Disgusting Bliss (21 page)

It made writing for
Brass Eye
a liberating experience. ‘Nobody ever got the impression that he had to change what he was saying or kiss up or try and schmooze any of those cunts in commissioning. Chris was a bastion of free speech. From the outset he seemed to bypass all the haggling and explaining process when you have to say why people would like your stuff and then it becomes shit because you have to change it.’

When she and Quantick contributed material – such as the miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary driving a car – it would be taken on by Linehan and Mathews and refined further by Morris. ‘What you were doing basically was you were having the world’s greatest pub conversation,’ reflects Bussmann now. The process generally involved making each other laugh for long periods of time. She cites the discussion of how Victorians might have courted, something which didn’t make it into the show. They riffed on gentlemen wearing stovepipe hats which would rotate at the object of their desire to show a zoetrope – except instead of the classic scene of horses jumping it would be people having sex. Even at the early writing stage, it was clear the series would be special. ‘I just remember thinking, It’s like some fucking summit in space,’ says Bussmann. ‘It’s a period in history you can actually look around and think, This is fucking amazing and I hope I remember every moment.’

Radio 1 contributor Paul Garner also got a few pieces in and played a couple of parts, and – as ever – Morris gave him the jobs that most involved potential physical harm. He was to illustrate fear of science by jumping out at people on the street with a big sign saying ‘Technology’. Each take Morris managed to cue him as a particularly bad-tempered commuter walked by.

After
The Word
was finally axed, several members of its production crew joined
Brass Eye
, including Andrew Newman.
The Word
shared with Morris’s show a casual disregard for its medium, and Newman had worked on the prank set-ups which required a certain amount of ruthless character to carry out. He specialized in getting
Brass Eye
’s celebrities to do the interviews. Production manager Ali MacPhail returned from
The Day Today
to work with Morris again. Caroline Leddy had arrived at Talkback after working in BBC radio. She liaised closely between Morris and Channel 4, a job which became more tricky as the relationship deteriorated alarmingly towards transmission.

They had a fairly healthy budget to work with, particularly in terms of comedy production, but there was so much going on in
Brass Eye
that it was swiftly swallowed by a large cast, location shoots, elaborate sets and the secret office for the campaigns. The amount of time and money Talkback spent on Morris’s projects would always far outweigh any tangible financial benefit, but the company knew they were powerful shows whose importance wasn’t easy to price. Morris would go over budget in every series he made, and nobody liked to tackle him about it, partly because he could be ferocious in defending something he felt was integral to a show and partly because he was usually right.

When Talkback did have to step in, it would usually be Sally Debonnaire who was tasked with telling him to stop spending. Peter Fincham tended to avoid battles with Morris if he could, although he did offer the team a kind of back-up support on occasion. During the making of the
Special
in 2001, he wrote a stern memo to Morris on the subject. And asked Philippa Catt, who looked after day-today production, to hand it on. Later that day she and Morris were riding to a shoot with director Tristram Shapeero. Morris read the note as they set off and immediately ordered the car to pull over. He jumped out, grabbed his coat and bag from the back of the car and told them, ‘I may or may not be there this afternoon,’ before slamming the boot shut and striding off up Berwick Street. Shapeero and Catt looked at each other and wondered what they would say to the rest of the crew. They arrived at the location to find Morris apologetic and having got there before them by public transport.

Money seemed to have no further meaning to Morris other than getting as much of it as possible up on the screen. He was entirely unconcerned about making it for himself, to the point that a despairing Chiggy virtually had to do aspects of deals for him behind his back to ensure that he didn’t negotiate his cut away entirely in return for a bit of extra filming – while simultaneously trying to get Peter Fincham’s executive producer fee diverted to production. And during the making of the
Special
, he hit on the idea of getting the crew to use his house as a location base for a Brixton shoot. About twenty of them turned up, and production coordinator Holly Sait had the distinct impression that Jo Unwin, at home with the two young boys, hadn’t quite been briefed on their arrival.

Everyone was expected to help save where they could so that ever more footage could be shot. Crew checked out locations by public transport – when Morris received the memo from Fincham they’d all been sitting in Tristram Shapeero’s own car rather than a taxi – and during shoots for the original series Ali MacPhail, who lived near Morris in south London, remembers that he regularly hitched a lift back with her. Enjoying a good gossip, he relied on her to fill him in on any production crew scandal on the way. It was about his only distraction as he absorbed himself in the technicalities of production.

When he wasn’t involved in battles about budgets, Morris’s charm and humour meant that the crew worked far harder than they might normally – without that goodwill, a show with the complexity of
Brass Eye
just wouldn’t have happened, no matter how much cash was poured in. More than anything, the ambition and boldness of the concept made everyone care about the show. ‘He’s hard work in terms of you’ve got to be prepared to put the work in,’ says Armando Iannucci, ‘but it’s always very rewarding. It does sort the men out from the boys. Because some people just want to do what you normally do for a show and don’t want the hassle. You find that he raises the quality threshold of anything you do. It makes you ask if something is good enough and if it’s not, then don’t do it. But it is hard, it’s very hard. It’s just sheer, gruelling, hard toil.’

Ali MacPhail likens Morris to a general leading from the front. When he marched smartly down the corridors at Channel 4, curly hair billowing, people would actually get out of his way. But then there was the weekend she had flu and he came over. By the time she had made it to the front door, he’d gone, leaving a little bag with a lemon, a jar of honey, a small bottle of whisky and a get-well note.

Charlie Brooker is one of those who saw a different Morris in production – his personality shifted into a grave and reflective mode, dwelling on everything that might go wrong. And the job was made trickier still for those around him because Morris actively enjoyed catching people out. You had to back up what you were saying and not waffle. He wasn’t looking to be surrounded by sycophants, and there was never any point in putting your point over half-heartedly. It was always good to take notes in production meetings with him, though you could never be sure whether he’d test you out because he was trying out every option or just because he wanted to see what you knew. There was a sketch in his later series
Jam
involving a television filled with lizards. What, he asked art director Dick Lunn, was the ‘operating temperature’ of a lizard? Having done a special project on lizards as part of his zoology degree, he probably knew more than most.

Just as on the Radio 1 shows, the production office fax machine whirred late into the night. Sally Debonnaire also received calls after hours, but more usually from tearful crew members for whom the constant demands had become too much. She acted as unofficial mentor– a role she would reprise in his other programmes – talking them down with ideas they might suggest to him for how things could be more reasonably accomplished.

Veterans of
The Day Today
had an idea of what to expect. Graphic designers Russell Hilliard and Richard Norley had left ITN by then and were building their company Jump. Money was tight and they used their old employer’s equipment during downtime. Their work was a key element of
Brass Eye
, which was designed to operate in a graphical environment that was rarely static, the viewer continually dropped in and out of reports which were framed in boxes popping up and down at speed. It was as if the documentary were the entire world and, having made you dizzy with confusion,
Brass Eye
held out its hand to be your only guide. The effects were complicated and, at the point of exhaustion, Jump eventually had to beg Morris to prioritize. He made an attempt – sort of – by faxing over a list of effects numbered by importance. The first was marked top priority. So were all the others.

Composer Jonathan Whitehead had initial idea sessions with Morris, after which he was largely left alone to produce the incidental music. He wrote to the completed graphics sequences in the shows to effectively suggest mayhem, panic and life-threatening urgency. Then the two of them refined or reworked the music – generally making it more rather than less overcooked. Briefed to write a main theme with the heartbeat of the inexorable progress of ‘Montagues and Capulets’ from Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
, Whitehead’s production indicated how clever the show thought it was with a shifting time signature. Just as the ad break started, a brief excerpt would be repeated over Jump’s rushing graphics disappearing into a perspective point, giving an effective feeling of falling into a bottomless chasm with the brass section from an orchestra.

Actors were drafted into
Brass Eye
at an early stage to make even the briefest part seem believable. ‘Often things are best when they’re thrown at you and you have no time to prepare,’ says Doon Mackichan. ‘So Chris would often just say he wanted to do a particular character and would talk. And then I would go away and have time to come back with some ideas.’ There were often new bits of script to be learned at short notice or props were changed at the last minute. ‘You just don’t take it personally,’ she says, recalling the moments she grabbed to learn words while simultaneously feeding her baby in the dressing room. ‘It’s the people who think they’re geniuses who actually don’t come up to scratch when they tell you to do things. That’s when your hackles get up. Chris can kind of get away with murder.’

It was a restless approach Chris shared with his brother Tom. Then at the Battersea Arts Centre, Tom Morris had been in experimental theatre for most of his career. Composer Adrian Sutton worked with both of them: ‘Tom, in particular, during theatre shows is always very infectiously enthusiastic about trying things out,’ Sutton says. ‘You just can’t help but want to please them because they’re just so gracious and lovely about it.’

Not all the cast came to
Brass Eye
with experience of how Morris did things. New faces included Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap and David Cann, all of whom worked so well with Morris’s meandering approach that they became a core part of his unofficial repertory company for both
Blue Jam
and
Jam
. ‘Work-wise it’s rewarding being asked to contribute to the process,’ says Eldon, ‘and the preparation that’s gone into is a marked contrast to how TV works mostly; you don’t get directed. You don’t rehearse.’ Both Heap and Eldon had an understated way of approaching their parts which gave even the most extreme scenario a sense of realism. They had a quality of stillness which bordered on the eerie, suggesting a sense of otherness to even the most ordinary character. Their deceptive normality was matched by David Cann’s startlingly reassuring figures of authority. But
Brass Eye
was most strongly associated with Morris’s anchorman – bullying, sneering, Paxmanning. Its strength made it easy to overlook the twenty or so other characters he played over the course of the series. But while his scripted parts were mostly reporters, so essentially men all doing the same job, Morris lightly suggested individuality with a skilful touch which never allowed characters to obscure the jokes in the stories they reported. Ted Maul was an old favourite from
The Day Today
, still blazered and not quite able to hide his inferiority fears about his provincial roots. Austen Tasseltine was geeky and not as clever as he thought he was. Alabaster Codify was more occasional, a US reporter with the full permatan and gleaming teeth which made him seem much more of a developed character than his brief screen time suggested.

Others made up an array of varied experts and witnesses for each topic. A baseball cap and wrap-around clear glasses marked out earnest anti-drugs campaigner Lemuel Webb as overanxious to appear to be seen as cool by the kids he’s trying to warn off drugs. Showing them a jar containing the bloody contents of a coke-head’s sneeze, he thinks he’s impressing them in saying, ‘That man is lying on his back thinking, Where in shitting crikey is my nose?’ For Captain Clyde Jackson, Morris wore blue contacts with a jet-black centre and a thin moustache to create a modern borstal psycho-governor, demanding of a prisoner, ‘Where’s your self-re-cocking-spect?’ It was the sparklingly demented dialogue more than the subtle characterization which stayed in the mind, but each episode was scattered with those tight cameos. Greasy US talk-show host Chuck Fadanoid talked glibly about priests with guns and – strictly just an impersonation of Jarvis Cocker but as rounded as Morris’s radio Keith Richards – there was Purves Grundy, lead singer with Blouse.

Brass Eye
was solid enough to pass for a documentary strand in its own right rather than trying to take off any one programme in particular. It had the feel of current affairs as macho eventing with bold and elegant editing and its emotive presentation of the big issues. The realistic presentation of the show supported its stylized dialogue and wilder invention – in a report on a detention camp, it’s somehow not surprising when one of the inmates is caught out during a regular dormitory inspection for not having polished a large brass moustache hidden behind a noticeboard. And as Gina McKee’s Libby Shuss concludes the scene with a voiceover explaining that the inmates will then have to strip their beds, bury the blankets and dig them up to sleep in them ‘all earthy’, the sense of indefinable menace is carried by the realization of the staging.