Disgusting Bliss (4 page)

When it came to doing the actual series, there was hardly any stylistic difference from the pilot. Ahead of the driving theme music, Morris set the tone with a gravelly welcome that got progressively more ridiculous over the two series, playing the main presenter as an amalgam of Jeremy Paxman and
Today
presenters, with the tragic tones of Michael Buerk at his most human-interested.

‘Everyone had done Paxman,’ said David Quantick, ‘but nobody had listened to the weird way Michael Buerk talks, his strange dying fall, and they picked up on all that.’
⁸
Comedy clubs for years after echoed with stand-ups bolstering a weak gag by emphasizing the final words with that mock pathos.

Each show started with the headlines with a realistic form and rhythm: ‘Life peer in wind tunnel disaster’, ‘International string lengths agreed’ or ‘Sri Lankan diplomat expelled for copying rice’. The news itself would often be read by Morris as an adenoidal Radio 4 continuity announcer, surreal stories with sound effects underneath distracting from the solemn tones. All the horrors of radio news in one show. Reports were faded up too quickly or not at all. Strange noises bled through from outside the studio, papers were rustled as attempts to read the news were continually interrupted and undermined.

There was one noticeable absence. In the pilot, Morris says, ‘Now it’s time for Bill with some sports news’, and producer Iannucci makes a rare appearance, cutting in as editor from the control room to say there was no sports news. It wasn’t until they prepared for the main series that Iannucci asked Steve Coogan if he could do a sports reporter. Tempting though it was to do an impersonation, they wanted to focus, as with other aspects of the show, on the generics of the species. ‘And Steve opened his mouth and Alan Partridge flew out,’
⁹
said Iannucci. The voice was defensive, someone who felt rather inferior to the other thrusting reporters on the show and as if he were anxious to prove he was a proper journalist. ‘It was very strange because . . . everyone in the room knew who it was. We knew the life story of this person, his frustrations at being seen as just a news reporter, when in fact he wanted to be taken seriously. But not so seriously he’d be seen as a serious news guy; he had more of a light entertainment ambition. Very quickly someone said he was a Partridge. And someone else said, “Yeah, and he’s an Alan.” Alan Partridge came out in minutes.’
¹⁰
From the very beginning he was recognizably the character who would find fame with his own chat show and, more immediately, he proved to be a great foil for Morris. Their stilted newsroom banter became an increasingly strained and awkward highlight as the series progressed. Alan was quickly as strong a character as Morris’s presenter, for ever awkwardly interviewing female athletes, strangely obsessed both with the propensity for sportsmen and women to have groin strain – ‘I’ve been told it’s a bit like a guitar string snapping’ – and male athletes in their changing rooms.

Alan soon had a back story. Items with him were often improvised, although Patrick Marber, whose writing partnership with Coogan was developing, would flesh him out with specific points to Coogan such as asking where he thought Alan would shop. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring wrote for his scenes, all the contributors engaging in absurdly detailed discussions about his life, down to the most plausible place he might come from (Milton Keynes was suggested as a comedy staple before settling on Norwich – a solid town, they decided, but also amusing).

Other regular reports included environmental news from the green desk of Rebecca Front’s Rosie May, her segment complete with soothing new-age muzak and the plaintive songs of whales. There was a trite religious thought for the day from Patrick Marber as Monsignor Treeb-Lopez, and Morris brought Wayne Carr, a vacuous pop correspondent he’d been doing for years on his own radio shows.

On the Hour
was an immediate success, with overwhelmingly good reviews in all the nationals, and it would remain a favourite with its creators.

‘We had a real hoot doing
On the Hour
,’ Iannucci says now. ‘Because it was the first and it was fresh territory. Nobody had been there before. I have very fond memories of that time.’

It sounded enough like a respectable Radio 4 show not to frighten the regular audiences but had an undercurrent of subversion you could pick up on if you were listening closely. You could be amused at the more affectionate aspects of its mockery of BBC radio or you could pick up on the harder stuff. There were a few listeners who thought the show was real and wrote into Radio 4’s
Feedback
to express their disgust at the mocking of religion, politics or sport. But this was balanced when an item about an evangelical American radio station offering an alarm to scare away liberals and homosexuals prompted a listener to congratulate the team on their stand against degenerates.

The show proved popular in newsrooms with its degree of accuracy that BBC media correspondent Nick Higham calls ‘spooky’, though Morris thought its favourable reception was more to do with the way that its existence confirmed to reporters that they were as important as they had always believed themselves to be.
On the Hour
arrived at a time when news broadcasting was expanding massively. Rolling news was the big thing and its champions had marked Radio 4’s frequency as potential Lebensraum under the BBC’s radio news boss Jenny Abramsky and deputy director general John Birt. Sky had just started its rolling service in the UK, and CNN had been doing it for years in America. During the first Gulf War, in 1991, Abramsky diverted Radio 4’s FM frequency to what some parts of the BBC uncharitably referred to as ‘rolling bollocks’.

Eventually, Radio 5 would be sacrificed to news, but the success of
On the Hour
gave the management of Radio 4 entertainment another handy ‘stick to beat news with’, according to radio historian David Hendy. ‘Though there were a few keen on the idea of more news,’ he says, ‘I think the majority among those running Radio 4 – and plenty among those making programmes – would have been very pleased by the show.’

‘There was just a general sense of newsiness being a bit loud,’ agrees Iannucci. The Gulf’s embedded journalists, endless expert analysis, time-filling speculation and the feeling that war had come to be presented as if it were a computer game provided material for
On the Hour
’s own war special, a highlight of a triumphant series.

Jonathan James-Moore, an inspiration for many upcoming comics at the BBC, came down to congratulate the team during the first run. It could have signalled the first step on the road to a conventional comedy career for all of the team in the BBC, perhaps even to
On the Hour
becoming one of the station’s perennial favourites. But there would be only one more series of
On the Hour
before its creators turned their attention to other opportunities, not least taking on the tics of television news. Even then it would have to be on their terms.

Morris would be instrumental in providing the confidence to keep true to the spirit of the show. There was a sense of apartness to what he did that even the casual listener could detect. His sections were the results of a practised radio professional working in his own medium to his own agenda rather than a comic performer working in collaboration. He wasn’t playing a role in the way that his fellow cast members were.

Morris had never been a comedian or an actor, but had spent his working life in radio, observing everything that it entailed – the backstabbing of the newsroom, the banter of local reporters desperate for a story that would catapult them into national networks and the station staff who had to cover for the sort of mistakes from which
On the Hour
got so much of its comedy. Legends about what he had got away with during that time – and what he hadn’t – were already growing by the time of
On the Hour
. It was that grounded understanding of how radio worked which made him so well placed to subvert it.

CHRIS MORRIS WAS BORN ON 15 JUNE 1962 IN THE VILLAGE OF Buckden, Cambridgeshire, to parents who were both doctors. His father, Michael Morris, was the local GP, and his mother, Rosemary Parrington, had taken on what were then expected duties of a doctor’s spouse as a full-time, unpaid administrative assistant in the surgery. She was also largely responsible for looking after Chris and his brothers in their early years. Tom was two years Chris’s junior and Ben was four years younger. It was a secure and stable upbringing, which would be reported by the
Daily Mail
in the wake of
Brass Eye
with something approaching disappointment. ‘For a self-appointed scourge of the Establishment,’ they said, ‘Chris Morris has the most conventional of backgrounds.’
¹¹

His colleague and friend, broadcaster Trevor Dann, suggests such early exposure to the realities of medical conditions around him would have been just the sort of thing to give the boy a down-to-earth attitude to life, which later influenced the boldness of his approach to his work and his choice of subject matter. It’s a theory that provokes a boom of laughter and a swift dismissal from Chris’s brother Tom.

‘That conjures up an image of some kind of Rabelaisian household with a sort of oak operating table and people hacking off legs,’ he says, like Chris authoritative and direct in his speech, ‘which wasn’t the case.’ But the thought prompts him to consider the other mainstay of Chris’s upbringing, the family’s long-standing connection with farming and rural life.

Both of the boys’ parents grew up on farms in East Anglia. Michael Morris’s family came from the Saxmundham area of Suffolk, and Rosemary’s came from Colchester in Essex. When they were married, the Morrises initially lived in a combined house and surgery in the village, but after a separate clinic was built they bought a large and ramshackle Victorian farmhouse which, although it was not any longer a working agricultural concern, nevertheless retained chickens, geese, pigs, sheep and dogs. Chris became used to such sights as rabbits being hunted for dinner by cats. It was a lesson in the realities of life to rival anything he might learn from his parents’ trade. Those rabbits which had only been half-killed would later have to be put out of their misery. Life on the old farm fostered an interest in animal life which culminated in Morris reading zoology at university.

The three boys got on ‘averagely’ well, remembers Tom, the age gap more noticeable when they were younger – Chris and Tom ‘were better matched as fighters, so we probably fought more than either of us fought with Ben’. They became much closer as they grew up.

They had an extended family they visited regularly – not only both sets of grandparents but also Rosemary’s sister and all but one of Michael’s four sisters, who all had their own families. Michael and Rosemary also took the boys on regular holidays.

Secure though their home environment was, Michael inevitably had less involvement with the boys’ upbringing than Rosemary as a result of his demanding position as the old-fashioned village doctor. He worked long hours and frequently at weekends. Chris’s mother went back to work in 1974 as he approached his teens, when she was employed by the local authority in community medicine.

Though the boys had a sciences background with seemingly not a hint of the arts in which all three would later make their careers, their father in his own way played a role, centre stage, in the village community. Buckden was only a few miles from Huntingdon and reasonably close to Peterborough and Cambridge itself, but Michael Morris was the first call for most locals. The GP’s role was to be compassionate but clear-eyed in his dealings with the public. He would know the most intimate details of most of the residents, their most private physical and mental concerns, often giving out general advice as much as prescriptions and being someone whom the whole village could confide in. It gave him responsibility and power in equal measure as he was implicitly trusted by so many. Chris’s work would later play on notions of authority and frequently featured the medical trade, particularly the doctor in
Blue Jam
whose apparent omnipotence covered disastrous flaws. At one moment he would be patronizingly ordering a female patient in and the next recoiling in horror at the sight of her daughter because he’s apparently never seen a child before and thinks she’s some kind of unnatural dwarf woman.

Michael’s own cultural interests lay more in the classics, which he had absorbed into an encyclopaedic mind alongside his medical studies, while Rosemary had studied English before she went into medicine, and enjoyed theatre. Storytelling was a prominent feature of the boys’ upbringing. ‘You can never tell how important things are, can you?’ says Tom Morris now. ‘But certainly I can very vividly remember my dad reading us stories from when we were under ten. I can remember on one holiday being read
Watership Down
aloud, all of it, in nightly episodes. And I can remember being read a version of
The Odyssey
. And we used to love it.’

The regular routine of family life was abruptly disrupted when the boys got to the age of ten and were sent to boarding school. Chris and Tom went to Stonyhurst College near Clitheroe in Lancashire and Ben went to Ampleforth College, a Benedictine school way up on the edge of the moors north of York. Their parents wanted them to receive a Catholic education and Stonyhurst, where Michael had been a pupil between 1944 and 1949, had an intriguingly radical past. It was founded in Europe in the late sixteenth century as a training centre for priests who were going to go undercover to support disenfranchised Catholics and foment revolution. In the late 1960s the headmaster fostered a creative ethos at the school through attracting music, English and drama teachers who were distinguished in their fields.

‘By the time we got there, it wasn’t at all like that,’ says Tom. ‘There was just a skeleton of this great liberal imagination that had moved on. It wasn’t a very good school – looking back on it, it was a shambles.’ It was saved by the few teachers who had stayed on from the heights of the previous years. One of the surviving elements of the old regime was a requirement that everyone had to learn an instrument for their first year. It rooted the pupils in musicality from an early age. Chris started on the double bass and later moved to the bass guitar. Tom learned the trombone.