Disgusting Bliss (20 page)

It was a mystery how the Krays found Talkback. Morris’s own office had been given as the correspondence address, but only Talkback’s number was on the letterhead. It shouldn’t have been possible to find the production office from that – apart from anything else, directory enquiries weren’t supposed to give out addresses from phone numbers. The reach of the Krays was evidently still rather impressive. Morris and Newman came back later in the evening to move sensitive material out of the building, and everyone made a mental note to run the campaigns out of an entirely separate location when it came to making the full series. Always assuming, of course, that it was commissioned. It hardly felt like an act of overconfidence to think that it would be. BBC2 had provided funding for a very strong pilot, and the channel’s controller, Michael Jackson, had overseen
The Day Today
and
Knowing Me, Knowing You
. And he did admire the pilot when it was completed late in autumn 1995. But admiration wasn’t the same as commissioning. Jackson quickly came to the conclusion that the BBC wouldn’t be able to support the celebrity interviews and the treatment of the subject matter.

Torque TV
co-producer Duncan Gray says, ‘We were utterly shocked when Michael Jackson turned it down. We couldn’t believe it. This is the man who’d done
The Day Today
. How could he turn that down?’ Peter Fincham was the angriest of anyone. It was the BBC’s public funding system which allowed people like Morris to develop his work in all its complexity. The corporation should have been his spiritual home. More practically, the pilot had been stamped rejected – and many, including some of the crew, thought that would be fatal. But Talkback weren’t ready to give up. While Fincham, Morris and Chiggy acted quickly to open up negotiations with Channel 4, Talkback’s head of production, Sally Debonnaire, took on the complicated and time-consuming work of buying back the footage – all owned by the BBC – at under the cost price to ensure the pilot remained intact.

Peter Fincham spoke to Seamus Cassidy, a senior commissioning editor at Channel 4 who was immediately intrigued – not least because, like everyone in the industry, he wanted to know what Morris would do next. Cassidy knew people who worked on the show but, sworn to secrecy by Morris, they had said nothing of what they were up to. They didn’t even discuss the project with other colleagues at Talkback – even Fincham preferred not to be told the details of what they were up to. The intrigue and mystery added to the appeal of the show and, in real terms, the effect of the BBC’s rejection was negligible – if anything, it helped. Channel 4 liked the idea of poaching talent that the BBC couldn’t handle. It was more than enough to ensure that they would at least give the pilot a watch.

For Cassidy on a personal level,
Torque TV
came at a point when he had become disillusioned with Channel 4 and had all but decided he was going to leave. But then he saw this show. It was like nothing he had ever encountered. He still vividly remembers taking it home and watching it with his girlfriend one evening. Neither of them could quite work out how
Torque TV
could have been made with its deceptions, its focus and originality. They ended up both laughing and gasping at the same time, howling together helplessly. The programme was compulsive, ‘almost narcotic’, he says, faith in television and Channel 4 restored. The feeling was shared throughout Channel 4, up to John Willis, director of television.
Torque TV
– eventually renamed
Brass Eye
– had come home.

Michael Grade approved of the decision to acquire
Brass Eye
in a broad sense but wasn’t directly involved in the production process. While he declined to be interviewed for this book, colleagues at Channel 4 say that his awareness of the show would have been limited to a belief that he had got something like
The Day Today II
. And it was true to say that
Brass Eye
shared the same news-parodying DNA. But Morris was busy making a new mutant strain out of it, and by the time Grade realized the true nature of what was lumbering around in the Talkback laboratory, the
Daily Mail
would already be handing out free pitchforks and lighted torches and pointing the way to his office.

‘
Brass Eye
was scarier [than
The Day Today
],’ confirmed writer David Quantick. ‘It would be, “We’re doing this thing about a priest wanking himself to death.” You’d go, “OK – Armando’s not here, is he, Chris? It’s just you, isn’t it?”’
⁸¹

Recording of
Brass Eye
took place over 1996. Complete secrecy had been restored after the Krays interlude, and Morris himself anyway always maintained the lowest public profile he could get away with, something that was reflected in the quiet family existence he led, a marked contrast to the daily pressures of
Brass Eye
. By the time production started, he had been settled for a number of years with Jo Unwin, the actress and performer who had made such an impression on him when he had been in Edinburgh playing bass on the Footlights tour back in 1984. When Morris moved from Bristol to London on a permanent basis, she was sharing a place in Holland Park with Caroline Leddy and Jonathan Whitehead. On hearing that Jo and Chris had got together, Bristol friends immediately recalled The Millies in Edinburgh. ‘Oh, my God! He’s going out with Cat Woman,’ Hugh Levinson said with some admiration to Jonathan Maitland.

The couple went on to make their home in south London, where they would have two boys. It was a comfortable existence, but not showy, completely out of any celebrity spotlight, and they had a low-key marriage many years later. Morris kept up with his old circle of friends and interests that continued to include a passion for cricket.

He never showed interest in corporate work or adverts, though he did confess to one friend that thinking about the sums he’d been offered for commercials and the difference it could make to family life, he’d had the odd night that, if not exactly sleepless, was at least slightly disturbed. But he never seriously wavered in his opposition, and requests to do ads virtually dried up entirely when agencies at length realized that his management company would always turn them down. Not only that, but they would be warned as a matter of course that PBJ lawyers would be watching with interest to see if an advert would appear based on Morris’s work without his involvement. It left him free to spend much of 1996 in varying shades of lunatic undercover disguises as
Brass Eye
interviewers, reporters and characters – everywhere but nowhere.

He kept up as much of a normal routine as the workload allowed. Friends recall that he remained very caring and was always closely interested in whatever they were doing. He carried on the same kind of intense conversations and debates as he always had, an experience which, as Jonathan Maitland remembers, was for others ‘like being interviewed to go into university’. The reputation that continued to build around him, says Maitland, ‘didn’t even register. He would genuinely spend as long talking to the sound technician in the corner as anyone else.’ His thoughtful attitude was summed up for production manager Ali MacPhail on one of the rare occasions when he had been at an award ceremony. Armando Iannucci had just made a speech in which he thanked her. The next recipient remarked that he would thank his production manager, but he wasn’t sleeping with her. MacPhail was furious at the false implication, and Iannucci’s wife Rachael was loading a glass with red wine to chuck over the culprit. Morris was the one who talked them both down.

And yet he could also be both energetic and loud – not least in the check shirts he favoured and anything with a leopard-skin print on black. He would regularly hold meetings in coffee bars or restaurants, sushi being a favourite, and he was often on health kicks. The old Mercedes had at last died, but he regularly used public transport or cycled to Soho. His kit would be familiar to anyone who saw his performance as Denholm Reynholm, stridently promoting less stress through fitness to his long-suffering employees in 2005’s
The IT Crowd
. Reynholm’s alarmingly tight-fitting outfit might have been a disturbing vision of Lycra bondage by way of
Tron
costume, but Morris’s own commuting gear was not so different, topped off with a pair of distractingly oversized goggles. Both Reynholm and Morris clearly relished the disconcerting effect their appearance could have, but the on-screen caricature belied a personal warmth to Morris that he never allowed to show through in his work. The creativity he put into his friendships was typified by his startling Christmas cards, which are mentioned in interviews by almost all of his close friends and colleagues with something approaching reverence.

For years, from his early days in radio onwards, he had sent his own designs that incorporated metal and wood, sometimes barbed wire and even bone. They included a fly on a fob in a test tube of formaldehyde (Sally Debonnaire muses in a Morris-like fashion on its meaning, ‘Maybe it buzzed itself to death?’), a container with yellow liquid on one side with some dirt on the other (and the message ‘Piss ’n’ earth’), a sculpted skull and blocks of wood with wire on them. The cards were, says Graham Linehan, a particularly personal gesture, something that could have looked positively threatening if you didn’t know their sender. They seemed to be an expression of creativity for its own sake, worlds away from the increasingly single-minded focus that would characterize
Brass Eye
. That came from somewhere completely different, according to Matthew Bannister. ‘He’s on a one-man mission to expose the hypocrisy of the media. That is his moral crusade,’ he says. ‘It’s an act, but the reason comes from the core of his being.’ Doon Mackichan, who joined Morris from
The Day Today
for a few appearances in
Brass Eye
, feels that his aims were more general, that his motivation came from whatever was in the air that needed cutting down to size. And writer David Quantick similarly says, ‘Chris’s thing is that he seems to me to be really outraged that the world is not the way it should be.’

Brass Eye
explored that sense of outrage by taking six perennial favourite documentary subjects – the sort of topics that were just too difficult to cover in thirty minutes but which the media regularly tried to simplify to the point where they didn’t make any sense at all: Animals, Drugs, Science, Sex, Crime and Decline. ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’ Morris admonished the viewer from his position behind the sickbed of British culture in Decline, ‘but you will do – if you watch for thirty minutes.’Was the decline of morals in the country irreversible – the country’s ‘The-moral-mometer’ reading just two morals per head – or was everything just great? Was science good or bad? These questions would be asked repeatedly throughout the show in varying ways as if there were some actual progress in answering them. Test tubes were shown in a courtroom to illustrate the trial of Science, ‘accused of going too far; of befouling, pollutement and the intoxifaction of men’s minds . . .’ There was a relentless rhythm to the shows, punctuated by the questions, without the respite that
The Day Today
had in the shape of its soap
The Bureau
and its mini-documentaries on the office and the swimming pool. At the end of each edition, Morris would curtly summarize the big issue before dismissing the viewer, but not the vague sense of disquiet that the constant interrogation of the show created.

The big themes provided rich inspiration for the show’s material which, when it didn’t come from Morris himself, was the result of sessions with Peter Baynham, shared with Armando Iannucci’s
Armistice
over the summer. ‘I find that writing is definitely made easier by having meetings with people,’ said Morris, ‘because you say things that you didn’t know you thought . . . In my experience anyway, if you sit and strain away at a blank sheet of paper on a desk, you know, you can get things out, but the type of things that come out are different from the sort of things you almost accidentally say.’
⁸²
There were also Monday-morning writing meetings with a wider circle. There was no set method for coming up with material. Peter Baynham particularly remembers being in a vague, hungover state the Saturday morning after they’d been to a Talkback party. It informed the way in which he and Morris were talking about an idea for a fox-hunting sequence in what would be Animals. At one point Morris suggested his pro-hunt spokesman might comment, ‘They say it’s cruel, but they wouldn’t say that if . . .’ Baynham added woozily ‘. . . if it was a little four-legged car . . .’ and Morris finished ‘. . . full of chips.’ And that was the defence his character used.

The other writers worked primarily to provide initial ideas. Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews came having evolved their own way of working in
Father Ted
, where they would write a couple of pages each, editing the other’s work as they went along. They settled into Morris’s looser way of talking around subjects, their suggestions including Egyptian pyramids being revealed as the ears of giant underground cat statues.

David Quantick had been working with writing partner Jane Bussmann when he was alerted to the existence of the new Chris Morris project. He brought Bussmann along. She had got into comedy after failing all her exams before university and had worked for Talkback and the BBC. Sharp and energetic, she had a filthy laugh and filthier sense of humour. The duo fitted in well. In the
Brass Eye
sessions, she recalls, she and Quantick wrote some material about a US army health film on gonorrhoea just to ‘out-disgusting each other with stuff coming out of your cock’. She was the only female writer on
Brass Eye
, but as with Doon Mackichan and Rebecca Front performing in
On the Hour
, there wasn’t any particular significance to a writer’s gender. It wasn’t the sort of show where there were female gags to be written and, referring to the general lack of women in comedy, she pragmatically describes her presence as over-representative if anything. She wouldn’t have had a female perspective to write from even if it had been required: ‘I never have had,’ she says now, ‘which is the reason I can write comedy, I think.’ But she did come to the sessions with some expectations of what the experience would be like, having been a fan of
The Day Today
: ‘Obviously, Chris is an amazing individual, so I always thought, Fucking hell, I wonder what he’s doing next? Everyone was in awe of Chris because he can say what he wants . . .’