Disgusting Bliss (3 page)

‘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 Wells, they were all in their late twenties. Less tangibly, the core members of the team were all Catholic – Morris, Iannucci, Coogan and Mackichan – or Jewish – Schneider, Front and Marber. As Armando recalls with a laugh, it was ‘the Judaeo-Catholic conspiracy against the English Establishment . . .’ Or the
On the Hour
conspiracy against the media mainstream – the cast had a track record in ignoring fashion even back when they were students. ‘Alternative’ was the buzzword and stand-up the most obvious route to fame when they were coming up in the mid-1980s and their Oxford revues and physical comedy had seemed almost wilfully out of step. It was a stubborn attitude to following their own instincts that informed
On the Hour
. They rejected the idea that you could have filler material as long as there was a better joke along in a minute. Easy laughs were dropped no matter how topical or populist they might be if it seemed they compromised the tone of the show – whatever that might turn out to be.

The writers were in the dark, having to feel their way to what worked rather than rely on tested standbys. They might tell Iannucci they had ruled out a particular avenue because it didn’t seem to work, only for him to realize that was exactly what he wanted. Even the best initial ideas could be reworked through improvisation. It would be hard to work out exactly who was responsible for any one item.

‘It’s an approach I’ve always been keen on,’ said Iannucci, ‘being non-proprietary about your work. Not saying, “No, you can’t change that, because that’s mine and I’ve spent four months getting that line right.”’
⁶

Morris provided up to a third of the writing of most shows himself and hijacked unused GLR studios at night for his own performances, refining them, multitracking voices and creating his own effects, while Iannucci worked with the rest of the cast to structure the show and create the rest of the material. It was cheap enough to keep the tapes running, so he did, just in case there was a piece of genius that couldn’t be recaptured.

‘It was like being in a little lab, really,’ says Patrick Marber. Just like in a real news programme, sessions were edited down by Iannucci until the best bits remained. The technique formed the basis for the way that he and Morris would both work over the years.

Working alone, Morris rarely needed to be in the main meetings. For much of the first series of
On the Hour
and into the second one he remained something of an unknown quantity to most of the cast and writers and an intimidating figure from a distance: ‘A bit daunting,’ confirms Rebecca Front, ‘because he is effectively a rather tall brain, but he’s charming with it, so that helped.’

It wasn’t until the show transferred as
The Day Today
to BBC2 that Morris and the others integrated as they all had to appear in front of the cameras at the same time. The freedom of radio was that Morris could be spliced into the final programme without its being audibly apparent that he didn’t work his material in with the group.

Carol Smith was Iannucci’s production assistant for
On the Hour
. ‘[Morris] would go off and he’d come back with a five-inch spool of tape and that five-minute piece would be on there, and then he’d play it to us in the studio and that was it,’ she says. ‘It was in, and we couldn’t touch it, because it was so densely produced and so layered and . . . you couldn’t get a blade in.’ It meant that Morris could get away with smuggling in material which nobody could then remove. ‘You literally could not get a blade in anywhere to edit and so, y’know, there were some extraordinary things in there, but they went out.’

Iannucci was the one who cut across all the various groups – communicating the shape of the show to the writers and the cast. Patrick Marber recalls, ‘He said, “Look, there’s a way of performing comedy where the jokes are very much told and I want you to bury the humour. I want you to do funny voices but I don’t want them to be too funny. I want you to improvise funny things but don’t be looking for the humour, just trust that it will come.”’ Their very serious approach won
On the Hour
’s creators a reputation for being unapproachable. Inspired by the concept of the show, they did all seem as if they had a lot to prove.

‘We were all full of the flush of youth and we thought we were the young turks,’ said Coogan.
⁷

‘I don’t think there was a single person there who wasn’t an alpha male,’ recalls Steven Wells. As self-confessed ‘ageing Trot’, he had marched with the Anti-Nazi League and seen The Clash perform for Rock Against Racism in Hackney’s Victoria Park in the late 1970s. While
On the Hour
wasn’t politically motivated, all of the team took inspiration from a clarity of purpose in the show’s concept which was as bold as any campaigning.

‘I think there is a lot of anger, I think it’s very accessible to comedians,’ says Dave Schneider, ‘and certainly to that group of comedians.’ They took their lead from the top. ‘There’s a sort of “from the pulpits” quality to them [Morris and Iannucci] . . . vengeful angels.’

The approaches of the members of the cast didn’t always agree. Steven Wells identified the generation that Stewart Lee and Richard Herring belonged to as being more cynical than his as a punk – but individually each knew they had earned the right to be there and that the team worked well together. Armando Iannucci treated everyone decently and inspired loyalty – both he and Chris Morris were motivated by doing something interesting rather than only becoming well known, so the rest of the cast felt comfortable in trying out ideas even when they fell horribly flat.

Morris wove the real world into
On the Hour
in the shape of phone calls he made in presenter character to such outsiders as the vet asked to comment on the news that dangerous dogs were to be fitted with rubber skulls – ‘It wouldn’t be able to bite a child’s face off, then?’ he asks, to the vet’s bafflement. The sound quality of the real interviews was virtually indistinguishable from scripted phone calls performed by the cast, Iannucci recording those through an actual phone rather than simply adding a filter effect to a microphone. Genuine archive recordings jostled with performed sports reports taped with real commentator lip mikes to give the voice an authentic nasal quality. Items from American reporters like Rebecca Front’s Barbara Wintergreen were compressed and distorted to sound like a cheap import.

The organic production method meant that nobody could be quite sure what they had until the moment of broadcast. Some of the team hadn’t even heard Chris Morris’s contributions. Even he and Iannucci didn’t know how well it would work until the last piece had been completed. There was no laugh track, no audience, no punchlines and no traditional gags. That would be as true of the eventual series, which was commissioned to go out between August and September that year, as it was of the pilot. That sense of flux, that it was something that was going out live, helped to mark it out from other comedy shows.

‘It then felt like it was a whole world,’ says Iannucci, ‘and I think you can only do that if you genuinely get lots of different voices contributing.’ Up to a point – the overall parameters were not negotiable. ‘I think I once in my youthful brashness made some suggestions about how things should be directed to Armando,’ laughs Steven Wells, ‘but he probably just blinked and thought, Who the fuck are you? and took no notice whatsoever.’
On the Hour
had come at a time when everyone connected with the show was ready to take the opportunity it represented. The rather unusual and protracted production process allowed the core team to create in a way they hadn’t quite worked out for themselves.

‘There was so much gratitude that we were in this thing,’ says Marber, ‘and Armando and Chris were the primary creative entities. Helping it be the thing it was, you know. They were gods to us. We just did what we were told, really. I was just coming up with gags that I thought were funny to support their vision. I never really thought about how the news was presented, to be honest. I didn’t really care. That wasn’t my agenda; mine was just to do the job.’