Disgusting Bliss (11 page)

Their colleague’s success did nothing to dissipate the rancour between Marber and Herring and Lee. For a while Patrick Marber was a frequent target in their double act. ‘I still see him every now and again,’ says Herring now. ‘He’s not someone I have great affection for, but I don’t hate him as much as we make out.’

Lee and Herring were still on good terms with Armando Iannucci and back in London got him to appear on their
Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World
that autumn. For his part, Iannucci enjoyed appearing in a show he wasn’t writing, so he could just turn up and be funny, ‘just the opposite of thinking about everything’.
On the Hour
had been such an intensive project that many of its participants went with relief to shows that lent themselves more to being performed than assembled. For Morris the reverse was true. He actively preferred to be away from it all in the studio. ‘He enjoyed his writing and he does his stuff himself,’ explains Iannucci, ‘but it takes us to tell him that he’s actually very good at all the voices and characters he does. He just feels that’s something he does.’ The GLR shows were all he needed.

Morris was absent from
Knowing Me, Knowing You . . . with Alan Partridge
, which began on Radio 4 in December 1992. Lee and Herring’s falling out with Patrick Marber and the dispute over credits meant they weren’t involved either. Yet it would be Alan more than anyone else who facilitated the team’s crossover from admired cult comedy to mainstream success. Alan was put forward for his own series even before the TV version of
On the Hour
.

The tone of
Knowing Me
. . . was lighter than
On the Hour
, a welcome relief for its performers. If anything, the audience took the show more seriously than its creators, with several listeners assuming that the show was real. In the last episode, Patrick Marber’s Lord Morgan of Glossop dies mid-interview, and the dismayed complainers included a headmaster of a public school.
Knowing Me, Knowing You
won Best Radio Comedy in the British Comedy Awards in 1993 and won a Sony award that same year. Of all the cast, Steve Coogan was the most obvious contender for stardom.
On the Hour
’s sports reporter had effortlessly passed his anchorman in the celebrity stakes – which suited them both fine.

Chris Morris was absorbed in
The Day Today
when he returned to GLR for six Saturdays from April 1993. Those shows – his last ever for the station – were his equivalent of the lightness of
Knowing Me, Knowing You
. He was confident and playful, displaying no apparent hint of effort in the endless stream of ideas and gags. There was plenty in the shows that would make it into Morris’s 1994 series of Radio 1 shows, and there was also a precursor of the later
Blue Jam
series in the form of a monologue with a strange and desolate tone. The pieces were called Temporary Open Spaces and were read by Robert Katz. It was the start of an occasional writing collaboration that would last for years. Katz had come to Morris’s attention through what he describes as a ‘vaguely surrealist column’ he wrote in London listings magazine
City Limits
. The two met through Jo Unwin, then sharing a house with Katz’s girlfriend of the time. The stories they came up with had a distinct flavour that was unlike anything else Morris did.

They would be delivered in a flat tone, the backdrop London as an alien landscape peopled with heartless media drones and depressives seen through the sinking eyes of an everyman disassociated from everything he encounters, exploited by those he meets and adrift in the city. Robert Katz says that it was Morris who was interested in exploring the downbeat comedy of a ‘fuzzy-headed’ figure, someone running at a different speed from the world around him. The inspiration was ‘partly the result of banging on my “fuzzy head” to see what thin noises might come out’, says Katz, ‘but also developed from one or two other bodies we stole from the morgue of real-life characters’. The GLR pieces were sculpted by Morris to bring out that quality of otherness: ‘I seem to recall that Chris edited every intra-vocal breath out,’ Katz recalls, ‘so that there’s a strange hiatus between each single word.’ Morris had been thinking of a way in which to change the jaunty tempo of the GLR show, and Robert Katz fitted the bill to work with, although he downplays his contribution to the process. It was certainly an important shift in mood, flavouring much of what Morris would do towards the end of the 1990s with
Blue Jam
and its offshoots. In conversation by email, though, Katz is not unlike Morris himself, witty and friendly, but nevertheless guarded and considered in everything he discusses. He gradually opens up over time in a series of observations that are as thoughtful as they are frequently tangential, occasionally acerbic and entertainingly gnomic.

Emphasizing Morris’s ‘galaxy-sized mind’, Katz says that he ‘always had the vision and wrote and recorded the things to his satisfaction, and because he’s a genius 99 per cent of that is perspiration. His, not mine. It’s not false modesty; I was just thrilled to be able to do stuff with him.’ And yet even in such casual correspondence, Katz has a precise and evocative style which could itself be straight out of a
Blue Jam
sketch. Asked if he agrees that something of the flavour of GLR’s Temporary Open Spaces is at the core of the later shows, Katz says, ‘I guess you could say the monologues in
Blue Jam
formed a centre, but only because that’s where they physically are, in the middle of the shows, like a slow movement in a symphony, or a dead body lolling in the middle of a pond.’ It’s hard not to come away from a – typically oblique – email conversation with him without concluding that he was more central to the process than he admits.

Their work was going out on a station that was changing. For those who loved its bold remit and chaotic creativity, it wasn’t for the better. Matthew Bannister had left GLR in 1991 to develop the BBC’s royal charter renewal and Trevor Dann became the managing editor. But the BBC were determined to standardize regional stations and had enforced speech-only segments of the day.

Trevor Dann took redundancy in May 1993. It was the month in which Morris’s last few shows were going out, as he and Armando Iannucci continued to work on
The Day Today
over the rest of the year. Dann knew full well what he was letting himself in for when he invited Morris to talk at his leaving do. ‘I suppose you’re all expecting something funny,’ Morris said, ‘but I don’t do stand-up.’ He played a pre-recorded phone call he had made to the director general of the BBC, John Birt. ‘Could you take a message for him, please?’ he said in Trevor Dann’s distinctive Midlands tones. ‘Could you tell him I think he’s a big load of sloppery old bollocks.’ The following day Dann had to make a conciliatory phone call to Birt’s PA, who had been entirely convinced it was the genuine article.
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There was a similarly painful call to Radio 1 assistant controller Chris Lycett, who greeted ‘Trevor’ with a matey ‘Doctor Dann! How the hell are you?’ But as ‘Doctor’ Dann bid ever more shamelessly for the inside track to becoming what he called a ‘waggish’ Radio 1 DJ, an increasingly unhappy Lycett attempted to shuffle out of the brittle conversation, which seemed for tortuous minutes to prefigure the classic desperate programme pitches of Alan Partridge’s. At length Lycett clambered out. ‘This isn’t Trevor Dann, is it?’ ‘You may be clever,’ said the counterfeit doctor over his victim’s repeated demands to know who he’s really talking to, ‘but you’re ugly.’

THE 1994 TRANSFER OF
ON THE HOUR
TO TELEVISION SHOULD have gone smoothly. The BBC had a proven hit on their hands, but BBC bureaucracy got in the way. They couldn’t possibly allow Iannucci and Morris the same sort of control over the show when it left radio. It would be out of the question, the duo were told, that they could run their own programme when they had no experience of television. It didn’t matter that much of the success of
On the Hour
had been down to their iron control – though as a concession, management told a distinctly unimpressed Armando Iannucci, he could have a script editing role. Morris and Iannucci decided they would rather take their show elsewhere than watch it slip away from them. It was a decision that the strengths of their partnership made far easier. ‘I’m not sure that I would have said “no” if I hadn’t been doing it with Chris,’ says Iannucci. It was a risk, because although they knew they had a good and tested format, they couldn’t be sure they would get someone interested to do it in the way they wanted. But if they were ever going to make the move away from the security of the BBC, now was the time. Chris Morris was only just thirty and neither of them yet had children.

But the hardest part of the decision for Armando Iannucci was leaving the organization he had worked for since university, where he had built a reputation as an excellent comedy producer. Now he was being effectively told that everything he did was somehow less accomplished because it was just radio and that television involved complexities that he just wouldn’t be up to. It was a short-sighted attitude, but one that was then commonly held at the BBC about radio production. Iannucci pointed management at the example of Dan Patterson, who co-created
Whose Line Is It Anyway?
on BBC radio and then took it to Channel 4. ‘Yeah,’ came the dusty response that was a clincher in Iannucci’s mind, ‘but if you look at the lighting on some of those Channel 4 shows, it’s not quite as good.’

He and Morris set out to find an independent production company that would let them work on the show on their own terms. Hat Trick, one of the biggest comedy producers, were one of the first they tried. They were welcoming but ‘not quite right’, says Iannucci. ‘Didn’t quite feel that we’d be completely left to do it the way we wanted to do.’

Talkback looked much more their kind of place. It had been founded by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones while they were doing
Not the Nine o’Clock News
at the start of the 1980s, and when Morris and Iannucci arrived it was still a relatively small but inventive company. They put the creative goals of their producers first and worked back to make sure they could be realistically achieved. The company was headed by Peter Fincham, a Cambridge graduate and former musician who had joined Talkback in 1985 yet retained his enthusiasm for the creative aspects of the shows he oversaw. ‘It was a really good camaraderie. I think Peter’s very good at leaving people alone,’ explains Nick Canner, a veteran of the company who was assigned to
The Day Today
production team. ‘People liked to work at Talkback because it’s not like there’s a David O. Selznick figure sending memos every day, saying, “I think that could’ve been funnier.” Peter was very much a sort of hands-off figure: “You’re a talented person – be talented!”’ And somehow the Talkback ‘vibes’, adds Armando Iannucci, were right. They’d found an easy-going centre of excellence where talent was given space to thrive. By convention, companies controlling the entertainment business make impossible, soul-destroying demands of their stars –
The Day Today
creators would turn that truism around.

It was also the start of a long relationship between Morris and Talkback, which tailored their working practices to individual creative temperament. They realized he didn’t need the safety net of a tight production contract – and that he wouldn’t be constrained even if he had one – so there was never a formal agreement between them. They gave him an office away from their headquarters and the time to develop his ideas.

With production secured, the pilot of the new show was completed in January 1993, a year before the full series went out on the BBC. Iannucci and Morris reinvented everything, even the title. That they brought such a fine level of observation to both radio and then TV news journalism did make it seem as if they had it in for news as a concept, but Iannucci maintains it was not a vendetta. ‘You do these things partly out of affection as well,’ says Iannucci now. ‘It was not saying, “All telly is bad and unless we change our habits British broadcasting is going to go down the pan.”’ Iannucci simply often found inspiration in politics and the media, though he had been the subject of enough interviews in which minor comments ended up being a sensational headline to feel a natural suspicion towards the media.

‘You can see how artificial the process is,’ he says. ‘It’s not that simple telling of reality. You realize how edited the news is.’ As part of their research, he and Morris took a mini news-editing course organized by the BBC newsroom. The pair were given a story from the ongoing Bosnian War with four main pieces of information, which they had to set to rushes from BBC coverage of the conflict in the form of a two-minute piece with voiceover. As their allotted two hours came to a close, they realized they were without obvious footage to illustrate one of the key points of the package and they had to leave it out. It gave them a clear idea of how much news had to do with presentation and deadline. In the spring of 1994 Morris would write in his review of a war reporter’s memoirs, ‘Basically, news is glorified gossip. It is not the truth that makes a story news, but its entertainment value.’
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He and Iannucci were given a tour of the newsroom that same day by staff who expected to be quizzed by the comedians on what funny things happen in the studio, only to find themselves questioned closely on the technical aspects of making programmes and learning about how the designers and directors of the news did their jobs, an in-depth approach to research which Morris would always retain. Charlie Brooker, co-creator of
Nathan Barley
, remembers at least a full hour devoted to deciding the font that would most believably be used by
Sugar Ape
, the style bible for which journalist Dan Ashcroft writes.

For the writing of
The Day Today
, the idea had been to bring along the same people from the radio. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring were still concerned about how they might retain ownership of ideas that they co-created, but for a while it looked as if the dispute might be resolved. The pilot went ahead without them, but when a new front in the wrangling opened over a trivial sum for the commercial release of
On the Hour
, ‘it was then beginning to stop things from happening,’ says Iannucci. He refused the request and went through every tape in one long session, removing everything credited to the duo.