Disgusting Bliss

The Brass Eye of Chris Morris

Lucian Randall

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781847391803
• eBook ISBN: 9780857200907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The Sunnewspaper asked if Chris Morris's July 2001 Brass Eye Special on paedophilia was 'the sickest TV ever?' It was certainly the most controversial, though his uncompromising style of comedy meant he was rarely far from trouble. Morris first came to national prominence at the heart of a group of virtually unknown comedians brought together by Armando Iannucci. This book follows them from their 1991 news satire On the Hour, which transferred from radio to television where it was reinvented as the equally successful The Day Today. It became impossible to watch bulletins without thinking of Morris's Paxmanesque anchor character chastising a reporter -- 'Peter! You've lost the news!' -- or authoritatively delivering nonsense headlines: 'Sacked chimney worker pumps boss full of mayonnaise.' Meanwhile co-star Steve Coogan created a lasting anti-hero in Alan Partridge, imbued with a horrible life all of his own. But Morris himself was always the most compelling character of all. Drawing on exclusive new interviews and original research, this book creates a compelling portrait of Morris from his earliest radio days and of the comedians and writers who frequently took on the industry they worked in, polarising opinion to such a degree that government ministers threatened to ban them entirely. THIS IS THE NEEEWWWWS!

1

NO NEWS = GOOD NEWS: BALLS

ON THE HOUR MADE A STRIKINGLY ASSURED DEBUT IN AUGUST 1991. You might even have listened to the first few minutes and not been entirely sure that it wasn’t one of the news programmes that it set out to parody rather than a comedy in its own right. The production was authentic in every detail, from music to the delivery of the presenters. It was only the absurdity of what they were reporting that gave it away. In its wake, topical comedies – taking a wry or, worse yet, a sideways look at the week’s news – suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated and unsophisticated when the medium itself was the subject. And not before time. Pretentious, self-important and riddled with parochial obsession, news programmes had never been questioned in such detail before. Let alone by a show that impudently assumed the slick confidence of its targets just to undermine them.

The programme was presided over by Chris Morris’s demon presenter character, sharing his name and so believable that it was hard to tell where it ended and he began. There was an unassailable confidence to his performance which was apparent to those he worked with as much as it was to the audience when the show was broadcast. But occasionally the mask slipped. When he had to create an outside broadcast for the second series, Morris took his audio gear and a clipboard on to the roads around Broadcasting House. From here, the item called for him to be recalled to the studio as the result of a technical problem. He tapes himself barging back into the BBC and records a genuine exchange with a security guard who wants to see his pass – ‘I’m bursting with news – if you stop me, I’ll explode’ – and takes the lift without ever pausing for breath. But he later admitted to producer Armando Iannucci that while his fellow BBC employees stood in audible silence as he crisply reported on origami attacks in an art gallery, he’d felt rather silly.

You wouldn’t have noticed any signs of discomfort in the broadcast programme. Iannucci says that Morris ‘acts confidence very well’. Throughout the two series, he bullied fellow presenters and punctured the conventions of radio news. He was by far the most prominent figure on the programme, only Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge as memorable. To the casual listener it would have sounded very much the Chris Morris Show in all but name, but the idea to take the format of news itself had come from Armando Iannucci and it was he who assembled and drove the team that worked alongside them. The cast worked from the framework that the two would create and which Morris would use and develop in much of his work throughout the decade.

Then twenty-eight, his invitation to join the show had come the previous year in the form of a speculative letter from Iannucci, a 26-year-old producer of such stalwart Radio 4 comic institutions as The News Quiz and Week Ending. Iannucci was extremely inventive and technically very adept and, like Morris, worked very much on his own terms. Yet he was more amenable to playing the bureaucratic constrictions of the BBC system and to accepting the conventions of publicity, obligingly trotting out the same anecdotes for different interviewers with polished charm. His self-deprecating tones were often employed to communicate the same kind of exasperation at the more ridiculous aspects of the media, but his character was more that of the eyebrows-raised insider who would subvert rather than sabotage. When he talks about working in BBC comedy but having to attend a general production training course at the insistence of the corporation, he expresses his attitude to the notion by emphasizing ‘training course’ in a Scottish lilt that suggests amazement at the existence in this world of anything so dull. And yet it was this course that sparked their revolutionary comedy.

Participants learned about news, features, drama and documentary. They had had to make a ten-minute factual programme and Iannucci began to consider the comic potential of his 1990 course-work. ‘I thought why not make a short news programme which sounded absolutely authentic but which was gibberish,’ he said.¹ Iannucci drew on the verbal tics of other programmes on Radio 4 – Today, drama, newsreaders – and the shows he had first listened to when he came to London from Radio Scotland, including The Way It Is on Capital Radio, a fast and furious news programme with a noisy soundtrack.

Iannucci sent the resulting ten-minute piece to Jonathan James-Moore, the head of light entertainment at BBC Radio, who suggested making it into a pilot for a full series. The first task was to recruit cast and writers. Iannucci had come across Morris’s weekend DJ show on GLR – Greater London Radio – on which he regularly included nonsense stories delivered with authority. ‘There’s someone who, as well as being funny, is very technically competent,’ says Iannucci, ‘so understands how to make something sound like that rather than have to ask a number of people to try and do it.’

Morris drove the ancient, battered Merc he’d had for years to meet Iannucci at BBC Radio in Portland Place. As Morris was illegally parked, they quickly went back to his car. A fruitless cruise for spaces around the block gradually turned into a mobile meeting and the start of a partnership which would last for years. ‘We spent about two hours driving around and around Broadcasting House,’ said Iannucci. ‘And I thought, Well, this is interesting. The fact that I can talk to him for two hours and it just feels normal is a good start, really. And we found we liked the same sort of comedy, so we just clicked instantly.’² It wasn’t just humour, radio and an interest in news and politics that they had in common. As kids they had both been Jesuit-educated and discovered they shared a couple of the same teachers between their respective schools.

The two worked on a pilot completed in April 1991. As a trusted producer, Iannucci was largely left alone to get on with a show for which there was little direct precedent. Comedy featuring the news tended to be either topical jokes about people in the news or the two Ronnies sat at a desk doing gags in their own voices. Even shows like Radio Active, which Iannucci cited as a favourite, alongside Rutland Weekend Television, had been recorded with an audience as a sketch show without going into the minutiae of the business of broadcasting news. The On the Hour team struggle now to recall much in the way of direct influences on the very specific take-off of the genre. There was nobody doing that improvisational, serious approach to spoofing – at least not in the UK. If there was anything at all, for the likes of Dave Schneider and Armando Iannucci, it was to be found from the US in the 1984 movie This is Spinal Tap, the closest cousin in terms of the approach. Its target might have been rock music – specifically heavy metal on the road being quite a ridiculous sight in all its self-regarding pomposity – but like On the Hour it seemed very much as if it could be true and clearly had an affection for the adolescent obsessions of metallers and a feel for the inherent tragedy of the ageing rocker.

On the Hour was to be a magazine show featuring news, sport, weather, finance, environment news and special features. Morris was the anchor, the main presenter, and also played other reporters and interviewees. As in real news shows, his items would be edited and dropped in as complete ‘packages’. Then there was a team of writers and actors who worked almost exclusively with Iannucci. With the overall shape of the programme dictated by Morris and Iannucci, they created the rest of the regular reporters and characters. Ideas either supplied by the writers or less frequently worked up in rehearsals would be developed through improvisation in the studio, and the humour was to come through the contrast between the straight performances and the nonsense content. The choice of cast and writers was vital to the success of a show that was not going to rely on filling a half-hour slot with topical gags for its humour.

‘Most producers try to follow trends,’ explains comic and On the Hour writer Richard Herring. ‘Armando is really excellent at understanding what good comedy is and who is a good comedian.’ Iannucci didn’t just call in the latest sensations from the Edinburgh Festival or select from actors’ directories like Spotlight. He had amassed a bunch of friends through performing comedy since his days at university in Oxford and knew people through his production work, and he was equally prepared to search outside the industry to find exactly the right people for the job. Iannucci’s cast didn’t have to have a background in performing – one of the first to be involved wasn’t even interested in making comedy a full-time career. Andrew Glover had been a long-time friend and partner with Iannucci deep in the mines of student comedy but had given it up to follow his dream as a management consultant.

Glover met Iannucci just days after starting at University College in Oxford. They wrote at college together and were in separate undergraduate revue shows at the 1985 Edinburgh Fringe. As Iannucci began work on a PhD the following year, they performed regularly as A Pair of Shorts. Even then Iannucci had a quality that marked him out from fellow student performers. ‘He was always a bit more demanding of himself,’ says Glover of the young comic. ‘If something feels at all obvious, he’ll want to put three twists in it.’ Having contributed some material for Iannucci who started his career at Radio Scotland, he supplied material for Week Ending when Iannucci helmed it. They continued the informal relationship into On the Hour, Glover enjoying the process of writing for the show without the pressure of it being a primary source of income. Amiable and smart, he would be relaxed about moving further away from the core of the On the Hour group as his very sensible career at washing-powder giants Procter & Gamble grew more demanding.

Rather more serious about the idea of making a go of it was Dave Schneider, another Oxford graduate who had occasionally joined Iannucci in A Pair of Shorts after Glover’s departure. Schneider had studied modern languages after attending the City of London School. ‘Armando was bloody good. Voices, impressions, stupidness,’ says Schneider. ‘There is a slapstick quality to Armando as well, which people don’t associate with him.’ The two would bunk off the Bodleian Library to spend time in coffee bars chatting about comedy and friends who had gone professional. Among Schneider’s own comedy heroes was Danny Kaye, like him a Jewish comic with a physical aspect to his act which inspired Schneider as he included clowning around in his live show, wrestling with tables or playing a talentless magician. Both he and Iannucci favoured surreal material and Schneider started to research around Yiddish theatre for a PhD, but neither he nor Iannucci completed their higher studies. While Iannucci went to Radio Scotland, Schneider acted at the National Theatre and ended up on TV’s Up To Something!, a forgotten sketch show with Shane Richie for which Iannucci was also a writer. Schneider was around for the flickering initial ember of On the Hour that Iannucci made for his BBC production course and has a vague recollection of contributing an interview with a brain-damaged boxer.

The permutations of friends from Iannucci’s Oxford days became more tangled with the addition of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, two comics who had met at the university. Iannucci used masses of their material on Week Ending, a show the pair regarded with mixed feelings. It was good to have a professional outlet, but, although Iannucci had freshened up the format, they still found it embarrassingly formulaic. Worse, as new, young writers they were featured in documentaries about it. They got their own back with an On the Hour sketch ripping up what they saw as the old show’s worst excesses of predictable caricatures and groaning puns, ‘Thank God It’s Satire-Day’. The bile was real. After a year on Week Ending, Richard Herring had got to the point where he hid in one of the crates used to store newspapers in the writers’ room to avoid a meeting. ‘I just couldn’t face writing shit topical satire,’ he explains.

Patrick Marber was another performer for whom On the Hour came at just the right time. He’d worked with Iannucci before, including a brief coinciding stint on the inevitable Week Ending. Marber’s own style of humour was much influenced by Ben Elton and Rik Mayall who he saw perform at his Oxford college in 1983. ‘Formatively, hilariously funny,’ says Marber, who also started out on the stand-up circuit. But he was always aware that he was just filling time.

‘I decided that I enjoyed doing this thing,’ he says. ‘“I want to be a serious writer, but I haven’t written anything, so I will bide my time doing comedy until I write my great work.” I think that was my general overview.’ He kept on what was becoming a performing treadmill, including a yearly stint in Edinburgh, but it was becoming painfully obvious to him that he wasn’t in the league of such contemporaries as Eddie Izzard. Marber took a year off around 1990 to live what he thought would be the life of a novelist in Paris, during which time Iannucci called up to ask him to be in On the Hour. Which turned out to be good timing, because Marber had failed to write his book and felt he was doing little more than standing by watching his friends preparing one-hour shows to propel them into stardom. ‘I didn’t have the talent to go all the way as a stand-up. I didn’t have the ambition . . . I just didn’t want it,’ he says.

Iannucci and Morris’s show represented a particularly welcome change for Doon Mackichan. She had been appearing in Radio 1’s sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, in its later series produced by Iannucci, starring David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, and had found it a rather depressing experience. There were few enough good comedic roles around for women and Mary Whitehouse was no exception, the female performers feeling they were left with whatever the men didn’t want to say. If On the Hour had a male perspective, it was dictated more by the newsroom setting than by the rest of the cast. The production of the show would be a collaborative process in which everyone could get something in – as long as they spoke up loud enough. Rebecca Front was another occasional Mary Whitehouse performer who was recruited. Iannucci had also produced a radio series for a double act in which she appeared.

In addition, Front knew Marber from a 1984 Oxford revue show called Stop the Weak, in which they’d done knockabout, physical comedy. And, independently of Iannucci, Marber and Mackichan knew of each other from the stand-up circuit, where both of them had come across the most well known of all the cast and writers, Steve Coogan. He was the one member of the team who hadn’t come across or worked with Iannucci in one of his many roles, but he came recommended. Coogan had been a great mimic from his childhood days, had started doing impressions as part of his stand-up while studying drama at the polytechnic in his home town of Manchester and walked straight into a contract to do voices for Spitting Image. By the time On the Hour came along, he had also appeared in the Royal Variety Performance and, like Patrick Marber, whom he had met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990, was frustrated by the limitations of what he was doing.

‘I was known as a sort of cut-price Rory Bremner. Reliable, but limited,’ he said. ‘I knew that impressions made people laugh and were a short cut to approval from an audience, but I respected other comedians because they got laughs without doing impressions, which meant they had to work a lot harder, and that what they were doing was more substantial. It wound me up. I wanted that respect.’³

Into this potent brew of youthful ambition, burgeoning success and sweaty impatience Armando dropped a couple of veteran New Musical Express writers. David Quantick and Steven Wells were a few years older than most of the others, had been working in the music press since the early 1980s and regarded their mostly lesser-known colleagues with a mixture of condescension and disdain. ‘I just remember thinking, What a bunch of losers,’ says Quantick. ‘These people will never make it.’ His partner felt the same.

‘I wanted to produce the show!’ Wells recalls. ‘I was an arrogant and incredibly frustrated rock writer.’ Although Quantick had also written for Spitting Image, he and Wells had been recruited on the strength of their NME column, called Culture Vulture, Ride the Lizard, or whatever they felt like each week once they’d got completely stoned and filled it with topical music parodies. An item in their column about classical music which included the assertion that it largely involved tiny guitars played under the chin particularly appealed to Iannucci, who felt it was good for the journalistic side of the show to have writers who were funny but as music writers weren’t primarily gag men: ‘More of a way of doing funny non-fiction,’ he explains.

As an actor rather than a comedian, Rebecca Front also contributed to the straight feel of the show, though she was initially uncomfortable with the improvisation. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be funny enough,’ she explains, ‘but Armando talked me out of it . . . Well, sort of shoved a microphone in front of me and made me get on with it, to be specific.’

In that first meeting, Iannucci handed out copies of his sketches and played an excerpt of the original programme he’d done for his training course. Richard Herring’s notes survive to reveal how advanced the thinking from Morris and Iannucci already was. Amid his doodles were ‘vox pops’, ‘news-clips – false – spurious’, ‘real clips’, ‘professional liars’ and ‘is it specially written or true. News events.’

Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan encountered each other for the first time when the cast first assembled in the studio. ‘I was slightly nervous because he was very quiet,’ said Iannucci. ‘Then we switched the microphones on and he was very funny . . . I now see that his strangeness was actually a matter of being a bit reserved with people he doesn’t know.’⁴

For his part, Coogan felt what could have been a sideways move in going to radio had been vindicated. ‘Working with Iannucci was a revelation. He really did reshape things for me . . . I remember thinking, I’ve been looking for this all my life. We knew we were on to something,’ he later said.⁵

From briefing to broadcast, the feel of the show remained remarkably unchanged, but Iannucci couldn’t be entirely sure of how the people he knew separately or in different permutations would work together. But his instinct had been spot on. They gelled almost instantly. It helped that, apart from Quantick and Well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• 1 No News = Good News: Balls
• 6 Putting a Spine in a Bap
• 11 Now, What Seems to Be the Problem?
• 12 If the Printed Word Has Any Meaning..