Disgusting Bliss (26 page)

Morris’s force field was depleted at the end of
Brass Eye
. He typically fell into something of a slump after finishing off a major project, when there was nothing left to do but pick over the parts of the show that might have been done better and wonder where the next idea would come from. As the torture of the process was forgotten, he would become increasingly absorbed in the next thing. But
Brass Eye
had been a particularly gruelling experience. It had, he told the
Guardian
, ‘exhausted my appetite for discovering people’s tolerance for talking nonsense’. And the constant fighting in getting
Brass Eye
out and keeping it intact had been worse than anything he’d known: ‘No doubt getting to the end, where you’ve been forced to be a sort of surrogate lawyer, well, that’s the most creatively stifling thing you could possibly do.’
¹⁰⁶

Radio seemed like an appealing place in which to get back to work in a more immediately creative way. He returned to Radio 1 free of the constraints of creating accurate parody with what would become
Blue Jam
, late at night, approaching delirium, something of a reflection of how Morris himself was feeling: ‘It was so singular and it came from a mood, quite a desolate mood. I had this misty, autumnal, boggy mood anyway, so I just went with that.’
¹⁰⁷

CHRIS MORRIS AND MATTHEW BANNISTER MET BY CHANCE on a Soho street in early 1997. It was the first time they’d seen one another since Morris’s Radio 1 series in late 1994, but they hardly needed to ask what each other had been up to in the intervening time, both having in their own way reached a certain level of public notoriety. The coverage of
Brass Eye
’s controversies had familiarized even
Daily Mail
readers with Morris, though that was largely limited to disapproving of him as a concept. Bannister’s ruthless remodelling of Radio 1, undertaken with fellow former GLR manager Trevor Dann, had been played out on the front pages to pantomime boos and hisses as the nation’s favourite DJs quit or were abruptly removed to make way for a new generation who were less predictable and whose record collections hadn’t stopped in 1985.

Comedy on Radio 1 had not fared so well since Morris and Bannister had last worked together. It had only been Morris who had managed to combine humour and music with the fluidity that Bannister had wanted to bring to the station. The comic presenter experiment had been shelved. And people had stopped saying comedy was the new rock ’n’ roll. But Bannister was nevertheless intrigued to hear that Morris was thinking of following up
Brass Eye
with a return to radio. ‘I’ve been working on a programme which is sort of like the nightmares you have when you fall asleep listening to the BBC World Service,’ Morris explained.

He had a similar idea back in the GLR days, when BBC2 still closed down for the night with the picture fading and a long tone playing for those still dozing in front of their TV. It was then that Morris imagined a sinister voice enquiring, ‘Are you still out there? Let’s have a little story . . .’ To deliver it, Morris enlisted his childhood favourite, former Bonzo Dog Band singer and artist Vivian Stanshall. Morris had seen him perform live and thought his rich, sepulchral tones would be perfect drifting unannounced into the half-dream state of the audience. But the recording session didn’t quite work out the way they planned.

Morris smuggled them both into GLR late one night, Stanshall late in his career and fragile. As they approached the studio, Morris accidentally let go of the heavy studio doors. It was, he says, an anxious moment: ‘Fuck, I nearly killed a legend,’ he remembers thinking at the time. When they came to record, Stanshall, then in one of his attempts at sobriety, seemed to be lacking in confidence. Morris later had his part re-recorded, but the BBC were sufficiently unimpressed not to acknowledge receipt of the resulting tape.

What became
Blue Jam
was in some ways a development of that indefinable sense of being awake when you should have long been asleep. ‘It’s going to be a spooky-woozy kind of thing,’
¹⁰⁸
Morris later wrote to a cast member. The exact shape would only emerge from experimentation in the studio, but Bannister instinctively felt that Radio 1 should be supporting it. He waived the ban on comedy just for Morris’s new show. It was to start broadcasting in November 1997.

Blue Jam
bypassed the rational mind of the day to speak directly to the nearly unconscious, as music and humour oozed together, grotesque concepts surfacing into the slick and away almost before your mind had a chance to register them. It was also Morris’s creative response to being what a colleague describes as ‘deeply, deeply terrified by the dark’. If
Brass Eye
loudly cracks open the brightly lit armour of professional life,
Blue Jam
examines in microscopic detail what happens at the most disorienting time possible, when defences are at their thinnest and even the familiar seems distorted, sinister – and hopeless.

The programme seemed unlike anything else around, to have come fully formed from nowhere, though the basic elements were exactly those that Morris had developed over his years in radio. The difference was he had freed them from the traditional hand-holding of the audience which he’d found so agonizing in his early career.
Blue Jam
had eliminated news, weather, jingles to remind you whose show it was and where you were listening to it, trails and chat. Listener interaction, always minimal with Morris, had also gone completely. What remained was comedy linked by DJ’ing without the admin. Morris drew fully on his wide-ranging taste in music to create a playlist that leaned towards the more interesting areas of dance and electronic music at a tempo that suited the lateness of the hour.

Warp Records tracks featured regularly, which wasn’t that surprising. There was a more than superficial similarity between Morris and the artists on the pioneering label. The likes of Aphex Twin, Plaid and Squarepusher were as accomplished in the use of their technology as they were in writing – and as a breed they were also artists with a reputation for being obsessive, experimental, uncompromising and reclusive. Many at Warp itself were confirmed fans of Chris Morris, among them Greg Eden, whose roles for the small and tight-knit company included business, internet and A&R. He followed
Blue Jam
’s broadcast with interest, and when one of Morris’s team phoned for a CD he took the opportunity to arrange a meeting. What started as informal chats about music would become a long and productive relationship between Warp and Morris.

More like the work of a cross between the kind of cutting-edge electronic music producer who might be on Warp and a club DJ than a traditional radio show,
Blue Jam
was an uninterrupted, hour-long mix of music, fracturing and dissolving into sketches. The comedy developed from the style Morris performed with Peter Baynham in the 1994 shows. Updating the cut-up celebrity quotes of the earlier series,
Blue Jam
had subversive jingles in the form of vivid mini-stories. ‘I can see Steve Lamacq as a frail old man in a wheelchair,’ says a computerized voice, ‘trying to shake hands with an elephant.’ Other Radio 1 DJs would be caught in their jingle just at the moment of committing a, usually unmourned, suicide.

And Michael Alexander St John was another old friend who returned to deliver a round-up of club culture, lending his unmistakable regal solemnity to Morris’s nonsense genres and hot venues.
Blue Jam
provided their last opportunity to work together, as St John died in August 2002 aged sixty-six, but his delight in the material was evident as his resonant voice lent credibility to such top-ten dance hits as Gloop Mongy Mong’s ‘Fat Bleeping Bitch’.

Having removed all the unnecessary explanatory parts of traditional music and comedy shows, the elements that remained were completely reconstituted through Morris’s enthusiastic use of the computerized audio processing which had come to dominate music production: ‘You can mix music until it’s coming out of every pore of your body,’ he later said. ‘You can do things that were unimaginable on tape. It seems to be a fantastic opportunity for people to do funny things in a new way.’
¹⁰⁹

Manipulating audio on screen had become as easy as word-processing text. You highlighted sections of sound and applied effects such as time-stretching – altering length without changing the pitch – something that Fatboy Slim was just over a year away from having a huge hit by doing with ‘Rockafeller Skank’. In the late 1990s, you would scarcely be able to go in a club or turn on the radio without hearing songs made almost entirely of simple words and musical phrases repeated, filtered and stretched.
Blue Jam
seemed at once to be at home in the scene, part medicated dance mix and part original, innovative electronic creation, but it also stood on its own ground, luring loved-up clubbers on to its pitch-black dance floor late on Radio 1 and then brutalizing them.

Morris needed more than a conventional post-production facility to get to the innards of
Blue Jam
and give them a visceral twist. It was via a friend of Caroline Leddy, then just a few months from leaving Talkback to become a commissioning editor at Channel 4, that he was introduced to Natural Sound in Soho and Adrian Sutton. Born in 1967, Sutton was a classical musician with a music degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. He had just the sort of background that Morris was looking for, having been a lecturer in computing and electo-acoustics in music. He had covered everything from synthesizers to using computers to manipulate sound directly. Sutton had also edited
PC Direct
magazine before becoming an adviser on the technical aspects of producing music for adverts. At Natural Sound he started writing music full-time, and he was as enthusiastic about audio experimentation as Morris.

Together they worked on
Blue Jam
for some three or four months. Morris came in twice a week for three-hour sessions, when they pushed the capabilities of the equipment more as if they were an updated version of Pink Floyd mid-1970s, creating some exotic genre-defying concept album rather than a radio comedy series. They built up layers of sounds until the whole audio picture was in a state of constant dreamy shift. Voices in the foreground were contrasted with sparkles of filtered sound mixed back to create a sense of distance. Jingles were created from scratch, and Morris also sequenced his playlist mix into a seamless whole in the studio.

But even Natural Sound’s state-of-the-art equipment had trouble keeping up with what Sutton calls Morris’s ‘firehose of ideas’. He was used to the days of analogue, when he could instantly hear the results of his edits once he’d spliced the tape together. You could accomplish far more elaborate effects with a computer, but they would often sit there for a frustratingly long time, whirring away as they applied the complicated calculations necessary to alter each selected portion of audio. And Morris was keen to try out alternatives, each of which would have to be saved separately on disk by Sutton. When they’d done them all he’d have to go back and locate Morris’s preferred take. It was a laborious process, one big experiment, and the results would be as much of a surprise to
Blue Jam
’s cast as it would to their audience: ‘Until the pilot I didn’t know what it was going to be like. Then it all made sense,’ said actor Amelia Bullmore. ‘During the recording he was telling us to become more detached, more stoned, slower, dreamier. He obviously had a rhythm in his mind. He had a pulse. After that it made sense. It was thrilling to hear it. I had never heard anything like it on radio. I had never been in a mood for an hour. Clearly in his head he was mixing it.’
¹¹⁰

Bullmore and the rest of the cast of
Blue Jam
had come together when Morris directed the pilot episode of Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’ sketch show
Big Train
that summer. She and Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap had also been in
Brass Eye
, but in
Big Train
, alongside Simon Pegg and Julia Davis, they gelled into a tight unit who could react plausibly to each other in comic situations where there were often no conventional set-ups and punchlines. For the show’s creators, it was an approach to writing that went all the way back to
The Day Today
: ‘We were huge fans of Chris and Armando,’ says Mathews. ‘The idea is stupid, but it’s played really straight.’

Linehan adds: ‘We just were wondering if the effect of that would be one that would eventually make you just get the giggles.’ He introduced Simon Pegg to the show after seeing him do stand-up, but otherwise Morris brought everyone on board. He was able to spot and develop a particular ability in an actor in audition – sometimes a character might end up being created around it. Rather than simply doing read-throughs and discussing the back story of a role, Morris often used the casting sessions to suggest something completely unexpected. When it later came to
Nathan Barley
, Charlie Brooker remembers Morris working up such scenarios as one in which the actor had to agree warmly and sincerely with whatever Morris said, which turned out to be a series of increasingly appalling statements. On occasion Morris’s auditions grew into new comic situations which would later be used in the show itself.

Morris also started to work with new crew members on
Big Train
, some of whom would go on to work on
Jam
and the
Brass Eye Special
. The show was produced by Talkback, where Morris’s appointment in his first role as director generated a faint odour of foreboding. With
Brass Eye
still fresh in their memory, they imagined long and arduous days of filming in which only tiny amounts of footage would be completed. But, directing for someone else as a favour, Morris seemed to delight in not having to fight for everything and was content to bring all of his considerable natural enthusiasm behind the camera as well as a sensitivity in the way in which he elicited performances. And his first stint at directing would be useful experience for him when he later decided to make his own version of a sketch show with the television version of
Blue Jam
.