Disgusting Bliss (10 page)

An occasional contributor to GLR was Paul Garner, who had kept in contact with Morris since meeting him at Radio Cambridgeshire while a teenager doing voluntary work. He played himself on air, willing to be as silly as he could be while helping Morris out generally, ad-libbing and doing competitions. Morris was amused to learn that when Garner had to fly anywhere he would invariably pass time at the airport by seeing if he could get the information desk to page names which made stupid phonetic phrases. Garner would go out to stores and record himself paging names like ‘Dawn Doyn’ for Morris’s show.

Callers to the show were engaged in a similarly brisk, deadpan banter. Morris always sounded most delighted when someone made him laugh despite himself or entered into his world, playing along as if the weirdness were just normal. This was just as true of very young listeners, who were used as part of the comic arsenal in a natural, inclusive way, rather than being handled with the patronizing overdelicacy that was the media’s default mode. Morris’s default mode was anyway a childlike, mischievous enthusiasm.

In a feature that he later took to his Radio 1 shows, ‘kiddy’s outing’, an outright slander would be delivered at a random celebrity with charming innocence by a very small child. Even the most baseless character assassination sounded endearing when the reader clearly had no idea of the meaning of what they were saying and their main preoccupation was to endeavour to pronounce long words properly – in which respect, kiddy’s outing was much like Morris’s adult vox pops. In a typical example, one BBC journalist was named as a ‘Mekon-headed, sour-faced, constipated news-barker’. For the most part, Morris needed only himself for the humour. He created vivid little characterizations for little mini-sketches. Keith Richards developed from an affectionate impression complete with wheezing laugh and drunken guitar strumming to the point where he would have his own little spot occasionally with surreal musings on current issues.

In July 1990 the GLR show won a Gold Award at the International Radio Festival of New York. That same year Morris and Iannucci started to discuss what would become
On the Hour
. And by the time studio work on that show began in 1991, Morris had found an agent, Caroline ‘Chiggy’ Chignell at PBJ – the management founded by Peter Bennett-Jones – though not without having to do some persuading.

‘We resisted,’ she says. ‘Partly because I was quite new and I didn’t know who he was.’ She tried to get rid of him politely.

‘I haven’t done anything in radio,’ she explained.

‘Exactly!’ Morris replied, delighted. He explained that it would be the gap they had that he could take up. Chiggy relented. ‘He’s easy to relent to,’ she says. ‘He’s just very persuasive. It’s like having the best salesman you can imagine.’ Morris energetically set about sealing the deal, treating it as a great game for everyone, but combined his irresistible energy with total clarity about what he wanted. It was an agent’s dream. An initial six-month try-out became a permanent arrangement.

On Christmas Day 1990 Morris made his debut appearance on Radio 1 for a one-off show, and early in the new year he left GLR as
On the Hour
took priority. But he continued to do specials and returned in November after the series finished for a further three-month stint.

‘He always was part of the team and he ebbed and flowed,’ says Trevor Dann. ‘His argument, quite legitimately, was: “I can’t do this for very long. You know, this is not an act I can do fifty-two weeks of the year” . . . Yeah, and I kind of get that . . . this isn’t like being Terry Wogan. You can’t just turn up and do it.’

Morris’s return was in the form of a three-hour Friday-afternoon show interspersed with news, sport, weather and traffic and an hour-long programme on Sundays. The run concluded at the end of January 1992 when he went to work on the second series of
On the Hour
. The first outing had been such a success that there was a buzz about what would be the final series.

Morris continued to introduce the real world to
On the Hour
with ever more elaborate stunts, including a series of phone calls in which he convinced the
Sun
to buy a story about Neil Kinnock (Steve Coogan) being recorded on a Dictaphone abusing restaurant staff in the middle of the general election campaign. It was not long after the Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown had been exposed for having an affair and it went all the way to a deal, to include substantial cash and a picture of editor Kelvin MacKenzie in a heart-shaped frame. The journalist realized he had been hoaxed only at the point Morris insisted he be quoted as having also seen Kinnock running nude down his hotel corridor in the middle of the night shouting, ‘Forget Paddy Pantsdown, I’m Neil Kingcock.’

But he was less successful in an attempt to get the
Today
programme to feature an item about cows coming back to life – it was close, though. Morris called the Radio 4 news programme early one morning shift posing as a freelance reporter from the West Country. His Ted Maul-style character was very much like one of the many real-life local reporters who would try the
Today
show in the hope that selling a story would be a way out of regional broadcasting. It was quite a good way of sneaking an item on the programme, as the approaches tended to be looked on favourably by the show’s editors as a way of deflecting criticism of the BBC as being London-centric. Morris and other cast members reported on a herd of cattle which had mysteriously revived at an abattoir after slaughter. No cause was given and the dread acronym ‘BSE’ was never mentioned, but it didn’t need to be. An inevitable, if unconscious, link would be made over the panic about British beef which was still in the headlines when
On the Hour
was recording in May 1992. From mad cow disease to undead cow sickness – not so far-fetched in twitchy times. It was a bank holiday, a thinner day for news, and the night editorial team were convinced.

Then assistant editor Rod Liddle arrived. He was later an editor himself of the show and someone who would become involved in his own brand of BBC controversy during the second Gulf War. But he took one look at ‘undead cows’ on the running order and spiked the story – he had no way of knowing who was responsible, that he’d outsmarted the man he would himself later cite in a
Time Out
interview as the ‘only genius’ working in broadcasting.

The fake eventually entered
Today
legend and was still being talked about when the 1992 team gathered for the retirement of their former editor, Phil Harding, in 2007, when the reminiscing turned not to the end of Communism, the first Gulf War or any of the other global stories of the time, but to the ghostly cows from the West Country. Editor Harding could look back on a thirty-eight-year BBC career during which he’d run the World Service, but he himself admitted while laughing that he would have had to resign from
Today
had the story made it through.

The series finished in the only way it could, with Morris’s announcement that the show was taking over Radio 4 entirely and for ever for 24-hour ‘permanews’.
On the Hour
had immediately established itself as a classic. ‘The most brilliant radio comedy to emerge in the last ten years,’ said the
Independent
in May, which highlighted the way it combined ‘flashes of hallucinatory wit with dazzlingly plausible imitations of the tropes of radio news’.
²⁷

‘I should really remember the date: it was a Saturday morning last summer. I was in bed, dismal at the prospect of
Loose Ends
,’ wrote James Hepburn in
The Times
. ‘As I reached for the “off” button, a voice like Trevor McDonald’s on the plains of Armageddon announced that this was
On the Hour
. Thirty minutes later, I was gazing at the radio with much the same feeling that Keats must have had on first reading Chapman’s Homer.’
²⁸
To the delight of doomed, consumptive poets everywhere,
On the Hour
won in the Best Radio comedy category of the 1992 British Comedy Awards.

In the wake of the series the long-running disagreement between Morris and Victor Lewis-Smith reignited. It was claimed that Lewis-Smith had complained to the controller of Radio 4 that Morris was being given more freedom than him to do pranks that pushed at BBC guidelines. Morris obligingly did his bit to keep the bad feeling festering: ‘He’s like an unofficial publicity agent who takes great pains to put my name in print whenever he can. It will run and run until he has a heart attack,’ he said that summer, ‘and falls flat on his fat face.’
²⁹

The mutual dislike had previously bubbled up into public view in
Time Out
’s letters page in late 1990 in a spat over who had originated comic broadcasting techniques and ideas. Lewis-Smith declared in one of the broadsides, ‘It is an ineluctable fact of media life that for every Coke there is a Pepsi. While I am the first to admit that I am no Château Margaux Premier Cru, I like to think of Chris Morris as the Babycham to my Mateus Rosé.’
³⁰

‘I object most strongly to Victor Lewis-Smith’s recent use of the word “ineluctable”,’ began one ‘Massingberd Stitt’ from W1 the following week. ‘Such magniloquent gasconism frankly raises the dander and my fellow symposiasts agree that this whimwham of an adjective sounds spoony and sticks in the craw like a probang.’
³¹
Matthew Bannister observed the skirmishing from a safe distance at the top of GLR. ‘It definitely seemed like a passionate feud, six of one, half a dozen of the other,’ he says now. Like others, he heard stories of Lewis-Smith scrawling Morris-unfriendly graffiti outside the station, but he had never seen it himself.

After
On the Hour
, Lewis-Smith said he was resigned to never receiving a sympathetic hearing from bosses. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘You take a tape into somebody’s office and say, “Listen to this – that man’s a thief!” And they look at you and think, This is somebody with an obsession.’ The
Guardian
featured the rivalry in its Feud’s Corner column in June 1992.

But the arguments between the two were harmless by comparison with another, potentially more damaging, disagreement which was opening up closer to
On the Hour
’s home. The root of the problem was also partly what helped the show to be so remarkable – the collaborative, improvisational approach. Collectively, everyone did well, but individually it was harder to credit each contributor.

This was increasingly a worry for Stewart Lee and Richard Herring who, together with their formidable agent Jon Thoday, wanted to clarify credits. If the show went on tour, then they should be able to say how much they owned of such characters as Alan Partridge. The situation was further complicated by a personality clash between the pair and Patrick Marber, who had started to contribute his own material to the show. Yet over the summer the three were still getting on well enough for them to collaborate on what would be called the Dum Show. They took it to the Edinburgh Festival with Steve Coogan and fellow comedian Simon Munnery.

Morris, meanwhile, showed no more desire than he’d had in his early twenties to perform comedy live. While the others prepared to storm Scotland, he released a record of a few sketches on a
Select
music magazine freebie. He often included music parodies on his DJ shows, and among the offerings to the magazine’s indie and alternative readership was an affectionate Pixies take-off – the incestuous tale of ‘Motherbanger’. Although he always wrote the words and music himself for such items, they were often recorded in the studio of former Bristol University student Jonathan Whitehead. They had got to know each other better over the years and Morris had often stayed at his place in Shepherd’s Bush when he’d been commuting from Bristol. Whitehead would work with him throughout the 1990s on the musical aspects of his shows.

Jonathan Whitehead had started his career harbouring a desire to be a serious composer, influenced by Stockhausen and John Cage, and also made an abortive attempt at establishing himself in the pop world. Realizing he was never going to write a chart-topper, Whitehead learned music production techniques and set about building a career in broadcast music. His background and training helped his role with Morris, assisting with the technical aspects of capturing the feel of a band. Just as it was all about close observation in Morris’s news parodies, here it was all about the detail of the sound, referencing at least two or three songs. Morris didn’t see a comic song as a quick filler. His songs sounded like something the target artist might do on a particularly demented day in the studio, suggesting their essence with little more than a brief sketch.

‘Musically, they somehow got compressed,’ explains Whitehead. ‘There would never be a whole verse just to get it to a certain length. It was always cut up, so you had very fractured structures that were very compact, just to get across the maximum amount of gags in the shortest amount of time.’ In ‘Motherbanger’ there was a brief ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ vocal breakdown: ‘My mother gummed my weapon.’ Like many of the bands Morris picked on, the Pixies were a real favourite of his and the affection helped to underpin the spoof with a sense of authenticity.

While
Select
was running Morris’s work on its front cover, the Dum Show was making its way to Edinburgh, ‘and therein begins the nightmare,’ says Patrick Marber. ‘There was a violent disagreement between me and Richard Herring. I thought he was a brilliant writer, but there was one sketch in which I thought Steve should play the part that Richard was playing. He got very upset, very angry with me, understandably, because it was hurtful, what I said, but I just felt it was true. I thought he was ruining his own sketch . . . Anyway, it all kicked off.’

The
Guardian
review was almost literally correct in observing of the show, ‘Inside this imaginative yet fundamentally flawed showcase are two incisive writers (Richard Herring and Simon Munnery), a pair of adept stand-ups (Stewart Lee and Patrick Marber) and an amusing impressionist (Steve Coogan) all fighting each other to get out.’
³²
It didn’t help, as far as Herring was concerned, that Marber spent the rest of his time directing Coogan’s show
Steve Coogan in Character
with John Thomson. Coogan had a well-rehearsed show, designed to showcase his character work, which won that year’s Perrier Award. Having struggled for so long to define himself as more than an impressionist, he had finally arrived.