Disgusting Bliss

By the same author

Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall
(with Chris Welch)

‘You need never have heard of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band song to enjoy this terrific biography’
The Times

‘Compelling portrait of troubled funnyman’ *****
Uncut
magazine

‘Lays bare an often horrible life . . . His comic gifts were never just funny, but savage and elegiac by turns, and the book evokes Stanshall’s celebration of mad Englishness, with its Dada-surreal vision of Edwardiana and the late 1920s’
Sunday Times

‘Hooked me’ Christopher Hirst, Books of the Year,
Independent

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2010 by Lucian Randall

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Lucian Randall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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www.simonandschuster.co.uk

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A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available
from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84737-138-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-090-7

Typeset by M Rules
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

For Ewelina Chrzanowska, whose passionate art is an inspiration and for her unshakable belief in me

Huge amounts of thanks to Chris Morris for putting up with the idea of this in the first place and for giving permission to everyone to talk, without which it would have been impossible. Thanks to Chiggy for supplying so much information and insight and patiently channelling endless requests to Chris. Additional research by Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis. They provided a wealth of detail and their advice has been invaluable. Thanks, too, to Chas Newkey-Burden for his generous help in answering so many questions. Neil Kennedy at Cook’d and Bomb’d (www.cookdandbombd.co.uk) and many on its buzzing forum have been so helpful and have shared an unmatchable archive of rare and wonderful material.

David Miller and Hannah Westland at Rogers, Coleridge and White got the book off the ground in record time and have been enthusiastic backers ever since. Andrew Gordon saw the potential in it at Simon & Schuster where Mike Jones later took it on and Rory Scarfe edited it. But it wouldn’t have got anywhere without the original spark from both Tim Brown and Jonathan Maitland – who gets another thank you for providing so much information on the Bristol years. The incredibly generous support of Peter Mangold over the last couple of years has kept me going, as has the encouragement and friendship of Alex Robertson, Amanda Grace and the boys, Gus and Dan. I spent many months working at the Village Underground in Old Street, where everyone, particularly Tom and Jack Foxcroft and Obi Mgbado, were unfailingly inspiring and cool.

Thanks for advice and information to Jonathan Amos; Simon Armour; Roger Avery; Louis Barfe; Johnny Beerling; Moazzam Begg; James Burton; Dorothy Byrne; Nick Canner; Steve Gandolfi; Russell Grant; Duncan Gray; Mark Harrison; Richard Hearsey; David Hendy; Jonathan Hewat; Nick Higham; Shirley Hunt; Adrian Jay; Oliver Jones; Peter Kessler; David Knight; Roger Lewis; Richard Lindley; Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen; Craig Oliver; Mark Pilcher; Simon Price; Jane Reck; Bob Satchwell; Matt Sica; Carol Smith and Valerie Ward.

Much gratitude to those who gave many generous helpings of their insight and knowledge, particularly Armando Iannucci; Tom Morris; Matthew Bannister; Peter Baynham; Trevor Dann; Patrick Marber; Charlie Brooker; Prash Naik; Andrew Newman; Dave Schneider; John Armstrong and Steve Yabsley. Many thanks for key interviews and assistance: Roger Alton; Ben Baird; Nick Barraclough; Steve Breeze; Dawn Burford; Greg Burton; Jane Bussmann; Seamus Cassidy; Greg Day; Sally Debonnaire; Greg Eden; Jane Edwards; Kevin Eldon; Matt Elliott; Rebecca Front; Paul Garner; Andrew Glover; Phil Godfrey; Mark Graham; Andy Gray; Russell Hilliard; Margaret Hyde; Dave Jones; Robert Katz; Hugh Levinson; Graham Linehan; Dick Lunn; Doon Mackichan; Ali MacPhail; Ian Masters; Arthur Mathews; John Mulholland; Rebecca Neale; Richard Norley; Sean O’Shea; Clive Priddle; David Quantick; Roy Roberts; Holly Sait; Sarah Smith; James Serafinowicz; Tristram Shapeero; Rachel Sherman; Jane Solomons; Adrian Sutton; Adam Tandy; Amon Tobin; Steven Wells and Jonathan Whitehead.

Extracts from TV Go Home © Charlie Brooker/Zeppotron, 2000, reprinted by permission. Other extracts and quotations by kind permission of Armando Iannucci and Robert Katz.

WHEN
BRASS EYE
WAS BROADCAST ON CHANNEL 4 IN 1997, Chris Morris came under attack on a daily basis, accused of pulling apart the very fabric of British culture, claims that would be made even more loudly in 2001, when the show’s
Special
was broadcast. One tabloid even printed his contact details and urged the public to phone him to tell him what they thought of his ‘brass eye’. Though he had become used to hearing that his work was unacceptable over the years, there was something personal and sustained about the reaction to
Brass Eye
. But rather than change his number, Morris simply recorded a new answering machine message.

‘Hello, you’ve reached the newsdesk,’ he said. ‘Please leave your message after the tone.’ It seemed as if the newspaper had printed its own number in error. The sputtering fury of callers was abruptly transmuted into the less immediately gratifying emotion of rather petulant complaint.

‘He was entirely nerveless,’ Morris’s friend, broadcaster Nick Barraclough, told one newspaper. Jo Unwin, Morris’s partner, read the piece and later told him, ‘You’ve got that so wrong. He’s afraid of the dark.’

Charlie Brooker has been a writing partner of Morris and says, ‘He seemed to find it like an annoying change in the weather. He didn’t seem like somebody who was stressed or under house arrest.’

The answering machine message was a classic piece of misdirection that echoed what Morris did best in his broadcast work. Programmes such as
Brass Eye
avoided easy targets and popular shots. If you noticed its creator at all, he would be standing to one side, subtly directing the unwary into traps that they had every opportunity to avoid. Celebrities, politicians, authority figures. Nobody was off-limits. No topic was untouchable.

It divided the reception to shows like
Brass Eye
across unusual lines. As important as the humour was the question of whether or not you thought what Chris Morris did was allowable. Was it OK to use subjects such as drugs, sex and the decline of morals in society to make jokes about the way they were portrayed in the media? The answer didn’t come in generational terms. You didn’t have to be older to feel uncomfortable about the way he got stars to endorse entirely fictitious charities and, if you went through the whole series and the 2001
Special
on paedophilia without thinking at least once that something, somewhere was indefinably, slightly, watch-through-your-fingers wrong, you were either doing very well or, more likely, hadn’t taken it all in on the first go and would later pay closer attention and pick up something ghastly and troubling. If still funny.

For something so clear and loud,
Brass Eye
gave away almost nothing about its origins. Chris Morris never told you what to think, and he gave away little of his motivation. You could believe almost anything about the show and its creator – the two seemed interchangeable – and there were no shortage of theories. He was the tiresome prankster out to shock. He was a contemporary satirist who was presenting a critique of modern media. He was misanthropic, a loner who was too clever for his own good. It was as if
Brass Eye
arrived fully formed and perfected its mixture of shiver and laughter with the 2001
Special
.

The most obvious starting point for the style which he made his own is
On the Hour
, the show on which Morris made his first major national appearance some ten years earlier. And yet even this is not clear cut. This part of the story belongs as much to Armando Iannucci. It was he who pulled together a group of ambitious and talented young performers to pioneer the eerily accurate style of news comedy with Morris.

Each member of the group was fiercely talented and ambitious and all went on to phenomenal success in comedy and elsewhere in the 1990s. But there was something compelling about Morris’s own story and the way that he would push at what was acceptable wherever he was which has made him such an enduringly fascinating figure. He developed his own style as much as his fellow
On the Hour
performers, but unlike them he had never worked on the comedy circuit. And so no account of his trajectory in the 1990s would be complete without a diversion to cover his early career in local radio, where he learned to love the medium and to tear it apart with a surety that came from intimacy.

His is a chronology which is a career in reverse, launched with a conventional success in
On the Hour
and becoming ever less predictable and more inventive, working only to his own agenda. It’s not something that someone who wanted to be a star could have done. Morris didn’t join his colleagues as they went to even greater success with the various incarnations of Alan Partridge. Instead he stayed just under the surface of general popular awareness, still broadcasting, but returning to radio and rehearsing the techniques he would bring to
Brass Eye
.

Morris himself has a reputation for being both hard to pin down and extremely approachable, rumours which are true in equal measure. It was hard to see how a book like this could work without his involvement. His circle of friends is very protective, and it seemed impossible to imagine that they would talk without his approval. Exactly one year after first being contacted, he arranges a meeting at his management company.

In person, with his black trousers, a long scarf and coat to keep out a February chill and the hair that away from the smoothed-down anchorman style is a mass of curls, he retains the youthful air of a tall, enthusiastic student. The impression is of someone fascinated by people in general, by what motivates them, what they do and how they do it. We discuss comedy, books and how he feels about this one in particular. He’s not sure that he wants to revisit what were often draining episodes in his past. And, having greatly overrun our allotted time, we move outside, but continue talking halfway down the street, about what he’s doing, where he’s finding his inspiration at the moment. He thinks he’s unlikely to be interviewed. But the channels of communication are open, he promises, making a channel-of-communication kind of gesture as he disappears. He hasn’t responded to any further requests.