Disgusting Bliss (18 page)

It was that kind of material which transformed the routine of BBC editorial meetings into surreal affairs in which Matthew Bannister’s office had to pass judgements on such sounds as a kidnapped baby dressed up as a fly being floated out of a studio window and down to its mother on Oxford Street. Could the BBC open itself to charges of encouraging cruelty to children? Should it be transmitting that sort of thing? The answer with Chris Morris was often a seductive ‘why not?’

Bannister was even persuaded that obituaries could be a suitable topic. Broadcast tributes were inevitably artificial constructs, prepared long in advance and regularly updated so that they were ready to go as soon as their subject did. Apparently spontaneous outpourings of emotion were pre-recorded and had to be remorselessly positive about the departed. The person delivering them might well be chosen because they could be relied on to give a good quote, whether or not they liked the subject or even knew them. There were some sound targets there, but Bannister was uncomfortable illustrating them with Michael Heseltine. Six weeks earlier, when Morris had been interviewed in
Time Out
to promote the first show, he’d given a broad hint at what was to come. ‘Phone-ins will be on issues such as animals and justice and pregnant women in uniform,’ he told Bruce Dessau, adding, ‘I’m trying to get a direct line feed from Michael Heseltine’s heart monitor. If there’s anything dicky, I’ll be first with the news.’
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It wasn’t so much that the Tory MP was very much alive that concerned Bannister, but that he’d survived a heart attack only a year earlier, which put him out of bounds and therefore intensely fascinating for Morris – Tarzan was untouchable, other than saying, ‘If Michael Heseltine had died . . .’ or ‘If we were compiling an obituary . . .’ Bannister knew that being told he had died was hardly the worst thing that Heseltine was likely to have heard about himself, but he didn’t want the family to be upset.

Though Bannister or someone from his office would review the show before it went out, quite a lot of material was live and Morris always reworked and edited the shows to the last minute. Bannister remembers this meant he could drop in surprises which they might not have a chance to hear, ‘thereby pushing us all into a kind of hysterical situation where we had to agree the material or we didn’t and there would be no programme to go out’. Bannister listened to the 6 July show at 9 p.m. while driving home, and the first line was one he hadn’t heard before.

‘This is BBC Radio 1 FM and if there
is
any news on the death of Michael Heseltine in the next hour, we’ll let you know,’ said Morris.

‘Very, very quickly, the studio telephone rang and it was News, trying to find out if there was something we knew that they didn’t,’ says Oliver Jones. ‘And after that, it was a matter of fielding all the phone calls and explaining and all the rest of it.’

BBC News were on the phone to Bannister the moment he got through his front door, and calls continued to come in until late that evening. Recalling the tricky aftermath in interview, Bannister is characteristically good humoured and it’s only at one point that his voice – his tones inflected with classic BBC warmth and measure – registers irritation. He disagrees rather pointedly with the suggestion that Morris only implied the death by saying ‘if there is any news’, observing sharply that none of the callers he fielded were in the mood to argue the semantics. Particularly not 10 Downing Street. That Morris wasn’t making a serious attempt at a hoax became irrelevant in the storm that followed the broadcast, but there was only one occasion on which he explicitly said that Heseltine was dead, in the course of soliciting a tribute from ‘close personal friend and colleague and bass player of The Jam, Bruce Foxton’. There could be few listeners who wouldn’t have thought there was something odd about hearing the bassist asked for his reaction and giving a stunned ‘Really?’ while Morris adds with discernible glee: ‘hit the ground screaming, yeah’. There had been enough clues in the first few minutes of the broadcast alone, including Toni Basil chanting ‘Oh, Mickey, you’re so fine’. But the nuances of what Morris did were of little consequence as Heseltine – quite possibly for the first time in his career – found himself the subject of sympathy and spirited defence in the press.

An inquiry was launched: ‘Some of the pre-recorded material was heard in advance and some of it was not,’ the BBC said carefully. ‘That is the focus of the investigation.’
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Morris expressed surprise at the coverage and responded to the accusations of going too far: ‘If I thought that, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d do it again, only better.’
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Matthew Bannister was at heart a fan, but he knew that he would have to be seen to be doing something. Not for the first or last time, he went to Morris’s agent. ‘Matthew used to go absolutely mental with me,’ says Chiggy, ‘if something had gone wrong. There would be a major kind of shouting.’ But rarely did any action follow the bollocking – a feature of the telling off which Chiggy also recognized in Trevor Dann and others who were essentially Morris’s champions. ‘They’re the people who’ve got a little bit of Chris in them,’ she says. Even Morris, for all his Bannister baiting, admired him for having a ‘miscreant child inside him’.
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After Heseltine, though, Bannister was pushed to hand out a more tangible punishment. With some irony, the moment he had to deliver it happened to fall when he was on a particularly dull BBC management away day, feeling like the corporate lackey Morris always accused him of being on such occasions because he knew it annoyed him. He had to tell Morris over the phone that he was suspended from Radio 1 for two weeks and all future shows were to be pre-recorded.

‘He seemed kind of resigned to it,’ says Matthew Bannister. ‘He didn’t strike me then as being angry about it. He seemed to understand what it was that I was doing and why I was doing it.’ It was rather differently experienced in Morris’s camp, remembers Rebecca Neale: ‘Oh, Chris was furious that he wasn’t live,’ she says. ‘He thought it was ridiculous and he was pissed off.’

Bannister had to write a letter of apology to Heseltine and the
Guardian
reported, ‘“Dead” Heseltine gets BBC apology after Radio 1 spoof backfires.’
⁷⁵

‘Most of what I do isn’t that troublesome,’ Morris pointed out in an interview that marked his readmittance to Radio 1. ‘It’s just the one per cent. You don’t set out to run over 160 sacred weasels one by one, otherwise you end up desperately trying to shock, like Richard Littlejohn. They know I’m contracted to Christmas, I want to carry on and so I wouldn’t destroy my own rostrum. They probably sense that if I was forbidden to do something, a malevolent old man in my subconscious would goad me on to do it.’
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The pre-recording made little material difference to the production of the show, which was recorded the night before broadcast so it could be vetted, but they did it as if it were still live. ‘It would take about an hour and ten minutes to record an hour’s programme,’ explains Oliver, ‘to allow Chris to restart a disc or whatever . . . We would race through.’

The new regime didn’t guarantee the programme’s safety, though it was only towards the very end of the run that an item caused offence again – and it would be one of the shortest clips, a spoof of celebrity endorsements which would be played as programme jingles. Morris scripted phrases that he deftly re-edited to make the stars say things they’d never intended.

‘I’m Alice Cooper,’ he got Alice Cooper to growl. ‘Isn’t Sybil Ruscoe a twat?’

‘I’m Whigfield,’ explained Whigfield, ‘and I think Naomi Campbell has a gravel fanny disorder.’ Paul Garner went out hunting celebrities at an event promisingly entitled Night of Two Hundred Stars. His first attempt failed when actor Robert Wagner quickly scanned through the phrases. He declined to read them. ‘You’re trying to get me to say I take coke,’ the
Hart to Hart
man pointed out with some accuracy. With just 199 other stars to choose from, Garner zeroed in on Petula Clark. He improvised a few innocent lines that Morris later reordered into something far more suggestive that proved to be a cut-up too far. Clark sued the BBC over what the
Mail on Sunday
breathlessly reported was a ‘sex tape’.

The series concluded on Boxing Day with a two-hour festive special, and the shows were never repeated. The Heseltine and Petula Clark moments provided the most publicity, but overall they were among the least creative examples of a series that was characterized by ambitious invention. Morris had fused music, humour and reality into scenarios that were often beautifully grotesque. Unfolding in the chat between records over the hour, the tales were like miniconcept albums, and their subject matter would have given the moral guardians of the press far greater concern than the fake obituaries if only they hadn’t been so subtly introduced into the shows. But as skilfully as much of the material was often presented, there was also a strong current of basic delight in the tradition of smuggling rude stuff past the nation’s moral guardians, back to the 1950s and 1960s when the BBC’s list of proscribed phrases included ‘winter draws on’ and still further to the music-hall era when ‘I sits among the cabbages and leeks’ drew the attention of the censors. Morris was drawn to the instinctive, mischievous laugh. With Peter Baynham and Paul Garner by his side, he was able to cover all bases.

The shows also provided a useful signpost in their style to what Morris would later do with
Blue Jam
and in their choice of topics and celebrity interviews more immediately to what he was about to start working on for television. What became
Brass Eye
would prove tortuously difficult to create, a show that in many different ways should not have been filmable and was certainly not broadcastable.

THE CONCEPT BEHIND FEEDBACK REPORTS FORMED THE backbone of Chris Morris’s shows from his first starring role in
No Known Cure
all the way to
Brass Eye
. Their mischievous blend of elaborate fabrication and mockery flavoured everything he did. He could tell with a glance on the street who would provide a good response to what he made sound like a pressing social question of the day without actually making the slightest bit of sense. When he gave the idea its first outing on television in an obscure and shortlived 1990 satellite TV show called
Up Yer News
, his high hit rate intrigued director Peter Kessler. He asked how Morris knew which member of the public would give the response he was looking for. ‘Just stand and wait and watch,’ Morris told him, ‘and when the right one comes along, you know.’ Kessler says, ‘He was very, very insistent indeed about picking the right people to talk to . . . And he basically stepped out and went for the right people.’

‘And if they’re unknown, it moves the focus from the person being set up to what the fuck is being said,’ Morris explained in 1994. ‘Part of the point is the sheer randomness of those people – from vicars to builders. You’re undermining any talking head on TV by showing them talking bollocks with apparent authority. And the whole of the media is a deception, everything that happens is a deception, cloaked in coded statements – a pay rise, a sacking, whatever. I can’t stand that high-handed attitude that there’s a proper way to behave. Everyone’s fucking about. You’re just displaying it.’
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Having refined his technique on the streets of Bristol and London, Morris used it in his celebrity interviews. Of everything he did, they attracted the most attention, whether praise or criticism. They were an exposure of sloppy thinking and self-promotion. Or they were cruel and cheap. His anger was scouring. Or he was a misanthrope who preyed mercilessly on those who gave their time to talk to him. Morris saw the set-up as very straightforward: ‘In everything I do there are enough clues, you’re challenging the situation to collapse by getting stupider. They’re given a fair chance to say “fuck off”,’ he said.’
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Few people did so at the time, although famous victims used their access to the media to say it loudly and publicly after they saw the shows go out. Accusations of unfairness dominated the headlines, obscuring what made his verbal traps so effective – their lining of rich and imaginative detail.

Virtually every premise Morris offered had at least one element in it that looked as if it might be true. And that was generally good enough for most people to overlook the fact that his questions were nothing more than gateways to a mad world – albeit one with its own internal and consistent logic. The breathtaking aspect of the interviews was the readiness with which people stepped into the alternate existence with him. His fierce criticism and satire on the media and its audience were the most discussed aspects of his work, but they would surely have been unremittingly bleak had it not been for the colourful absurdities he created in his least celebrated role – that of accomplished storyteller.

He had identified the way in which people can be susceptible to a mutant folklore, that they could be convinced to accept almost anything as long as it confirmed the long-held suspicions they’d always had about the way things were. His experience in local radio had taught him that even less encouragement was needed to get people to expound on big social issues, the instinctive collective fear that barbarians are around the corner. Morris was sparing in his suggestions, and respondents enthusiastically filled in the rest for him, condemning ‘gut festivals’ or the cruelty of ‘hinges on dogs’.

One couple expressed horror on his radio show about ‘this so-called fashion for blatantly hiding the ground’, and they were typical of his respondents. There was an easy laugh to be had at their expense, but what made the interview so memorable was how far they travelled down the rabbit-hole with Morris. He engaged with them sympathetically throughout and allowed their personalities to come through, she forthright, he slightly reserved. They need no prompting to declare it is kids who hide the ground. Somewhere in the murky confusion kicked up by Morris was a tethered sliver of a solid concept, unspoken, that even if the yobs who populate news headlines weren’t really out there hiding the ground, you felt sure they would if they could. And that was almost enough to make it true.