Disgusting Bliss (13 page)

With Morris as the ringmaster for the bizarre collection of presenters,
The Day Today
was an only occasionally awkward blend of the savage and the absurd, Alan Partridge fumbling his brief or Morris humiliating guests such as the woman who has raised £1,500 for charity with her jam festival – ‘You could make more money by sitting outside a Tube station with your hat on the ground even if you were twice as ugly as you are, which is very ugly indeed.’

The inventive mix of cruelty and wild stupidity put the show in a very English style of comedy. The novelist Jasper Fforde has pointed out
Diary of a Nobody
in this lineage, but he could equally well be talking about
The Day Today
: ‘Pooter fits into the tradition of absurd humour that the British do so well, which started with Jonathan Swift and runs through Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear and is reflected much later on in Monty Python, the novels of Tom Sharpe and films like
The Wrong Trousers
. The satire [in the book] is cruel – but then a lot of comedy is cruel. You really squirm. But then the really great comics are not necessarily the people you always laugh at, but the people who make you think: Ooh, should I be laughing at that?’
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The Day Today
’s fantasies were framed in the serious news format. Morris’s dazzling headlines were anchored by real footage – ‘Headmaster suspended for using big-faced child as satellite dish’, ‘Bouncing elephantiasis woman destroys central Portsmouth’. Surviving scripts show that even the unused examples were strong – ‘Major reacts after pony swallows cabinet’ was one and there was the environment news – ‘a large cloud of noise is threatening the northeast tonight. The noise is believed to have escaped from a chemical plant in Middlesborough and has now drifted as far south as Scarborough.’ The studio looked believable, as if
The Day Today
existed within its own complete world, with mock trails for other programmes. There was a suggestion created of life off camera in the show’s newsroom by the awkward flirting between Morris and travel news presenter Valerie Sinatra, moments that could have come directly from Morris’s GLR show.

The force of his personality, which had been so apparent even on radio, was underlined by his commanding physical presence on camera, but the success of his presenter character lay fundamentally as much in what Morris wasn’t. Not having wanted to pursue a career in comic arts, the power of his performance lay in him seeming to be a real newsman gone bad. He wasn’t simply delivering jokes about news to highlight how funny he was, but rather seemed thrillingly as if he were deliberately sabotaging the medium, much as he’d done back at Bristol, and communicating the fun he’d always had with it to the viewer. It was the sense of easy confidence and understanding of the desperation to be seen as weighty by so many in journalism which made his appearance as mesmerizing as it was funny. He was doing the job he’d been trained for, but to excess, which was perhaps why, as Iannucci observed, he had to be reminded that he was actually good at doing other characters and styles of humour.

Following the pilot, Morris seemed to have calibrated his performance and he had become more intense in the way he played the presenter. His characterization took inspiration from many different sources: ‘[Michael Buerk is] like a priest and he pulls serious faces in a hammy way. It’s like Russ Abbot saying to himself, “I know this can get a laugh,”’ he said. ‘Michael Buerk’s probably saying in the newsroom, “I know this can get a tear . . .”

‘I’ve always found television news fantastically distracting because of people’s mannerisms. If you’re watching Peter Sissons, you’re always thinking, Why’s he got a nuclear missile up his arse? . . . Michael Buerk is pulling this po-faced, “Hey, we’re all in church” act, Peter Snow is on fire.’ And then there was the note-perfect Jeremy Paxman: ‘Because I’m naturally a cruel bastard.’
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His other presenter characters were as carefully observed. Ted Maul had a subtle difference in voice which marked him out as a rougher version of Morris’s main anchor, not quite as bright and slightly more old school and clubbable. He was one that Morris would come back to right through
Brass Eye
.

Other elements transferred from the radio series, often gaining in the process. Alan Partridge was increasingly confident, Coogan’s live reports completely natural in their halting incompetence. Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan was a standout performance by Patrick Marber. Rather than simply be cowed by Morris’s bullying, he was always argumentative and petulant when he knew he’d been caught out not having all the facts.

A spoof soap was set, on Doon Mackichan’s suggestion, in a bureau de change. Iannucci was, says Patrick Marber, ‘against us hamming it up. Of course, we do ham it up a bit. Compared to
The Office
it’s primitive, but it’s the beginning of that journey I think of doing it for real.’ The authenticity was created by filming much more than was needed, rather than just scripting a few seconds to seem like an excerpt from a longer interview or scene. Just as he had for
On the Hour
, Iannucci assessed all the material before editing it down with the pace and fluidity of a real documentary. In the swimming pool documentary, a large number of characters were invented to approach Mackichan as the heroically unhelpful ticket clerk, and snatches from just a few were used in the final show.

Morris, meanwhile, did much of the work on the music in partnership with Jonathan Whitehead. In interview, Whitehead is a laidback and reflective voice who becomes precise and analytical only when he talks about his approach to music and how he and Morris took apart such staples as the
Newsnight
theme. They knew the history of their music, that
Newsnight
had been written by well-known movie and TV composer George Fenton. As they roamed around the news music landscape, picking over the major beasts of the genre, Whitehead noticed that they often had unexpectedly avant-garde roots. It was this that gave them their pomp and was a pretension that informed
The Day Today
. At Whitehead’s Bayswater studio, he and Morris played around with ideas on keyboards.

‘Gravitas,’ muses Whitehead now, ‘was a word bandied around
The Day Today
which I’d never really thought about before.’ It was Morris who came up with the main four-note motif for the show. Whitehead embellished it, made it lurch around disconcertingly in 7/8 and 8/8 time and created the associated programme stings. He also worked on incidental themes for the show and, as he had done on GLR, with helping Morris to produce musical parodies such as RokTV’s Nirvana sanitary towel advert and George Formby as the real author of Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Morris himself made a banjo sound by playing a guitar with a capo. ‘It was the only time, really, that I’ve collaborated,’ says Whitehead. ‘I felt that I was doing something that required more time and effort than other jobs. Even though he would write bits of the songs and have them ready-made, there was still quite a lot of actual note-bashing to do. We were very closely involved in writing the music together. He’d come to the studio many times, which is completely unusual. I normally do it by myself.’ And because they knew how each other worked, ‘there was a chance to do something that wasn’t so bland, something that might be noticed in some way’.

Every news show of the time employed computer graphics to heighten the drama of their stories – even when an illustration wasn’t needed or relevant. All the channels competed madly with the most powerful processing systems to get the fanciest graphics. Using a funky three-dimensional image in a story was a guaranteed way to attract praise from a news editor, and the idea of using an illustration only to simplify a complicated concept was frequently lost in the rush to make sexy footage. The biggest constraint was the time it took to make smooth, broadcast-quality graphics. The brief for the on-screen graphics of
The Day Today
was to imagine what would happen if the wildest imaginings of the most megalomaniac editor were not constrained by the daily deadlines and budgets of a news show.
The Day Today
took five months to create a visual feast of overblown colour – graphs, illustrations and globes spinning dizzily. Eventually, computer power got to the point where any news show could do similar things on a daily basis, which then made it seem rather weirdly as if the real news had taken several years to look like
The Day Today
.

The design department of ITN, led by senior designers Richard Norley and Russell Hilliard, won the contract to do the graphics based on a pitch they did for what would become the story about dogs being used by the IRA as explosives. The graphics showed police spraying the dogs with a special sealant that contained the explosion within the animal and Hilliard and Norley cheerfully went over the top with the idea. They loved the whole idea of the show from the start, while immediately realizing it would be unlike anything they had done before. They laughed at the scripts, though sometimes a little nervously as they tried to work out how they were going to create a currency cat or a finance arse. The graphic look of the show was central, and they were part of the creative team rather than just being called in as an afterthought to prettify it. Morris and Iannucci briefed each design and returned graphics with detailed directions for improvement. The show meant long hours and many reworkings for Hilliard and Norley, who had to fit the work into a relatively small budget and around their day job at ITN. But, as enthused by the concept as everyone else, it was obvious to them that they were being stretched to do something special. They weren’t able to realize every idea. Among the abandoned briefs was the world turning into a suit, the camera zooming out to reveal the jacket as the countries, with stitching as the coastline and the sea on the shirt. But what did get through was enough to win a BAFTA for Television Graphic Design in 1994, and it was also key in launching Hilliard and Norley with their own successful company making titles and graphics across a huge range of major entertainment shows.

Over the last few months of 1993 Morris sat in with editor Steve Gandolfi to work on his tapes. Gandolfi says, ‘And he had it all worked out. All the people – he knew what they all said, he edited it, but when we cut it, it didn’t work. So we just went through everything and edited it.’ Morris and Iannucci had very little padding in what they had produced, but it didn’t make it any easier to fit together. ‘It’s like, when you watch Benny Hill, it’s very simple,’ says Gandolfi, ‘and I’m sure that when they first started making it, every frame of it’s perfect . . . but Chris; one thing was complicated, one was simple . . . the way it was all structured together. First couple of days were quite hard to understand, to get involved.’ At one point it looked as if they couldn’t possibly do it all by the end of the year. ‘I remember, I was worried about Christmas,’ says Gandolfi. ‘When they were shooting the studio stuff, I was carrying on editing the other stuff. I was an absolute wreck.’ Segments like RokTV – which might on other shows take a day to put together – were edited over a full week. When Morris spat out the words of rap parody ‘Uzi Lover’ at full pelt, Gandolfi had to work to get the sound to fit. ‘The “cop/fuck/bitch/bang/motherfucker!” stuff I was synching. I was the one trying to get them in synch, it was so fast. His lips weren’t in synch . . .’

Editing was completed by the end of November and the six episodes were broadcast between 19 January and 23 February 1994. The series was heralded by a press release promising the dawn of a bright age in news, saying that ‘today’s viewer must be able to “feel the reality of news” and will only do so if broadcast reality is assisted in a process called Ultranews’. Most of it was standard PR stuff, but buried among the biographies of the cast and principal crew were interesting embellishments to Morris’s CV: ‘In the eighties, numerous local radio stations found themselves unable to tolerate someone who would fill a news studio with helium seconds before a broadcast, resulting in the announcer reporting a motorway pile-up in the voice of a smurf. In 1990, Radio Bristol choked when Morris did a running commentary over a live news bulletin; later that year GLR decided that his vigorous pursuit of their brief “Get us into trouble” had put them in jeopardy – Morris left.’ It was this press release that gave birth to so many of the myths and legends about Chris Morris. Even by his own lofty standards of misdirection, it was astonishing how full a life of their own these tales took on, repeated without comment in both friendly and critical press reports. Journalists swallowed the tales without blinking or thinking about how difficult it would be to fill a studio with helium without a newscaster knowing or, indeed, dying. But perhaps strangest of all was the way in which Morris’s own friends and colleagues from those early days have come to accept them as if they were actual memories of the late 1980s and early 1990s, even though they didn’t start to circulate until after
The Day Today
was broadcast in early 1994.

It was hardly as if stories needed to be invented to create more excitement about the show. A background buzz of interest in
The Day Today
had been building from the moment of its commissioning. As early as summer 1993
The Times
said, ‘Anything with Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, Rebecca Front and Armando Iannucci is worth cancelling a wedding for.’
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The
Independent
did a feature they wanted to accompany with a group shot of the principals. Morris, already very careful in how he presented himself, didn’t want to be photographed at all, and neither he nor Iannucci wanted to be seen as part of a ready-made troupe. Journalist Robert Hanks made it clear he found the reluctance to do regular publicity made them seem rather precious.

The interest they stirred was inevitable – a show about the media was always going to be watched closely by the media simply because it was about its favourite subject. Then there was the very specific fan base that
On the Hour
had won who would also be paying close attention. They were partly attracted to the show because it was so cleverly observed with the layers of subtle references which could be cherished and the numerous memorable lines to be savoured. It had attitude that you could line up with, and that made it something to be protective about, something to own. Fans were articulate, opinionated and media-literate. They would be waiting to see if the evocative world of
On the Hour
had sold out in an attempt to be a hit on TV. It all meant that the show itself then had not only to be good, but to be as good as everyone was saying it was going to be.