sex for not only telling vulgar jokes but controversial ones at that. Caroline Leddy, by then head of comedy at Channel 4 and responsible for commissioning the show, was according to the paper ‘herself the mother of a young child’, and the child actors featured alongside Doon Mackichan were ‘not unlike her own’136 – although it wasn’t made clear how they might have differed.

  Mackichan had already warned her mother that she would probably hear about the show and explained that she’d found it quite hard that people close to her hated it, including some Smack the Pony colleagues. Mackichan had been blanked in local shops and by mums in her kids’ playground. Then the Mail tracked Doon’s mother to Spain. She innocently relayed the conversation she’d had with her daughter, and the Mail worked it into a piece so vicious that on advice from friends Mackichan has never read it.

  It wasn’t until well into August that the stories eventually dried up. Ali MacPhail later received a copy of the Brass Eye DVD with a card from Morris: ‘This is to remind you that you are as sick as I am.’ But it wasn’t just the usual suspects ranged against Chris Morris. The Special also alienated some who had been traditionally sympathetic to his work.

  The Guardian’s Hugo Young thought, ‘The satire was too deeply embedded in the shock effect to make much sense.’137 And in the same newspaper Ros Coward addressed the subject of the show being watched by those who had been abused. ‘Who on the liberal left, intent on a critique of media forms, really cares about that? They think the only problem with paedophilia in our society is that it’s the subject of a moral panic, paedophiles as wildly exaggerated bogeymen.’ She went on to say, ‘I’m much more concerned that many people (including media liberals) still don’t really believe sex abuse happens.’138

  Channel 4’s own Dorothy Byrne, later head of news and current affairs at the channel, is not so prescriptive, though she agrees wholeheartedly with Ros Coward’s assertion that the content of the Special diminishes the threat posed by predatory paedophiles. Perhaps they might not so often affect middle-class families, she says, but she herself had become much more sensitized to the dangers during the production of the Dispatches on Sidney Cooke. She’d seen public spaces in less well-off areas where paedophiles would meet, and she had challenged a man who approached her own young daughter.

  And yet Byrne also says that the Special did provoke debate. ‘Comedy,’ she says, ‘should be about really serious things.’ She is dis-armingly frank in acknowledging that it accurately identified presentational tics which had her wincing as she watched. While she remains proud of the original Dispatches, would she make it differently today? ‘Maybe we would be less dramatic now,’ says Byrne after a moment’s thought. ‘When you saw the parody, we looked like we took ourselves too seriously. But on the other hand, you’re talking about a man who abused children.’ The balance – for both Brass Eye and the documentaries it lit with a dazzling but strangely humanizing light – was hard to calibrate.

  A short series was shown in prime time on BBC2 a year later under the title The Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles. One man arrested during the making of the series allowed the crew accompanying the police to conduct a graphic interview with him among the pet ferrets he allowed to wander freely around his overflowing flat. Within a day of the filming he had killed himself. He left notes indicating that the interview should be used, which it duly was, the executive producer of the series telling the BBC: ‘We were shocked, but that feeling subsided when one of the officers took us to one side afterwards and told us what he’d done.’139

  The Hunt … was shown to far less viewer protest than Brass Eye, which prompted a record 2,000 complaints to Channel 4 and a further 500 to the ITC. The broadcaster had thought through its defence of every aspect of the Special, sketch by sketch, and at eighty pages it was longer than that submitted for the entire original series. The ITC found only that Channel 4 hadn’t warned sufficiently of the contents of the programme or made it clear that child actors hadn’t been harmed and the programme wasn’t a documentary. The broadcaster was ordered to make an on-air apology.

  Though it was nominated in the BAFTA Awards that year, Brass Eye continued to divide opinion, with ceremony host Chris Tarrant publicly criticizing it. When a clip was shown, it was greeted by boos from the audience. It didn’t win. For Channel 4 itself, says Prash Naik, Brass Eye and the Special remain ‘probably the most difficult comedy programme[s] we’ve ever done’. Yet even years on, he adds, ‘Brass Eye is still one of the seminal programmes that the channel quotes in terms of innovation and experimentation.’ And Dorothy Byrne notes that few other broadcasters would produce such a weighty programme as Dispatches and then another that so comprehensively mocked it.

  By 2001 Chris Morris had refined a style of news parody into something that existed on its own terms. The Brass Eye Special stood as much in a genre of one as it mimicked other programmes. Over the years since he’d first worked with Armando Iannucci in On the Hour, Morris had operated his comedy in a state of constant shift; deceiving and morphing, as much of a surprise to those who commissioned him to make it as it was to its audience. The Special was unmistakably the fullest exploration of that approach to humour in the way that it demanded a response even from those who said they hadn’t seen it.

  But while other comedy-makers have followed in the wake of Brass Eye to colonize the areas that he had first marked out, Morris has decisively turned away, focusing his practice on developing character through more sustained forms of comic narrative. He has become concerned with being more completely the storyteller that, from his earliest days, his material had always suggested he could be. Signposts to the direction he was later to take could be found in the artefacts of the long and terrible history of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling which he expertly unearthed from Peter Cook, in the succinct tales of his made-up listener letters on the Radio 1 shows and almost everywhere else you cared to look in his work, but most clearly in the monologues of his radio shows.

  Morris returned to the rich source of Blue Jam for inspiration for his first stand-alone story and movie in 2002. The story of Rothko the dog, whose ability to talk is heard only by Morris’s narrator character and gets him into considerable trouble as a result, became My Wrongs #8245-8249 and 117, also the inaugural release for the newly formed Warp Films. With Paddy Considine starring, My Wrongs … went on to win a BAFTA for best short. The running time might have been just fifteen minutes, but its relatively straight narrative represented a completely different mode of expression. In 1998 Morris described in characteristically stark terms the way in which he pushed himself to find new areas: ‘I’ll probably be staring into a void,’ he told the Guardian. ‘It’s a way of finding something that you want to do, because something comes out and then you go with it. I think it’s the only way to go. You can become very demoralized by confronting the void, but if you know that you’re treading the same ground, you can become much worse – you walk, you talk, you go to parties or whatever, but you become dead, you become a zombie. So, you know, the life’s gone.’140

  With the success of My Wrongs …, Morri
s extended conventional narrative over the length of a full sitcom in the shape of Nathan Barley, the series he and Charlie Brooker created in 2005. And even if he had still been interested in using the sort of guerrilla techniques that had been such a part of Brass Eye, the practical considerations of doing a sitcom wouldn’t have allowed it. There was little scope for delivering tapes on which were secreted last-minute bits of extra material, but in any case Morris showed little signs of nostalgia for the Brass Eye days. In 2008 came the announcement that he was to direct a full-length feature film, still in production at the time of writing. Under the title Four Lions, it is another coproduction with Warp Films. Though the form couldn’t be further away from what Morris was doing in the 1990s, Four Lions shares with all his work the distinctive imprint of his extensive and extended research. Preparation for the movie, said to concern UK-based Islamic fundamentalists, included lengthy discussions and correspondence with former Guantánamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg as well as intensive study of the nuances of Islam, just as Morris and Armando Iannucci once closely observed news programmes before making On the Hour and The Day Today.

  Such thoroughness underpins even Morris’s earliest work with an enduring sense of solidity, but while his methods frequently seem to have more in common with those of a particularly blistering branch of investigative journalism than they do traditional comedy, his shows never came wrapped in the flag of a campaign. There is a lack of preciousness which makes them enduringly attractive; they wear the smartness of their construction lightly. They can be very much of their time, tapping into club culture as Blue Jam did, but they always come with their own identity rather than relying on trends for the laugh. At the heart of it all is a playful and energetic sense of the absurd that keeps the likes of Brass Eye fresh. It’s that which remains once the shock of the unpredictable has worn off and the satirical intent understood when the headlines have faded.

  Morris expanded the possibilities of what could be done with radio and television as media. More than any other single artist he utilized the full potential of the technical firepower which he had realized from his vantage point as a broadcaster and DJ. Many stylistic elements of his shows have provided inspiration for other comics, but none has managed to combine all of them to the same devastating effect.

  And finally, but perhaps most startlingly, there is a profoundly emotional resonance to be found in Chris Morris’s work, in the way in which he relentlessly mines his material for tangible proof that there need not be any part of human experience that is out of bounds for exploration. He charges straight through the politeness and respect habitually paid to sensitive subjects which can be enormously destructive when it means that pain and distress are allowed to fester within someone rather than being illuminated and understood. It’s a tremendously optimistic achievement. Because if there really is nothing you can’t talk and laugh about, then there truly is nothing to be scared of.

  MINI-NEWS

  IN LEAVING THE DAY TODAY AFTER ONE TRIUMPHANT SERIES, the team had guaranteed that its status as a classic would never be tarnished by botched-follow-up syndrome. They had each gone on to develop their own highly successful careers in interesting and individual ways without once looking back. And yet they all retained a huge affection for the show that had made their names and jumped at the opportunity to get back together again in 2004. It was a reunion. Ten years since they’d last been together. But brief. The old firm together for one last job. Enough to cause a flutter of excitement – without putting at risk the show’s immaculate reputation.

  The excuse was the release of the series on DVD. And given the history of the programme’s development, it was perhaps appropriate that it came about partly as a result of a BBC mistake. An Alan Partridge DVD was put out without the input of anyone connected with the series. Exasperated, Talkback insisted on handling all subsequent DVDs themselves, with The Day Today saved for the last and most lavishly over-the-top release.

  Chris Morris was the most enthusiastic of everyone about doing extra features for the DVD, though neither he nor Armando Iannucci wanted to settle for the standard nostalgic commentary track when they could improvise new material. The challenge was to find a time to suit each member of the busy group, but they were determined to do it: ‘It was more about getting everyone in the same room. That was an odd feeling, but it was nice,’ says Patrick Marber.

  In January 2004 they gathered in a sound studio with Iannucci’s longtime producer Adam Tandy. There was some thinking the actors had to do, to get themselves back to how they did that The Day Today thing, but then they found the old rhythm. Riffing on suggestions from Iannucci, the new material included a live link between Morris and Marber as Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan. Sent to cover a conference at the World Trade Center on 9/11, the reporter oversleeps and completely fails to notice the terrorist attacks. Under Morris’s increasingly pointed questioning, he firmly maintains he is reporting from the Windows on the World restaurant at the very top of the North Tower, ‘sipping a cappuccino’.

  Peter Fincham and Sally Debonnaire arrived with a cake and photos were taken, the moody gang of the original publicity shots replaced by a bunch of mates with nothing left to prove, all thumbs aloft and big grins. Not everything had changed within the group dynamic, however: Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber were still to be found comparing notes to see which of them had done better since the series first went out.

  The DVD, given a gatefold design and a paper band around the outside, was relatively expensive to produce and counted against promotion with the BBC, which had also decided that the old comedy wouldn’t sell well anyway and had become resigned to not recouping the costs. Having accepted at Morris’s insistence that they wouldn’t have pictures of the stars on the cover, they gave the release little publicity. The Day Today quickly went on to sell well over 100,000 copies. It was joined four years later by a release of On the Hour through Warp Records, neatly packaged on CD under Morris’s supervision with all material by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring fully restored. It seemed as if all the loose ends had been tied up.

  Or had they? The heady emotion of the get-together had overcome some of the cast with a non-specific desire to do something together again, but it was a passing notion, swiftly tempered by a more specific feeling that the reality probably wouldn’t be half as good as the idea. For Marber the sessions were ‘nostalgic, fun, strange … sort of sweet and sad’.

  And so that was it, after all. ‘It seemed like a mirage,’ says Adam Tandy of the recording sessions. ‘They just came together for that brief moment.’

  NOTES

  1 NO NEWS = GOOD NEWS: BALLS

  1 ‘Comic Wants a Word in Your Ear’, Laurie Taylor, The Times, 24 December 1993.

  2 Armando Iannucci in interview with Mark Lawson, 2 January 2007, BBC4.

  3 ‘Pair of Jokers’, Mark Edwards, Sunday Times, 6 March 1994.

  4 Independent, 26 October 1997.

  5 New Yorker, 5 November 2007.

  6 Armando Iannucci in interview with Mark Lawson, 2 January 2007, BBC4.

  7 In Conversation With, BBC Radio 4, March 2001.

  8 Word, March 2005.

  9 The Times, 24 December 1993.

  10 Armando Iannucci in interview with Mark Lawson, 2 January 2007, BBC4.

  2 MAN STEPS OFF PAVEMENT

  11 Daily Mail, 28 July 2001.

  12 The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, Humphry Berkeley, p. 11 (Harriman House, 1993).

  13 The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, Humphry Berkeley, p. 39 (Harriman House, 1993).

  14 Publish and Bedazzled, No. 13, August 1998.

  15 On the Hour, series one, episode one.

  16 Melody Maker, 4 June 1994.

  17 Independent, 28 May 1992.

  18 The Listener, 30 April 1987.

  19 Private Eye, #853, letters, 26 August 1994.

  20 Broadcast, 17 July 1987.

  3 NO KNOWN CURE

  21 Chris Morris in conversation with Paul Lashmar, 6
March 2007, Wessex Media Group, Bournemouth University.

  22 Chris Morris in conversation with Paul Lashmar, 6 March 2007, Wessex Media Group, Bournemouth University.

  23 Guardian, 25 July 1994.

  24 Chris Morris in conversation with Paul Lashmar, 6 March 2007, Wessex Media Group, Bournemouth University.

  4 RAW MEAT RADIO

  25 Chris Morris, GLR, 1 April 1991.

  26 GLR, 24 April 1993.

  27 Independent, 28 May 1992.

  28 The Times, 21 August 1993.

  29 Guardian, 11 June 1992.

  30 Time Out, 21–28 November 1990.

  31 Time Out, 5–12 December 1990.

  32 Guardian, 21 August 1992.

  33 Word, March 2005.

  5 FACT X IMPORTANCE = NEWS

  34 Independent, 19 March 1994.

  35 Melody Maker, 4 June 1994.

  36 Time Out, 20–26 June 2007.

  37 Independent, 18 January 1994.

  38 The Times, 21 August 1993.

  39 Time Out, 12–19 January 1994.

  40 Financial Times, 19 January 1994.