Disgusting Bliss (7 page)

In 1994 Morris told
Melody Maker
about a journalist he called Pat who ‘knew all the tricks, how to chat up the police, etc. One day, he came rushing into the studio, shouting, “Chris, Chris, you’ve gotta listen to this: ‘Police are out in force today as the county’s roads serve up their traditional pre-Christmas cocktail of carnage.’” I said, “Pat, you
can’t
say that.” When he did the news, he read, “The roads have served up their traditional pre-Christmas
menu of mayhem
,” smiled at me through the glass, and carried on.’
¹⁶

Nick Barraclough promoted Morris’s promising show to Trevor Dann, who presented a Sunday-night show on Radio Cambridgeshire for new and alternative music. At thirty-five, he was an established name with a career including stints as a Radio 1 producer and on BBC2’s
The Old Grey Whistle Test
. Within five years, as one of the managers tasked with founding the BBC’s London station GLR in 1988, he would be on the lookout for DJs with distinctive styles – by which time Chris Morris would have stepped a considerable distance along the hard way.

Even at Radio Cambridgeshire, Morris was evolving a clear idea of how he wanted to work, as fellow presenter Valerie Ward discovered when they briefly collaborated on an arts programme. ‘I think they thought that, as I wanted to produce and Chris was keener on presenting, we would make a good team,’ she says. ‘We didn’t. I wanted to write everything, script it, time it, craft it, include interviews and location packages. Chris just wanted to go with the flow.’ They tried to work separately and bring their pieces together. But by the time they met, Morris had often still not decided what he wanted to do. ‘I was reduced to tears,’ says Ward. Ian Masters recalls, ‘Even then Chris’s approach to broadcasting was out of the ordinary. Some people asked me if he was a little too “zany”. My response was always that I would rather have broadcasters who tried new approaches – even if those approaches failed sometimes. I liked his bright tongue-in-cheek style and his wry humour.’

Morris would use listeners who called in as props for his own sense of humour, rather than draw out their own stories. He wasn’t unkind, but he wasn’t patient. ‘I think he did find it hard to put himself in other people’s shoes perhaps,’ says Rachel Sherman. ‘He was always one step ahead of them, but that wasn’t always funny. Sometimes that was a problem. He can make you feel stupid even though he’s not meaning to. If you aren’t very secure in yourself, if you don’t feel up to matching what he’s doing, you could end up feeling a bit pathetic.’

His style was more readily understood by his colleagues. Morris would enthusiastically bound around the studio and had a flippant, public-school sense of fun which made him a popular figure. The absurd constraints of time and budget on the station encouraged a black humour in the creative teams which, as he had on the market stall, Morris fitted into comfortably. He employed his observational skills to capture almost everyone in the station perfectly and without mercy. Ian Masters’ headmasterly style and tendency to be pompous made him a particularly rich source of humour for Morris in evening pub sessions. It was only a year or so after Morris joined that he gave a devastatingly cruel and accurate impersonation during a speech on the occasion of Masters leaving, which marked him out among such colleagues as Trevor Dann as someone brimming with comic talent and potential. His confidence was reflected in his appearance, which was usually relaxed and individual, and even when he seemed more interested in what he was wearing he never tried to make a statement and was certainly not a follower of trends. He favoured Harris Tweed jackets and pinstripe or sometimes outlandish paisley shirts, occasionally with bow ties and a blazer, Viv Stanshall-style. He was engaging with friends and always wanted to know what they were doing, why they were doing it and who they were doing it with. ‘Which is a rare thing in his business,’ says Nick Barraclough, who had quickly established what would become an enduring friendship with Morris. ‘Normally people just talk about themselves.’ Chris was genuinely curious. But when he opened his mike to address, largely, the housebound and afflicted of Cambridgeshire, all of that remained hidden.

‘He could never let down the front,’ says Barraclough. ‘He was always playing a part when he was broadcasting. I don’t think he could ever just be him, really. The thing about local radio is that you’ve
got
to put your personality across and you’ve got to disrobe everything. If you don’t open up, then you’ll be no good at all, and Chris is by definition any number of people except himself.’ It would always be hard for close friends to work out how much of that broadcasting persona was worked out in advance and what was simply down to how he felt on any particular day. Perhaps he didn’t even have it all figured out himself. ‘They just thought I was being ironic,’ he later said of those early days, ‘and I don’t quite understand why.’
¹⁷

Dawn Burford was not won over by his style. She thought her driving partner was full of himself. It wasn’t right that he was so offhand with the public, she insists – that despite the fact that many of the audience had, even in her own words, the intelligence ‘of a broom handle’, the staff should make allowances. She remembers being dispatched in the radio car to cover a craft fair where stallholders would be eager to discuss their crocheting and knitware with the smart young types from the BBC. Morris was horrified. ‘What are we doing here?’ he said to Burford despairingly. ‘It’s full of smelly old women. I can’t do this.’ He dumped the recording gear on her and, she says, ‘sodded off for a bit’. It was almost as if he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whatever his destiny held, he seemed to know even then, it wasn’t smelly old ladies, although they would provide material for
On the Hour
. The ‘Look Around Your Region’ sections would be the heartfelt pokes he delivered at the parochial stories he was doing for real as a young journalist in Cambridgeshire, featuring ‘Bang on Target’ with ‘Michael Bang’ and headlines such as ‘Hopping lessons for Timmy the amputee badger’ and ‘How far are we from Kent today?’

A phone call to Radio Cambridgeshire from anyone who appeared to be more on the wavelength of the young staff was always a cause for celebration in the studio. Morris had been at the station for something like eighteen months when a sixteen-year-old named Paul Garner called in to a competition. He sounded naturally funny and was soon helping out in the studio. It was the start of a friendship and occasional working association between the two that would last years. Garner’s primary interest lay in music rather than comedy, and as he planned to make it in the music business he was far from overawed by what Morris was doing and brought an unaffected freshness to his weekend job. But he quickly learned to respect Morris’s professionalism. He once came in with a tape of something stupid he’d done and mistakenly played it on a tape machine that interrupted a serious programme. Always imposing, Morris was suddenly a furious figure. Though the storm passed quickly, Garner says, ‘I remember being quite frightened of him.’

In later years it would be reported that Morris’s own tendencies to cause mischief started at Radio Cambridgeshire. But he was still learning. There simply wasn’t the scope to mess around at the under-resourced station and though friends and colleagues have heard all about the stories – often repeated in press profiles – of him filling studios with helium and being fired, in interview they all say that while they are sure it happened, it wasn’t there. But it was only a matter of time before he broke out from the budgetary and creative limitations of his first proper show.

In the spring of 1987 Morris sent a reel of his best work off for a position at the BBC station located, coincidentally, in his university town. Radio Bristol advertised for a ‘bright and lively broadcaster who can produce and present weekend sequence programmes with flair, pace and imagination . . . Salary around £10,000–£11,000’.
¹⁸

In another coincidence, Morris already knew the man who would hire him, David Solomons, programme organizer at the station. The former sports reporter’s daughter Jane was a station assistant at Radio Cambridgeshire, where she was going out with Morris. Yet though it was an appointment which might appear to be a clear case of industry nepotism, quite the reverse was true. Morris’s engine was fuelled by a powerful dislike of unfairness and hypocrisy in all their forms. Colleagues at Radio Cambridgeshire remember that he took against his fellow young recruit Emma Freud simply because it was said she’d got work experience at the station only after her father, local MP Clement Freud, had asked Ian Masters. It seems a minor offence – the media is after all rife with far more breathtaking crimes of family, and Emma Freud became a talented broadcaster in her own right – but it was enough to ensure that Morris never quite got on with her. Some years later he contributed an occasional column for the London
Evening Standard
, then edited by a relative of his later partner Jo Unwin, a fact picked up on by
Private Eye
and reported by them in typically arch style. He immediately wrote to the magazine to confirm the piece and volunteer the story of his earlier connection with his employers at Bristol. ‘Mr Yentob!’ he added in a plea to the controller of BBC1. ‘Have you a child for me?’
¹⁹

Quite apart from anything else, Morris’s ability and potential on the demo tape were proof enough of his capability. David Solomons had told
Broadcast
magazine that he was looking for someone ‘able to take a sideways look at life’.
²⁰
Morris’s style – edgier and more irreverent than most – was exactly what they were looking for. Jane remembers that her father was impressed by Morris as a broadcaster: ‘I think he greatly admired his imagination, daring and creativity,’ she says.

Jane Solomons was born in Yeovil, Somerset, and studied at Reading University. She was also new to the industry and at Radio Cambridgeshire had become aware of Morris gradually as he took on more shifts before they started to go out together. In interview she is guarded in her description of their relationship, almost as if it were one in which there was more companionship than passion, though they were committed enough to remain a couple even after he got the job at Bristol. For a while it would be a distance relationship, as Solomons had to get work in the area and to sell her Cambridge home before she could move to be with him in the West Country.

Morris stayed in contact with old friends and colleagues when he left. Nick Barraclough would be kept up to date with Morris’s new enthusiasms, his discoveries in music, the shape of his first starring show at Bristol and, at length, the increasingly uncomfortable relationship that developed with Bristol’s management as Morris began to push at the limits of what could be done with a local radio show.

A MAVERICK RADIO TALENT, HE WAS SACKED BY THE BBC AFTER inappropriate remarks concerning a government minister and, after almost a year’s exile from the airwaves, was hired by Radio Bristol – on the condition that he supplied his tapes from his home studio in advance. Kenny Everett, who had been such an influence on Morris’s childhood, made his return to the airwaves in the summer of 1971. Following in his footsteps – albeit sixteen years later – Chris Morris was a long way from making the not dissimilar comments on a contemporary minister that would lead to his own suspension from what Kenny Everett used to call the Beeb. Morris was still learning and Radio Bristol allowed him greater scope to develop as a broadcaster. More solid than surprising, some presenters unchanged in themselves or their format for twenty years, Bristol was longer established than Radio Cambridgeshire and was actively looking for somebody to innovate.

Morris and no-nonsense programme organizer David Solomons developed the concept of what became
No Known Cure
, which started broadcasting in July 1987. The tight budget meant that Morris had to stretch his material to fill live shows on Saturdays and Sundays between 10 a.m. and midday. In October 1988 he took on a Friday 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. slot for the
Late No Known Cure
, the same month he started to do a show for the new London BBC station GLR. He managed to produce both programmes for eighteen months before at last moving up to GLR and the capital on a permanent basis.

Morris was again under short-term contract. Roy Roberts, Radio Bristol station manager, remembers that his new employee arrived with a chequered reputation. ‘We knew that he was a slightly risky, or adventurous, proposition,’ he says. If Morris’s card was already marked, it wasn’t clear who at Radio Cambridgeshire tipped them off. Ian Masters’ successor, Margaret Hyde, insists that she’d had no problems with him, but he had already begun to get a reputation.

Morris worked alone to create the bulk of the material for his show, starting the working week on Wednesday through to the final show on Sunday. He laboured over every detail, down to composing his own jingles – he could spend an entire day making a brief trail of a quality that went far beyond what was required for local radio. It wasn’t unusual for a newsreader hurrying to deliver a late-night broadcast to see Morris hunched over a synthesizer in a room at the front of a former private house where programme-makers congregated between shows.

Steve Yabsley helped out with such tasks as fielding listener calls. He had joined the station in 1986 after having been a packing clerk who hung around the station until they gave him work. Slim, with a narrow face, brown eyes and neat dark hair, he was a local boy and naturally funny. On Thursdays Yabsley and Morris repaired to a café to write items together. ‘Chris was incredibly focused and he knew his own mind totally,’ says Yabsley. ‘Everything else was going on around him and he was concentrating on what he was doing. I just think of him as a whirlwind.’

Matt Sica worked at Radio Bristol as an assistant in his teens. ‘He took on the show – really grabbed it by the horns. It was a real wrestling match between him and the show. And if the timing was out on anything, it didn’t sit well with him.’ Morris had ranks of cartridges on which he stored effects and the jingles he’d written. ‘Observed from the outside, he was rather comical, because he hid behind a wall of carts and seemed to be doing the job of four or five men.’