Disgusting Bliss (23 page)

The toughest edition to sort out was Sex, where almost every scene had something to worry a regulator. It opens with Morris simulating intercourse as the camera pans back to show he’s on a monitor being watched by a fully dressed version of himself, turning to do the introduction while the sex continues vigorously behind him. The studio audience debate section of the programme features a character Morris criticizes for having ‘bad AIDS’ – having caught it from a boyfriend – rather than ‘good AIDS’, which he says you get innocently through blood transfusions. The audience back Morris as he demands the man is removed from the studio.

The uncomfortable atmosphere in the studio was more than matched by the response of many at Channel 4 in the debate with a 12-year-old character called Judy Lehewuttwhohen, who is introduced as having been abused from the age of nine by her uncle. Morris questions her with agonizingly slow and quiet prurience. ‘If you fall over in the snow do you make a couple of bumps?’ he asks. ‘Probably do, don’t you?’

The sketch was one that Morris discussed with Chiggy, who had been half-expecting the call. He phoned so rarely during production time that she rather suspected that he guessed she would be as uncomfortable with certain sketches as Channel 4 and just wanted to rehearse the argument he would later have. Sometimes the broadcaster would have already been in contact. ‘Chris and I had these pointless, circular conversations,’ says Chiggy. ‘If I agreed with them, that would set him off on a major rant . . . Sometimes you get into those arguments with him and he can way outwit anybody, as far as I can see. He can create any argument for the most ludicrous suggestion and in the end – and I’m sure he does this on purpose – you become quite emotional about it. You descend into these increasingly plaintive responses like, “I don’t know why I think that! I just
do
!” It’s a feeling, not an argument. But it’s what informs a lot of people’s reactions.’

There were also sketches which it always seemed were never going to get through, and some both on Morris’s side and at Channel 4 thought that he put them up to be sacrifices to make other things look acceptable. An advert for a board game called Horrorcaust – based on the Holocaust – seemed particularly unlikely to make it. But if anything was designed to be expendable, Morris would never admit as much to anyone at the channel in their regular battles. Enthusiastic as Prash Naik was about the show, he grew to dread the daily calls about a programme which had begun to take over his working life. Morris had familiarized himself with the ITC code,
⁸⁶
as every programme-maker was supposed to but not all did in practice, and he had also identified loopholes and worked out how to circumvent restrictions. Naik would frequently seek the advice of Jan Tomalin, and they would endeavour to find a creative way around the code only to find that Morris had thrown another tricky problem their way. The two never actually fell out, though there were plenty of heated conversations – literally, at one point.

‘He actually said to me, “If you don’t let me do this, I’m going to burn all my rushes. I’m not going to deliver. I will destroy everything.” And it’s the only time I’ve ever thought, You’re mad enough to do that,’ Naik says, adding thoughtfully: ‘I don’t actually think now that he would have.’

It seemed that nothing sapped Morris’s energy. The daily grind of living didn’t seem to affect him. Even when his home suffered from subsidence in the 1990s, he took on and won a fierce battle with the insurers. It was as if he didn’t see the same obstacles that affected other people. Back in 1993, when he and Armando Iannucci went to see
Reservoir Dogs
in the cinema, they found it sold out. Morris immediately went to the nearest phone box and, says Iannucci, ‘just spun some yarn and wouldn’t stop and eventually – and I’ve no idea how they did it – we were shown into the cinema and given two seats’.

Yet even Morris began to betray a sign of the colossal battering he was taking towards the end of
Brass Eye
, though it took the eye of the make-up artist to spot it. When they shot more material for Animals to augment the
Torque TV
pilot and had to apply make-up to match him to how he’d looked the previous year, he was candidly informed he looked ‘fucked’.

The last of the cuts and changes were eventually agreed – and despite everything they were in the end relatively minor. It looked as if the show would meet its scheduled transmission dates. And then Michael Grade became interested in the content of the programmes.

BY LATE 1996 EVERY INSTINCT IN CHANNEL 4’S PRESS OFFICE was keenly attuned to giving
Brass Eye
a major push. They wanted to offer the star to the press for interviews and profiles and circulate clips. But
Brass Eye
’s profile was to be kept deliberately low. It had even been suggested that Talkback handle the publicity themselves. Realizing that this would effectively be giving Chris Morris complete control of Channel 4’s public relations, the station promptly suggested it might be better if the show were taken in-house. Senior press officer Greg Day was used to working with comedians and on entertainment shows which had always been promoted in a very straightforward way. It wasn’t long before he found himself working against everything he knew as a PR for
Brass Eye
. He was never able to contact anyone on the show apart from Morris himself, who allowed him to release just a trickle of information into the void. The press, like the celebrity interviewees, were told only that the show was a ‘factual entertainment’ which was ‘looking at topical issues in an entertaining way’. The press office was instructed to admit if directly asked that Chris Morris was behind the show. Nobody did, and his identity was revealed only two weeks before broadcast. For someone whose job was to make a big fuss of things, it was agony for Greg Day. Morris supplied only non-attributable quotes for the press. Sometimes he would give enough juicy facts to start a story and then get Day to promise to call back – but never actually do so. Journalists excitedly invented the rest of the story for themselves.

‘I can say to you it was the right time for that series,’ says Day. ‘There is no way that the Channel 4 press office would ever do now what I did then.’ Day had to consciously stop himself from giving more information. ‘As an in-house PR there is a part of you that is trained to be corporate, and I got very upset about it, but I found myself being a much better liar and manipulator than I thought I could be,’ he says.

It took three weeks to get a press release for the overall series that both he and Morris could agree on. When he was forbidden to release a couple of pages of the show’s highlights, Day said issuing only the couple of paragraphs that Morris wanted would look strange coming as an official release from Channel 4. Morris retorted that in that case he should issue it without the broadcaster’s logo. The deadlock was eventually resolved with a reluctant compromise of half a page. ‘He just wrote it,’ says Day, ‘and I took out the expletives.’ Day was frustrated and felt undermined by Morris, and thought he was crippling his own show.

But elsewhere in Channel 4, the fears about the show’s content that were coming to crisis point would prove far more dangerous for its existence than arguments over headed paper. It was a reflection of the character of the publicity campaign that when the news broke that the show had been postponed, many assumed the announcement was just phase II of the anti-PR PR master plan. The show had been trailed on Channel 4 by then, and the week’s listings magazines had already highlighted it for 19 November. ‘Is Chris Morris too hot to handle?’ asked Bruce Dessau presciently in his
Time Out
preview.
⁸⁷

Conspiracy theories circulated among Morris’s base of fans on the internet about the official line from Channel 4, that more time was needed to be sure that everything complied with regulations. But prosaic though the explanation was, senior management at the broadcaster were still concerned about certain sketches. In the end, the series was referred up to Michael Grade and the effect was catastrophic. It was the first time he had become properly involved, and he reignited the debate over many sketches, instigating another set of changes with the lawyers. Morris was faced with beginning the negotiation process all over again.

‘Right up until the end,’ says Seamus Cassidy, ‘Chris was gentlemanly, courteous and reasonable.’ The end was in sight. With the reports of the postponement had come rumblings from David Amess and Sir Graham Bright, the MPs who had been featured in the Drugs episode. They got together with Home Office Minister Tom Sackville, who had been involved in drafting an answer to David Amess’s question on cake, to condemn the show for wasting taxpayers’ parliamentary money.

And it wasn’t just the MPs’ interviews that were under threat. Other celebrity names began to appear in the press, and Michael Grade suggested revisiting all of the hits. Morris’s gentlemanly reason went up in a sheet of incandescent rage. ‘Grade was just looking for an easy life and a knighthood, and he didn’t want to have the cigar swatted from his mouth by some blowsy celeb,’ he later said. ‘He called me into his office and offered me a drink in a showbiz-matey kind of way and said, “Look, all we have to do is ask permission [for the interviews].” My argument was that wouldn’t work. The whole point was that the hoax wasn’t bulletproof. It was quite brittle.’ He refused to make any more changes. Grade told him, he later claimed, that great though the series was it would never go out: ‘I really spent three days thinking about very little else than what great pleasure, what absolutely total pleasure it would give me really to kill somebody. I’ve never felt that before. But I could imagine every aspect of killing somebody and but for the fact that the opportunity didn’t present itself . . .’
⁸⁸

The channel’s regular editorial meeting was the most popular event in the company the week that the
Brass Eye
question was debated. They were turning people away. Executives, commissioning editors and their deputies jammed themselves into the room, with the majority – though not everyone – in favour of the show. Strong support was expressed by John Willis and Seamus Cassidy. Caroline Leddy from Talkback lobbied hard on Morris’s behalf. ‘It began to turn Michael’s views,’ said Willis later.
⁸⁹
Brass Eye
went to the heart of what Channel 4 meant for the station staff – whichever side they were on. But there was still much to be done to convince a boss who had become reluctant about the show as a concept and about Chris Morris in particular.

‘Why on earth was I keen to buy trouble by giving him a slot on Channel 4?’ Grade later asked readers of his autobiography. ‘Why do people become lion-tamers or swallow razor-blades for a living? I recognized a rare talent and felt that Channel 4 had a libertarian tradition that ought to be able to accommodate Chris Morris’s satire – though, as with lion-taming, the cardinal rule would have to be: never take your eyes off the beast.’
⁹⁰

The
Guardian
reported no fewer than 112 websites discussing
Brass Eye
, and journalist Jim White wondered at the source of their information: ‘You could imagine Morris at its centre, firing off the email, relishing the opportunity to drop a few pearls of misinformation into the public domain, undermining and sabotaging, while all the time maintaining his anonymity.’
⁹¹
It couldn’t have been further from the truth. The mood in Morris’s camp was despondent at the way in which his innovative PR campaign had descended into a shouting match.

‘After spending a year of our lives and £1 million,’ Peter Fincham told the
Guardian
on 25 November, ‘we are very keen that this thing be shown. I can assure you this is not a stunt.’
⁹²

On the Hour
and
The Day Today
writer Steven Wells ranted splendidly in his
NME
column against the ‘bottle job over
Brass Eye
. . . Having seen previews of the series,
Brass Eye
is great and utterly moral comedy. Its “postponement” is nothing other than an act of spit-licking corporate cowardice. You DESERVE to see this programme. Are you pissed off yet? Are you going to do something about it?’ He gave the Channel 4 number and instructed, ‘Give them hell.’
⁹³
Morris happened to run into Wells some months later and asked with some amazement what he’d written, saying readers had flooded Channel 4 with calls.

Emotions were running just as high within the station itself. Seamus Cassidy was among those who maintained that the second round of cuts was unnecessary. And eventually the tireless campaign mounted by champions of
Brass Eye
paid off, with Grade persuaded by the arguments and undimmed passion for the series. It was rescheduled for the new year.

The battle might have been won, but it had exhausted everyone. Cassidy, all the enthusiasm he’d had when he’d first saw
Torque TV
lost, soon quit the channel. Michael Grade himself abruptly announced his departure from Channel 4. Having timed the statement two days before rescheduled
Brass Eye
began its run on 29 January 1997, it was widely questioned whether the series had been a factor in his decision.

The new transmission date placed
Brass Eye
at the start of an election year which was anticipated to mark the end of almost two decades of Conservative rule. There was a sense of imminent change in the country which seemed to fit with a show as sharp, clever and knowing as
Brass Eye
. Morris might not have been party political, but targeting the self-satisfied and the hypocritical seemed to fit in very well with the mood of the times. The Tories were seen as burned-out history, stale and stodgy, and their replacements were younger and smarter and promised to create a fairer society. Morris himself would have been the last to claim to be part of any of that – only months later he dismissed New Labour as ‘hopelessly cosmetic’.
⁹⁴
But for those watching the show who could barely remember a time without the Tories, there were eerie parallels between
Brass Eye
’s celebrities prepared to say anything as long as they got on television and the Tories hanging on desperately to power having lost their majority of one seat in Parliament. Incompetence and sleaze coloured the perception of Major’s last days. It was only the previous September that the ‘cash for questions’ affair climaxed when MP Neil Hamilton and lobbyist Ian Greer dropped their libel actions against the
Guardian
. Their reasoning was that they could not afford to continue with the case, but the damage to the Tories’ image had been done – they were seen as the party who could be paid to take issues to Parliament. Overdosing on too much cake somehow went well with fat-cat Conservatives.