Disgusting Bliss (8 page)

The audience didn’t quite know what to make of this clear new presence at Bristol. Presenters always had to prove themselves, and Morris’s voice in particular wasn’t the comfort blanket the listeners were used to. At first his mates called in for the competitions until the show established a fan base.

Morris might not have been playing in bands any more, but he diverted his undimmed passion for music into the records he played on the show. He delighted in discovering new music, was a regular gig-goer and gave mix tapes to friends. ‘His musical knowledge is phenomenal,’ says Nick Barraclough, who received a number of those tapes, ‘and [he] has a completely catholic taste. Absolutely open to anything.’ Morris shared his passions with the audience. Favourites included Nirvana and the Pixies and They Might Be Giants. While chart hits constituted much of the playlist, he had an instinct for the popular over the populist, though Matt Sica remembers being introduced to Michael Nyman’s
Belly of an Architect
and Philip Glass’s music for
Koyaanisqatsi
. ‘He used to play that in the office as well. He really liked the repetitiveness and the polyrhythms . . . Things like that would get played. For me, it was bizarre stuff for the radio.’

No Known Cure
could also be a vehicle to develop parodies of broadcasting clichés, but the heart of the programme was essentially a really good DJ show. Morris gave formulaic features, from competitions to interviews, an imaginative and subversive tweak. Rather than being asked to call in, listeners were expected to be ‘bothering’ the phones. All the features of a traditional DJ show were there, but each given an emphasis that conveyed the futility of the existence of the local broadcaster and the show itself. It was conspiratorial, drawing the listener in as if they had to make the best of the dross with him. He read out letters and dedications reluctantly, with palpable disdain and affected horror should a caller be gauche enough to sound happy to be talking to him. It looked just as extraordinary as it sounded if you happened to be in the studio with him. ‘It was completely new to me to see someone doing radio like that,’ says Matt. ‘You’re seeing somebody perform, doing something that is, in effect, verbal mime. Morris’s energy was quite outstanding.’ His jingles lurched tipsily, he dropped snatches of amusing vocal samples on to records or faded himself in playing along on a synth like a demented five-year-old. ‘You weren’t sure if he’d lost it! Or whether he was being funny ’cos it looked so odd. You’re only listening to one thing, but watching it – it was a mixture. You couldn’t quite believe what you were seeing, so you didn’t bother listening to it, ’cos it was more fun to watch it.’

When the show went out on Fridays, Matt Sica recalls, ‘I had a particular job of going to the office where Morris worked in the daytimes, to record on cassette
Week Ending
, and that had to be religiously done. To go up, and sit and wait. All the other jobs downstairs were put aside, because I had to wait for the cassette to finish, turn it round and put it back in the player as quickly as possible . . . I think it fitted in to the genre of show that we were doing for a while. Whether or not it gave Morris ideas, or inspired him for ideas, I don’t know. It was more than a passion of just listening to
Week Ending
’cos of being on while he was on air.’

There were guests on the show, and some interviewees came from a comedy club that had opened in Bristol, Julian Clary and Jerry Sadowitz among the disparate bunch. ‘I don’t know if I went to see Les Bubb first, or Les Bubb came to see us,’ says Matt Sica, ‘but somehow I came across Les Bubb – and then he became associated with the show. Arthur Smith also became sort of “Listen to this – this guy’s funny” and strange poet Ivor Cutler.’

In later years, Peter Fincham, the executive producer of many of Morris’s TV shows, would say that Morris’s humour came from working alone in the studio rather than honing a stand-up act himself in front of an audience, but Morris worked the crowd, albeit remotely. Callers were props in his humour. They might be encouraged to win a prize by guessing what an object was from clearly unconnected and unhelpful clues, and Morris would be mock-outraged at any attempt at obviously humorous answers. Unlike a stand-up comedian, Morris had the refuge of being able to cut his audience off, yet there was the sense of the show as a club. As at Radio Cambridgeshire, he simply seemed to expect that everyone could keep up.

Unsuspecting members of the public on the street were regularly used for Morris’s Feedback Reports slot. People would give their thoughts on anything from ‘wind obedience’ (commenting on the conclusions of ‘Professor Gus T. Day’) to official moves to limit the time people take to say things. Most interviewees fumbled their way to agreeing with whatever he said, but one managed to produce a stream of consciousness that seemed to come from Morris’s own universe. He was a trolley collector at the local Sainsbury’s called Steve who was soon christened Sergeant Murphy. His rapid-fire responses featured on Morris’s radio programmes for years.

Then there was ‘Ten ideas to change the world’, co-written with Steve Yabsley and delivered by the golden voice of local broadcaster Michael Alexander St John-Gifford over Pachelbel’s stately ‘Canon in D Major’. It was a thought for the day for the deranged – the point was that there was no point. Each idea and meandering digression made less sense than the subjects up for discussion in the Feedback Reports, but the writing was packed with delightfully surreal imagery and given apparent authority through St John’s irresistible solemnity: ‘Coalescing a mild stir in the public gallery by actually frowning your face off’ was one idea, ‘Calling for absolute silence after the sorbet, then dissolving rather beautifully into a rude finger’ another. Michael St John, as he was known by everyone, would be another regular voice on Morris’s shows for years to come.

Morris used his repertoire of impersonations and created Wayne Carr, a smug DJ of the sort that Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield later popularized with their Smashie and Nicey characters. Wayne Carr (‘WC on the radio’) would be Morris’s alter ego throughout his DJ career, popping up to misinterpret news headlines, make banal or offensive observations and interview unknowing celebrities.

On making his return to the city of Bristol, Morris at first rented and then bought a place with a doctor friend he’d known from university. Jane Solomons would share the house with him before buying her own place. Morris often took to the streets of Bristol in a rather beautiful Mercedes, cream-coloured and impractically large for the narrow streets between his place and the BBC in Whiteladies Road. It was a distinctive car, if rather old and unreliable, but somehow Morris kept it on the road into the 1990s. He was an enthusiastic cyclist and played tennis and remained a keen if, friends remember, rather wayward bowler in cricket. Morris had his own take on the 1980s look which hadn’t developed greatly in his move from Cambridgeshire. ‘Always with a bow tie! Literally, bow tie, a stripy shirt quite often and a V-neck,’ says Matt Sica. ‘Absolutely loved it – and trainers. Just wonderfully took the piss. It was like power-dressing at local radio. Cravats as well; he also wore cravats.’

Morris attracted a like-minded bunch of friends, sharp, funny and well attuned to the absurdities of life in local radio. Many were around his age, twenty-five, such as Jonathan Maitland, a warm and charmingly ambitious reporter, nicknamed Nath by Morris. Hugh Levinson, who had played guitar in the 1984 Footlights revue show, joined Bristol as a local radio trainee partly at Morris’s suggestion. Having graduated in 1985 with no idea of what he wanted to do, Levinson spent a year in Japan teaching English before deciding to follow his friend. Clive Myrie went on to be a foreign correspondent. The gang also included Steve Yabsley and bringing up the average age was John Armstrong. Tall and slightly untidy, Armstrong had come up through newspapers and a variety of local, national and London-based radio and was one of the newsreaders at the station who shared Morris’s irreverence for their working environment.

Maitland remembers that Morris’s attention was slightly distracted by another of their friends, Julie Sedgewick: ‘She was well fit and everyone fancied her,’ he says. ‘You’d have to have been gay or asexual not to have felt a bit of a twinge. She looked like I imagined Cathy from
Wuthering Heights
to have looked. In the end, Clive went out with her.’

Other friends came from his university days, and Jane Solomons remembers a time characterized by a busy social circle, as much drawn from outside the media as from the BBC, and lots of good conversation. Morris was a great host with a skill in cooking beyond the range of the average twenty-five-year-old. ‘My impression of Chris at the time was as a sort of bon viveur,’ says Steve Yabsley, inspired to develop his own fare by Morris’s versatility with herbs, garlic and flavourings. It was nurturing stuff, which he deployed to bring everyone together and not just during good times. When Jonathan Maitland had relationship problems, he ended up on Morris’s doorstep one night. ‘He opened the door and I burst out crying,’ says Maitland, ‘pretty embarrassing for a bloke.’ But Morris was sweet and caring. Having grown up to be self-reliant through Stonyhurst, he nevertheless had an instinctive understanding of people and their problems. ‘I just spilled it all out to him, and he was just very kind and knew how to deal with it,’ says Maitland. ‘He was in touch with his feminine side.’

There were also more raucous get-togethers. ‘We had a really good party at my place, really good,’ says Maitland. ‘Tasty women and loads of drink. And Chris jumped out of the window and a hedge broke his fall. So he got lots of people to do this hedge-jumping thing. Undergraduate high jinks . . . but very funny.’

Jonathan Maitland was also a natural show-off and, although a news journalist, as aware as Morris of the inherent ridiculousness of his trade. ‘He and Chris would often taunt each other on air,’ remembers Sica. ‘One would whisper abusive things down the other’s cans [headphones], or buzz them just as they were about to go on, or stand outside the door and wave frantically as if it was some sort of emergency . . . play around like that. I remember once, Maitland was reading the news and Morris had his mike on, rustling his papers, taking big deep breaths before Maitland’s sentences, to make it sound like he was nervous, or breathe deeply, or saying things under his breath.’

The domain in which Maitland worked was largely populated by a race more savagely ambitious and self-important than anyone in TV. They were fanatical about making news local. Morris later said that in December 1988, ‘When Lockerbie happened in the Radio Bristol newsroom and somebody discovered that a local woman had been involved there was a, “Yes!” So it is quite hard to take it all seriously, but I was trying very hard to be well behaved.’
²¹

Newsroom editor Mark Byford was an ongoing comedic obsession for Morris and Maitland as a BBC management textbook made flesh. He paced the newsroom when anything exciting happened and indicated his approval for a story by announcing in his Yorkshire accent, ‘That’s good telly! That’s good telly!’ Byford always seemed destined for great corporation things – and indeed went on to be deputy director general.

For all its absurdities and puffed-out peacocks, Radio Bristol would remain home for some of Morris’s friends. Aside from a stint on Radio 4, John Armstrong remains at the station and Steve Yabsley is still a presenter much in Morris’s inventive mould. Not so for Morris and Jonathan Maitland: ‘I was trying to get out of Radio Bristol like nobody’s business,’ says Maitland. When he eventually achieved escape velocity it was to make it first as a reporter on Radio 4’s
Today
programme and then later on ITV.

Meanwhile, back in his York penthouse flat, as he styled it in his radio shows, was Victor Lewis-Smith, another radio natural who was further down the road to recognition than Morris. Lewis-Smith started out on Radio York in 1983 and went on to contribute to Radio 4 shows as both a broadcaster and a producer. Evolving a breakneck, powerhouse style of his own as a performer of radio comedy, Lewis-Smith created lightning-fast, densely-packed sketches, often linked by manic tape winds. He multitracked multiple characters and did his own jingles in mocking BBC harmonies. He was, said Morris, a ‘fully loaded weapon’,
²²
someone who had also come up through radio rather than stand-up and ‘unquestionably one of the few who’ve taken radio by the horns.’
²³
But Morris didn’t say it until much later in his career.

From their broadcasting citadels in the 1980s, the princes of Bristol and York regarded one another with mutual suspicion. There might have been plenty of room for two talents like theirs to develop in tandem, but as young men with everything to prove it seemed they were trying to occupy exactly the same space, and a mutual loathing developed which, over the years, would be not so much barely disguised as played out in public at every opportunity. ‘There was a lot of snideness on both sides,’ says John Armstrong.

In 1987 Lewis-Smith was a feature on Radio 4’s
Loose Ends
. He poked fun at anyone and everything, from Ned Sherrin downwards. With collaborator Paul Sparks, he would send contributions to the show as late as possible so that they could sneak more contentious material through, a technique Morris would later use to his own great advantage.

Morris and Lewis-Smith followed each other’s work very closely. A senior colleague at Bristol observes that for Morris ‘it seemed to be quite an obsession’. He was getting national exposure with
No Known Cure
items appearing on Radio 4’s
Pick of the Week
, and it was only a matter of time before Ned Sherrin played a clip of one of Morris’s tapes on
Loose Ends
in January 1989, introducing it by drily commenting that Lewis-Smith was reportedly ‘thrilled’ about the ‘young broadcaster from the West Country’ as a precursor to what indeed was a very direct homage by Morris. He had perfectly caught the manic technical and presentation side of Lewis-Smith, he just hadn’t quite found his own voice at that time. But even at what was a fairly embryonic stage, there was a detectable sense of energy, of a ferocious talent ripping through a whole palette of broadcasting techniques, discarding what didn’t work and beginning to create something new out of what did.