Disgusting Bliss (17 page)

The office fax machine buzzed ceaselessly with ideas for Rebecca Neale to research. She arrived in the mornings to find requests sent at an hour so early it strongly suggested Morris simply never slept. Each idea would become an area of specialization until they had wrung out every last detail and then he’d be off again, rushing to get into the next thing. ‘The desire to be a comic is primarily a young man’s thing which tends to be through by the time he’s thirty,’ said Morris, who turned thirty-two that summer. ‘I try to keep ahead of it but it’s a race because you’re trying to keep yourself interested. Your biggest fear is being trapped with something you hate.’
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Rebecca Neale often only realized why she’d been asked to find some of the obscurer items if she later heard them used on the show. The request for taxidermists’ numbers didn’t make sense until she heard Baynham and Morris apparently discovering the cooling corpse of DJ Johnnie Walker in a neighbouring studio. The story was played out in real time over the course of the entire programme between records and included a genuine call to a shocked BBC security guard, squelching noises representing Walker’s body being dragged between studios and a Morris-invented medical procedure involving Baynham scraping a hole into the back of Walker’s neck and blowing into it while Morris moves the corpse’s lips to allow him a ghastly croaked ‘Goodbye’ to his fans. Rebecca Neale’s taxidermists pop up at the end when Morris phones to get them to agree to stuff a real human body as part of an exhibition about radio.

Morris happened to be leaving the Radio 1 building after that show went out just as the real Walker – still very much alive – was mounting his enormous motorbike. He didn’t seem to have taken offence at the lengthy coverage of his demise or the inventive uses for his remains and as he roared off his only comment on the intricate drama came in the form of a yelled, ‘Hey, Chris! You killed me!’

Peter Baynham called on the technique of seamlessly combining reality and comedy years later when he co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the
Borat
movie. The Sacha Baron Cohen comedy came largely from the interaction between the crassness of the fictional Borat and the real world of his journey across America. ‘That was the challenge of
Borat
,’ says Baynham, ‘to do a full-length feature version of that trick.’

For Baynham, the Radio 1 show was never more real than over late summer when the inspiration for one of their extended items came from his own life. He was overloaded with additional work for Lee and Herring’s Radio 1 programmes and his one-man Edinburgh show. Prone to getting panicky and having tantrums under stress, Baynham decided with some reluctance that there was only one thing for it – he would have to drop his commitment to the Chris Morris show.

‘I can’t do it,’ he blurted on the phone. ‘Just give me a break next week, all right? I’m going mad. I’m really stressed out. Do the show with someone else.’ He felt genuinely close to the edge and nervous about how his decision would be received, though Morris heard him out sympathetically. ‘Let me think,’ he mused at length. ‘How can we use this?’

Baynham snapped, ‘We can’t use this! I’m going mad! I can’t, I’m doing my show . . .’ But Morris was convincing. By the end of the conversation, Baynham found it was he who was saying, ‘All right, I’ll tell you how we can use this. I’m going mad. I’m really going mad. I feel like I’m near to having a breakdown. Let’s use that.’

So Baynham linked up from the BBC studios in Edinburgh the following week and Morris ridiculed his workload on air. It was exaggerated for comic effect, but underpinning it was a genuine sense of Baynham’s own terror, which Morris tore into: ‘Peter, you’re a lazy sod . . . It’s pathetic . . .’ he sneered. ‘You’re a self-obsessed little Nazi . . . You little Nazi. It’s about time you sorted your life out.’ Baynham called him an old bastard, before disappearing off mike to sit on the floor repeating, ‘The drawer’s empty’, while Morris phoned a BBC staff member in Edinburgh and ordered them up to the studio where they witnessed Baynham wailing and eventually running away. Discernible tension in the scene was layered with the real confusion of the BBC employee on discovering the gibbering Baynham.

Morris seemed genuinely curious to see how far Baynham would go in their exchanges, how far he could push it, but at the same time he didn’t have an egotistical need to show he was in control, so what seemed like bullying on the show never – quite – crossed that line. Baynham even allowed his father to be brought into one episode. An elaborate fantasy, the background of which defies description, climaxed with Baynham and Morris kidnapping a baby and dressing it up as a fly by wrapping it in gaffer tape, attaching CDs for wings, tea strainers bent back over the forehead for bulbous eyes and six spoons to make little fly legs. The sound of it flying with helium balloons floated across the stereo picture, accompanied by contented baby gurgling noises. With Peter out of the studio, Morris phoned up Baynham Snr to reveal confusing snippets of the lengthy story.

‘Me and Peter, we’ve found him, you see.’

‘Who?’

‘Big spoon baby balloon.’

A few of Peter Baynham’s friends were critical of him getting his father involved, but the phone call had been carefully worked out beforehand. ‘I just loved the idea of him being not freaked out, but just totally bemused,’ says Baynham, adding that he’d got to know Morris well enough by then to stipulate, ‘Don’t say anything that makes my dad think I’ve died.’

Paul Garner returned to work with Morris on the Radio 1 shows, though his partnership was based more around straightforward pranks rather than baroque comic fantasies. ‘I was mainly the man out and about,’ recalls Garner, ‘suffering at the hands of the public.’ But only because he and Morris set out to wind them up beyond endurance.

Since previously appearing with Morris on GLR, Garner’s musical ambitions had taken a knocking. His band had been signed and then imploded, and he was beginning to think that maybe comedy could be his career. He was sent out to ‘bother shops’ – an activity that manifested itself in Morris ordering him to do things specifically designed to send their owners into a state of psychosis.

‘Paul was some of the bits that made me laugh the most,’ says Oliver Jones. ‘Laugh out loud. With Chris I enjoyed it, obviously . . . but actually
spluttering
when you hear something happen . . .’ Garner, a mobile phone clamped to his ear through which Morris barked instructions, would queue up in convenience stores to say ‘thank you’ twelve times at the till or insist that he be given different change, perhaps because the coins were ‘sleepy’ or they had ‘a Harris’ on them. All the time, buzzing on adrenalin, he would be giving Morris a breathless commentary on the deteriorating mood of the staff and an urgent account of how his subsequent escape was going, as if he were on a secret mission behind enemy lines rather than in the local corner store.

The final episode targeted a taxi, and Garner, pretending that he was taking one for the first time and that Morris was his father on the phone talking him through the process, recalls that he not only wore an anorak and clutched a bag of rubbish, but also covered himself with the entire contents of a large bottle of TCP, method pranking which was all the more admirable for being completely wasted on a radio audience. The taxi driver, however, was only too aware of his passenger’s distinctive scent and so was already fairly enraged before Garner even started on a long list of annoying requests that resulted in him being dragged bodily from the cab as back at base Morris dissolved in laughter.

‘The taxi journey as recorded,’ remembers Oliver Jones, ‘went out in the programme after we’d recorded it. So we used it almost immediately. I was almost breathless with that . . .’

‘I’ve never listened back to it,’ says Garner now. ‘It just terrifies me. It’s like Vietnam flashbacks that I have back to those days.’ He and Morris never discussed Garner’s missions beforehand or how they would progress. They frequently sound very much as if Morris is taking advantage of him. ‘Of course he is. He did,’ says Paul, ‘and I let him. And that was why it was funny. It was weird for me because I’ve never been the fall guy in anything, but he is such a domineering figure.’

With Garner returned the public tannoy announcements from GLR as he and Morris invented such passengers as Heidi Drargs-Queek and Miss D. Fäagen-Bazs to be paged at airport information desks. Towards the end of the run at Heathrow Garner called for Makölig Jezvahted and Levdarhöem Dabahzted. Returning for Steelaygot Maowenbach and Tuka Piziniztee, he was met by a grim-faced announcer with her colleagues standing in a line, arms folded, glaring. They had kept the first piece of paper he gave them and compared his handwriting with his second note. Busted. They claimed passengers had been offended and banned Garner from Heathrow. He drove straight to Gatwick to get them to read the last part of the message.

Having planned that the Radio 1 shows would lead to more commissions, Garner was also rather hoping for some kind of assistance from Morris in getting ahead in comedy. Rather than a nepotistic leg up, he received only the suggestion that he get a copy of
Ariel
, the BBC in-house magazine. Yet, says Garner now, ‘It was probably the best thing he could have said to me.’ He got it together himself to write for Radio 1 DJs who’d been impressed by Morris’s show. And Morris did provide practical assistance, editing and advising on Garner’s show reel as he developed his career.

Radio 1’s
The Chris Morris Show
began its six-month run in June 1994. Promotion included an article in the
Radio Times
, who hoped it would be accompanied by a photograph of the star. The photographer was instructed to turn up at a certain platform at a particular time at Waterloo Station, displaying his camera prominently, so that Morris, his usual careless chic outfit topped by sunglasses and a black beret over his curls, was able to locate him. They chatted for a while before Morris abruptly broke off: ‘I’m going to stop you there. This isn’t what you think.’ They were to meet an hour and a half later on Waterloo Bridge. ‘Bring a ladder and your camera.’

It was almost lunchtime as the photographer struggled on to the bridge against the crowd of tourists and office workers. Morris explained that he never wanted to be seen: ‘I’ll go to the other end of the bridge and walk along with everyone else and you take pictures as I come along. But you must promise not to use any where you can recognize me.’ They did about four takes before settling on an image of Waterloo Bridge which the
Radio Times
printed with a circle indicating where, if you peered very closely, you might just be able to make out a beret and a pair of sunglasses.

Morris also did an interview in the
Guardian
ahead of the programme. ‘The whole point is that it’s a music show with attitude.’ He created the playlist ‘according to tempo and feel rather than fashion. It’s everything from utterly abrasive sounds to pop, from the Auteurs and the Pixies to Nik Kershaw, or even “Copacabana”. Anti-snob, basically.’
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Oliver Jones made a few contributions to what was played. ‘A lot of the time, we’d just chat afterwards and talk about records, because we’d go off for a drink after we’d recorded the programme,’ he says. ‘Chris just knows amazing things.’ It wasn’t just that an average programme might include Sly and the Family Stone or Gil Scott-Heron, but it could easily be one of their lesser-known tracks. ‘He adores Sly Stone, not just Sly Stone the musician, but Sly Stone the lifestyle, the philosophy, all that kind of thing.

‘It’s like really good pirate stations – when you listen in to something and you hear an amazing track, and you think, These guys, they’re not interested in what’s going on commercially, they sort through some jumble sale, through hundreds of albums, and picked out some fantastic break . . . And that’s what Chris is like.’

On relatively rare occasions he might even find he’d discovered a song Morris hadn’t already heard of. ‘The one thing I’m very proud of, which I always thought was a great record, was “Fisherman’s Grotto” by Justin Warfield,’ he says. It was a hip-hop track which had been released the previous year. ‘I used to work in an office that belonged to another Radio 1 producer and they’d left behind a rack of records and CD singles and I put this thing on, and it was just extraordinary, such a walloping record. I do remember introducing that to Chris – it just comes on at a hundred miles an hour, wallop, all the things Chris loves . . .’ On air, having been eloquent in sharing his passion for some track one minute, the next Morris played along with his guitar or keyboard on another song, wrecking it comically or augmenting it with his own riffs. ‘Chris would sit in the DJ’s position with his keyboard, which we’d always have to wire up,’ says Oliver, ‘and the studio managers always said, “That’s unorthodox equipment, we’re not meant to use that, how do we do that?” And I’d always say, “Look, it happens every week, please just put it in through, put it on one of Chris’s faders, that’s all I want you to do . . .” And every week they would complain about it.’

There were other features of the show which had become familiar parts of his routine over the years. The ever-rude kiddy’s outing for younger listeners returned, and Bristol colleague Michael Alexander St John did a kind of sequel to his
No Known Cure
‘Ten Ideas to Change the World’ with a take on the typical mid-1990s dance chart rundown. Acts included Discombobul-8 and ‘Who’s Operating Colin?’, Burpmytosis with ‘Brains of Chutney’ and Oestrogen Blab Daddy’s ‘Bring Me a Chicken’.

Morris still refused to read out listener letters, and when he appeared to break the rule it was just to get in what turned out to be wild parodies of Our Tune-style record requests, proto-
Blue Jam
tragic stories of quivering love which always ended with the object of desire being pierced at a climactic moment by a spear of frozen waste dropped from a passing aeroplane. These epistolary mini-dramas were a favourite feature for Armando Iannucci.

Star interviews were a regular item, a testing ground for the
Brass Eye
set-ups. Celebrities would be on their own in a studio and told that they were going to be interviewed down the line. Morris was actually in a neighbouring studio to preserve his anonymity, sometimes playing Wayne Carr and not exactly following the BBC rules which said that interview subjects had to be aware of the true purpose of their recording. Some material was taken out on review by management pre-broadcast when there wasn’t evidence that Morris had told people he was recording, though the BBC always had a fairly strong feeling that very few of his assurances could be relied on. During an interview with Nick Ross, Morris explained that Keith Richards was next door promoting a Stones album and wanted a word. There were shuffling noises on the mike which sounded as if Morris was going out of the room to fetch the star. Ross was treated to Keef’s thoughts on drug use among older people without once giving any indication that he had any idea it wasn’t a genuine Stone he was talking to.