A clown called Malice
Are there no lengths to which Chris Morris, one of our most original comic talents, will not go
to cause offence?
Euan Ferguson
Sunday July 22, 2001– The Observer
A few days ago, as Phil Collins, the man who once made boatloads of money with an actionably mawkish song about the homeless called ‘Another Day In Paradise’, then threatened to leave the country if we didn’t vote Tory, was beginning to seethe at Chris Morris’s latest trick, his nemesis was walking out of Oxford Circus Tube station into a blattering rain.
Pamphlets were being rudely proffered, and rudely dumped, and left to slick the metalled stairs, and people had begun to slip and fall, and Morris thought this was Fairly Stupid and he decided to do something about it.
Told that Tube staff wouldn’t wouldn’t stop the leafletting, he went back to his office, called them up pretending to be management and ordered it halted. The station was closed for a while as the leaflets were cleaned up. Thus Morris had possibly upset as many people as he had helped, but he had struck a blow against Stupidity, and in his world this was another little victory.
Not as glorious, necessarily, as his famous – legendary in some circles – victories over the dozens of publicity-hungry celebrities and politicians who have, over the years, lined up, under Morris’s rigorously manipulative gaze, to condemn themselves by opening their mouths on his spoof TV programme Brass Eye.
Phil Collins is just the latest to have agreed to spout Morris’s carefully-crafted ludicrosities on to camera, thinking, when filmed, that he was helping to warn children against paedophiles on behalf of an imaginary
child-protection agency by dressing in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Nonce Sense’, though only one of the words apparently appears on film.
His first line is: ‘I’m talking Nonce Sense.’ DJ Dr Fox joins him to add that, genetically, paedophiles have more in common with crabs than with humans. The programme, aimed at satirising last year’s climate of fear over paedophiles, should air this Thursday; Collins last week threatened to sue.
He’s not the first. Funsters Noel Edmonds and Jimmy Savile have also threatened to sue Morris, their howls of shame and anger drowned only by our howls of delight. To have the likes of Edmonds, Bernard Manning and Tory MP David Amess pontificating autocued rot on the fabricated dangers of a fabricated drug (‘One girl threw up her own pelvic bone…’); to hear indignant panic at the new teen crime trend of shop-bursting (‘They fill the shops with rice, then they pour in water…’) was, for Brass Eye fans, to revel in what his own smoothly satirised TV anchors would probably call The Enigma That Is Chris Morris… once more driving an issue-bulging bull into the loudly crashing china shop of public morality.
Has he gone too far this time? Well, way too far for Collins. Way too far, almost without doubt, for the Daily Mail, which once called him ‘the most loathed man on TV’, and asked the Vice Squad to monitor him. Not far enough, probably, for his many fans, who deify him as Britain’s ‘only comic genius’. Not
far enough these days for Morris himself.
In this, after years in which he was (wrongly) seen as just a funny guy, he is completing a journey to
a different, darker place, and one that now has him actually performing a vital service to the country as its one true satirist, the only one vivaciously unafraid of what governs so much of what we do, and say, and think.
He sees our more traditional ‘satire’ – Have I Got News For You and the rest – as part of the problem, rather than the solution, because of their collusion with the establishment (‘I think you can only really get underneath by deception,’ he has said), and shuns the London media scene for a small, sharp, loyal band of friends and his wife, actress Jo Unwin.
Where the anger comes from is impossible to gauge, even for friends. After a pleasant, some say idyllic,
childhood, with loving doctor parents, he took a degree in zoology before spells in local radio – Radio Bristol and then GLR – where he was equally excited by the possibilities of the media and bored to distraction by its conventions.
He would quietly fill his rivals’ studios with helium. He amassed P45s. Later, Morris became the talent behind radio’s sublime On the Hour and its TV sister The Day Today. Later came the darker radio series, Blue Jam, the surreal TV spin-off, Jam, and the one that made his name, Brass Eye: his gulling of rentaquotes to spout nonsense on camera, particularly over the fake drug Cake, was TV’s success d’estime of 1997.
But it wasn’t just funny: it made several important points about the nonsense we usually listen to from these people. Brass Eye also helped split the country into those who ‘got’ him and those who didn’t, a valuable service in a time of confused political polarities. Either you thought Bad Things – death, disease,
loss – were to be skirted at all costs or you thought we should talk about them.
Either you simpered over the symptoms or you wondered about the causes. Either you were Nick Ross or Chris Morris.
By continuing to push the envelope as far as he could, he fell out with some allegedly on his side. Not
with friends (they all remain fiercely loyal) but with the likes of then Channel 4 head Michael Grade, who delayed transmission of the Cake programme because of political fallout and cut one sketch about a musical on the life of Peter Sutcliffe.
Morris was livid. His revenge began subtly – writing to Nelson Mandela for comment and mentioning in passing that Grade had campaigned to have him kept on Robben Island; sending a note to Paul Simon wondering if he knew that Grade had always considered Art Garfunkel the more talented of the duo – but ended up simply scatological, inserting a flash-frame, when the programmes were eventually transmitted, which read ‘Grade Is A C***’.
Grade was livid in turn, feeling let down. ‘What upset me was… the breach of the oldest convention in
broadcasting – the editor trusts the presenter not to speak or act unilaterally on air.’ Which misses the point gloriously. Morris despises convention, and a convention in broadcasting, the medium for which he
was born, is even fairer game.
Although in many ways he is a conventional man – a happy childhood, a happy marriage, quiet days at the cricket with friends, normal conversation (albeit shot through with abnormally fast wit) – other conventions simply pass him by.
And so the unilateral Tube action. And so the meals: he hosts celebrated dinner parties for his friends but, as one confided last week, to this day relishes slipping meat into the dishes of all friends who are veggies.
So what does he hate? ‘Pomposity of any type and stupidity,’ explains one friend. ‘Pomposity from the Left or Right; from old or young, from newspapers or telly. It’s that simple. Nothing happened to change him, to darken him; there’s no trauma in the past. He’s the most well-adjusted person I’ve ever met. He does it because he can. He does what all of us would do, all of us with a basic morality, if we were as clever as he is, but few people are.’
It remains to be seen whether that argument will convince the Mail. It hardly even convinced the paper’s
bete noir, Channel 4, which postponed transmission of the paedophile spoof, scheduled for 5 July, because of the Danielle Jones story.
It could, fairly, be argued that C4, like so many of us, is riddled with the same bogus sentimentality he seeks to expose. Were Danielle’s parents suddenly going to feel great three weeks later? Or three years? The deliberate misdirection of emotions is one of Morris’s favourite targets, along with false thinking: his spoof Kilroy debate on ‘good’ Aids and ‘bad’ Aids (depending on how you caught it) remains one of the most uncomfortably astute pieces of comedy of recent years.
In an age when Damilola Taylor’s death is turned into hand-wringing on the alleged walk-on-by culture (rather than a chance to ask why we make people live in these estates in the first place), or Sarah Payne’s used as an excuse to hound paediatricians, his intellectual rigour has never been more valuable.
His surreality has been compared, erroneously, to the Pythons; in fact, it’s closer to Becket or Albee. But if there is one Python he could be compared to – certainly in obsessive attention to detail – it’s Terry Gilliam. Morris sees moral dwarves everywhere.
And he’s not going to solve the ills of the world himself. But he might, if he’s allowed, help us stop believing they’re going to be solved instead by piety, celebrity, mendacity or cant.
Chris Morris
Family: Partner is the scriptwriter and actress Jo Unwin; two children
Age: 38
Degree: Zoology (Bristol University)
Shows: On The Hour; The Day Today; Brass Eye
Stars duped: Claire Rayner, Bernard Manning, Petula Clark
Stars ‘killed’: Noel Edmonds, Jimmy Savile
From the Morris archive:
Edited extract from Cake, finally broadcast Feb 5, 1997, postponed from Nov 1996 following concerns over taste and decency.
The episode opens with Morris as reporter Ted Maul explaining the evil threat of a new drug.
Maul: It’s a new Czechoslovakian drug called Cake. And luckily the story involves these people: Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and British Opposition to Medically Bi-sterbile Drugs. [Morris holds up a T-shirt with the acronyms F.U.K.D and B.O.M.B.D and a series of interviews with concerned celebrities
follows]:
Bernard Ingham: …this is a piece of Cake [points to enormous yellow disk in his hand]
Bruno Brookes : …we all like to party, right? Absolutely. But only the fool would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll enter
the nightmare of Cake.’ [points to large yellow disk in hand] And this is it.
Rolf Harris: This colour, that they thought would be a good selling point, is put in using an industrial
dye which in itself is a pollutant and is causing in Czechslovakia something called ‘Czech neck’. It causes enormous water retention so that the body swells up … until the person that is on the trip dies from not being able to breathe at all.’
Bernard Manning: One little kiddie on cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt. It’s a fucking disgrace.
Noel Edmunds: What is cake? Well, it has an active ingredient which is a dangerous psychoactive compound known as di-mesmeric ansonphosphate. It stimulates the part of the brain that deals with time perception so a second feels like a month. Almost sounds like fun, unless you’re the Prague schoolboy
who walked out into the street in front of a tram. He thought he’d got a month to cross the street.
Brookes: You know they’ve even tested this stuff on rats. Turned them into bloody Space Hoppers.
Manning: And if you’re sick on this stuff, you can puke yourself to death. One girl threw up her own pelvis.
What a fucking disgrace.
David Amess, then MP: You’ve heard what Bernard Manning’s said: Cake’s a Bi-sterbile Cradabolic Anphetamoid – which is a made up psycho-active chemical. It comes from Prague, with its own culture of Boon raves, where kids wolf down vast quantities… Look at that [gestures to huge yellow pill of Cake in his hand] £100,000 in the pocket of the filth that sells it, a big yellow bullet in the head of some user.
Edited extract from Morris’s Blue Jam ‘interview’ with Princess Diana biographer Andrew Morton
CM: OK, let’s look at the book. New edition. Here it is. Em, first of all, its size; it looks bigger than it is, which is quite a crafty move. Was that the intention?
AM: Well it is a big book. It’s a lot bigger than…
CM: Than it is…
AM: Than the original one.
CM: But it does look bigger than it is as well.
AM: Well, I’m glad, I’m glad, you think that_
CM: Let me give you an example… ‘The tectonic plates which underpin society having shifted culturally, socially and politically in the previous few years.’
AM: Hmmm…
CM: Now that describes exactly what had happened after Diana’s death, so many people struggled to put
their finger on that. Was it something you worked hard on or did it just come out? I mean how on earth…
AM: Well, I, I… (sigh).
CM: What I want to know is how you feel about other people who are feeding off the same … carcass. People who make computer games like ‘The Last Chase’ where you play a paparazzo chasing a car through a tunnel, subtitle of the game ‘Snap The Dying Bitch’.
AM: Well, I find them very abhorrent because all you’re doing is exploiting someone’s death.
CM: Hmm…
Arthur Magazine 