Disgusting Bliss (27 page)

It wouldn’t always be so easy for Morris to step back when he worked on other people’s projects. When playing Denholm Reynholm in the later Graham Linehan show
The IT Crowd
, he would be doing his usual debating and questioning of everything, whereas Linehan was ready to leave jokes as they were without examining them for clues to the characters. It wasn’t made any easier for Linehan having taken on board Kevin Eldon’s description of Morris as ‘officer class’. Denholm was killed off early in the second series of
The IT Crowd
when Morris was too busy to come back for the full run, though Linehan confided in him that he’d also found doing the first series with him hard work. It was clear when he returned for the spectacular suicide of Denholm that opened the second series that Morris had taken all the concerns on board and unplugged his brain entirely from creative concerns. He swiftly and brilliantly rattled through his lines – though when it came for Denholm to jump out of the window at the back of the set, just a few feet off the studio floor, Morris still asked the art director if they could build it higher to make it look like he was really plunging. No, he was told, health and safety wouldn’t allow it. Denholm proved such a favourite that Linehan brought him back to provide a malign ghostly influence in the third series.

Simon Pegg was the only member of the
Big Train
cast not to join
Blue Jam
, and David Cann, who had provided such congenial figures of authority in
Brass Eye
, augmented the line-up as sessions began in the grubby basement at Talkback. Morris returned to the instant creativity of radio with a small cast who knew each other well and could develop their roles. The only other staff were a studio manager and Rebecca Neale, returning from Morris’s Radio 1 shows as production assistant.

Morris would shout out suggestions as they worked; there was no fixed way of producing the sketches. Sometimes they veered wildly from the script for hours, sometimes they would nail it as written. The tape ran all the while and the performances were carefully logged and script changes noted so that Morris could find his way when he took the recordings away for reworking.

It was later rumoured that the show’s mood had been conjured by recording in the small hours, but though taping might run late, the sessions were in regular time, and rather than being infused with dread purpose they were frequently broken up by outbreaks of hysteria. It was sometimes apparent in the show – particularly in the ‘Bad Sex’ series of sketches in which lovers engage in increasingly bizarre pillow talk with laughter never far from the actors’ voices, Kevin Eldon and Julia Davis particularly prone to cracking up. The crew would also have to stifle giggles or quickly look away from the actors while the tape was running. The genuine sense of enjoyment gave the performances an energetic life that made them far funnier and if anything contributed more to
Blue Jam
’s disturbing quality than if the cast had deliberately set out to do weird and shocking. Though some critics would accuse the show of setting out to break taboos simply for the sake of it. ‘It just seems like the laziest criticism,’ says Peter Baynham, who was again Morris’s main writing partner. It was more, he says, that they ‘allowed’ themselves freedom to go where they wanted.

The writing meetings were as loosely structured as the recordings. It helped, Morris explained to the
Guardian
, to ‘evolve things casually. It proceeds almost like a conversation.’
¹¹¹
Most of the supporting writing team, largely unchanged from
Brass Eye
, were as enthusiastic as the cast about the creative possibilities that this offered. David Quantick and Jane Bussmann were relatively fresh from the heady live chaos of
The Election Night Armistice
with Armando Iannucci. They had also appeared on the show, Quantick causing some slight awkwardness for Iannucci and producer Sarah Smith when he said something to the effect that they were ‘spurting the jism of news over the hard stomach of fact’. He and Jane Bussmann took the
Blue Jam
‘woozy’ briefing to mean it would be trippy, that you wouldn’t be sure of what you’d heard, and set about coming up with the nastiest ideas they could, concentrating on relationships going bad. The writing meetings were as lively as the recording sessions, on occasion continuing at the upstairs bar of the John Snow pub in Soho late into the night with Baynham, Quantick and Bussmann joined by fellow comic Peter Serafinowicz and later
Blue Jam
cast member Sally Phillips.

Graham Linehan found the writing brief less inspiring. Preparing to direct the first series of
Big Train
, which would go out a year later, he nevertheless contributed material throughout
Blue Jam
and
Jam
, including some fine moments such as a sketch for the TV version written with Arthur Mathews in which Mark Heap’s mumbling, embarrassed security guard never quite manages to warn the staff of an office against leaving for the evening via an open lift shaft. But while he shared Quantick and Bussmann’s analysis that the show would have a hallucinatory feel, for him it was a ‘bad trip’ that Morris was making in which people were given moral dilemmas with increasingly bleak resolutions.

For the listener, it was partly that complexity which could make the show such a rich and resonant experience, particularly in the monologues. They came from Morris’s writing partnership with Robert Katz, and the longer form of the stories gave them the space to develop character in a way Morris hadn’t done before.

The pair evolved the monologues from the Temporary Open Spaces pieces on GLR, with a flavour of Morris’s fictional listener letters of the Radio 1 show. The media remained a target for Morris, though here it was accompanied by an exploration of depression. The flat-voiced narrator of the monologues seems once to have been a member of London cliques whose fringes he now haunts, a medicated observer of their absurdities. Each story stood alone, though they were characterized by invariably climaxing in a finale of humiliating slapstick for the narrator while all around him narcissistic dregs of the more vapid reaches of the creative industries climb over one another in ceaseless comic efforts to be top dog.

In their way, the monologues became as much a trademark of
Blue Jam
as Morris’s anchorman had been in
Brass Eye
and
The Day Today
– and went on to be the inspiration for later work for both Morris and Katz, the latter taking a show to Edinburgh where he performed alongside his wife’s sister, Sarah Parkinson. He based his segment of their
Unfucked
on the narrator character. Director Paul Merton was married to Parkinson, who died in 2003.

Morris himself appeared in relatively few other
Blue Jam
sketches, apart from the introductions that set the tone with disorienting scenarios that embraced the humiliated, the lost, the suicidal and the abjectly confused . . . ‘Then welcome . . . in
Blue Jam
.’

David Cann’s deranged doctor was one of few regular characters, subjecting his credulous patients to degrading examinations. Most other characters crept in and out just once, often in a haunted kind of mini-documentary format, like the landlord who explains how he once evicted a tenant by creeping into her room when she was asleep and, like an amalgam of figures of horror from Edgar Allan Poe to Struwwelpeter, ‘I tiptoed to the bottom of her bed and I lifted up her bedclothes and took out a scalpel – a very sharp scalpel; I used to be a medical student – and I
slivered
the thinnest possible layer of skin from the bottom of her foot and it just came away like a sort of silk insole and I took it out and I put it under a shrub’, without her waking. He repeats the process nightly until ‘she wasn’t there at all’. The slum landlord of nightmare.

The lateness of the hour prompted characters to confessionals of self-inflicted suffering – the woman who brushes her teeth until the gums are so raw she faints, and the man who has deliberately amputated both his legs so his girlfriend has to do everything for him. ‘They’re trapped in a mutual loathing, but it works,’ explained Morris, ‘they’ve reached a symbiosis where they both get something from it.’
¹¹²
But however visceral each set-up, the characters invariably met them with a very English equanimity – a composure not always matched by BBC management on hearing the sketches. But Matthew Bannister of all people had known from the start that a certain number of moments of unease came with Chris Morris territory. He seemed to welcome the way in which Morris’s presence caused a slight warping in the fabric of life at the BBC.

‘You couldn’t put your finger on it,’ he says now, laughing, ‘but almost everything in it was deeply disturbing. There was a question of whether or not you wanted to disturb people to that extent. And sometimes you couldn’t even articulate why it was you were worried about it. Almost everything had some kind of question in it.’

For his part, Morris said that his return to Radio 1 had been greeted with some suspicion: ‘It was enshrined officially as a kind of abuse relationship.’
¹¹³
There were many long discussions between Morris and Bannister over such issues as the number of times ‘fuck’ was allowed per broadcast. Bannister became managing director of BBC Radio in addition to his other work and nevertheless took the time to count all the instances from one episode. The majority were said to have contributed to the pace and rhythm, and those that seemed to be in there to offend – suspected of being deliberate Morris sacrificial fodder – came out.

‘I think to a certain extent if you’re a pompous BBC manager, you’re fair game,’ says Bannister. ‘Sometimes he forced me to confront some of my lazy preconceptions about what was acceptable in broadcasting. I found it rather exhilarating actually to be able to debate it with somebody who is deeply intelligent, cares passionately about it, but who could drag you into a slightly parallel universe where you suddenly found you’d gone mad. That was where it got a bit scary, when you found yourself agreeing with points that he’d made, which you knew in your saner moments were absolutely weird and you shouldn’t have agreed with them.’ Each of Morris’s managers seemed to have their own way of dealing with him, and his strategy for coping with what he called Morris’s ‘attempt to make me look like a lily-livered BBC poltroon’ was to make a creative case – to say that something was not funny rather than being against policy. But when it came to the Archbishop of Canterbury, negotiations broke down.

Morris had re-edited the words of the Archbishop at the funeral of Princess Diana in September 1997: ‘We give thanks to God for those maimed through the evil of Mother Teresa,’ the sermon begins over a trip-hop instrumental backing track. It hardly formed the most challenging material Morris had ever come up with, and the technique itself was one he’d used to the same effect on countless occasions. The cut words were worked into the beats, and there was a sense of silliness – ‘Lord of landmines’ – which if anything was light relief in the context of a show where elsewhere, to take just one example, listeners met parents who’d always felt their daughter was a 45-year-old man trapped in the body of a 4-year-old girl and so have had her suitably fitted with the correct vintage ‘penis and testicle glands’.

But the show was due to go out in December 1997. Prime Minister Tony Blair had only just anointed Diana the people’s princess. Mountains of flowers left by her distraught admirers outside the palaces had scarcely had the chance to rot. It wasn’t, as Matthew Bannister pointedly observes, ‘any old Archbishop of Canterbury speech’. Which only made Morris more determined to include it. No compromise was reached after lengthy phone discussions, and the two arranged a meeting with Peter Fincham at which Bannister asked what he was supposed to say if it went out and he then had to pick up the phone to a wrathful Archbishop of Canterbury. It was intended as a rhetorical question, but not only did Morris tell him, he went away and drafted a written response for the Archbishop. It was convincingly detailed, it was brilliantly argued, it was irrefutable – and quite beside the point as far as Matthew Bannister was concerned. His office had no wish to field the sort of calls that had come after the Heseltine obituary. The decision was final. Morris smuggled it in anyway.

The studio engineer on the night duly faded the programme down at the offending point and substituted an edition of the show from earlier in the run. But as a fan of Morris he deliberately took so long to make the switch that most of the re-edited speech was broadcast. If George Carey tuned in, he made no comment. And Matthew Bannister himself, recalling the episode in interview, appears even years on to be unaware that it went out. ‘I hope not,’ he says now. ‘I think he might have put it back in, but I mean . . . I’m not sure . . . I don’t believe that the Archbishop was ever transmitted. I think we’d have heard about that. I really don’t believe that.’

But it was easy for anyone to miss
Blue Jam
. The lateness of its slot made sure of that. ‘I seriously did want it to go out at three in the morning,’ Morris told the
Guardian
. ‘I thought that was about the latest time of day that could be late without being early. It’s a sort of autumnal, middle-of-the-night show. You need to be as far from light as possible.’
¹¹⁴

Radio 1 had wanted it to go out when there would be more listeners awake to hear what had been an unusually expensive and time-consuming production. It was known that listener figures went up at about 10 p.m. as people were on their way to bed, but in the end the compromise was settled on midnight, by which time the listener numbers were negligible. There was also little publicity. Morris came up with the idea of doing a photo shoot under water (even though, Rebecca Neale later learned from his partner Jo, he wasn’t actually a great fan of swimming) and was captured in startling blue on blue, his eyes suffused with an eerie glow and his hair billowing around him. The show was given a preview playback at Tom Morris’s Battersea Arts Centre.
Blue Jam
was placed in its natural environment as Chris played it back to an audience who lay down in a completely blacked-out auditorium. There were no preview recordings issued to the press, and the series slipped out barely noticed in mid-November while everyone’s attention was on Steve Coogan’s motel-dwelling agonies in the first series of
I’m Alan Partridge
. Only Radio 1’s introductory warning of strong language and material that some might find offensive gave any indication of what lay ahead.