Disgusting Bliss (19 page)

‘Let me put to you, at least in the mind, in this rather grim scenario,’ Morris asks them in Michael Buerk mode, ‘you open the front door, the ground’s been blatantly hidden . . . What could happen to you?’

Understanding exactly where he’s leading, she responds, ‘We should perish, shouldn’t we?’

‘Rather horribly,’ confirms Morris.

‘Yeah.’

Peter Kessler describes the quality that Morris was looking for in members of the public as that of ‘being vague enough in their mind to answer in the right way’, an echo of Robert Katz’s description of their monologue characters of GLR and
Blue Jam
as ‘fuzzy-headed’. Both the interviews and the stories explore in their different ways the arbitrary way reassuring smears of sense and logic are imposed on the terror and chaos of life and how easily that layer can be revealed to be a fiction. Few props were required for the feedback reports. The set-ups were more elaborate in
Brass Eye
, but basically Morris needed little more than the fig leaf of a microphone, a pleasant speaking voice and the natural presence which meant he could hold his subject through a mixture of willpower and sheer height. He exploited the natural willingness that people have to help and to feel useful, despite not knowing anything of what it is they’re talking about. His credibility was rarely questioned, no matter how far he pushed it, playing with accents and delivery, even emphasizing words with a little bleat – nothing broke the spell. The power of the pieces was all verbal, and no concessions were made to the visual format when they appeared on
The Day Today
as Speak Your Brains. Morris was always almost out of sight, or half visible from behind, always suited, occasional bow tie glimpsed. He seemed very reassuring.

Celebrities were no more resistant to the lure of his convincing storytelling. Gary Numan appeared on one of the Radio 1 shows to condemn fox-hunting, and Morris mentioned that his call would help provide protective clothing for foxes. Immediately, Numan switched from taciturn rock star to a delighted innocent, though he says he’s never heard of such fox-wear. Morris has a ready explanation – safety material as worn by chainsaw operators. But how do you get foxes to wear it? Morris likens the process to trout tickling – hunt saboteurs move in a circular fashion around the fox, so it can’t tell where they’re coming from. Numan audibly brightens at this notion, and there is something endearingly playful in the way he seems to have ended up in a better place at the end of his call, surrounded by bright-eyed fox cubs in sunlit meadows, gambolling safely in their extra-small-size Kevlar jackets.

Morris called on a seemingly limitless supply of such vivid imagery to slather his work in thick pseudo-authenticity. His scripted scenes were equally rich. In 1997’s
Brass Eye
there is the staged ‘modern drugs party’ which he wanders through, spilling out in a minute enough substance-abuse gags to keep most other shows going for a series. As he delivers his apocalyptic summary of drug-fuelled mid-1990s decadence you might even miss the final throwaway bilingual pun, ‘This decade is not so much the neinties as the Ja danketies’, if you were concentrating on the special effect of Morris being rolled up into a syringe and injected through the top of the screen into the next scene.

Even those ideas that came from contributors and colleagues rather than from Morris himself were, as writer Jane Bussmann points out of
Brass Eye
, all filtered through him so that however disparate the suggestions, they had a focus, what she calls a ‘clarity of voice, it has a loud voice. That’s the reason it stays good.’ He was open to inspiration from anywhere, though it was also true that there were certain areas that he would frequently revisit. When Peter Baynham had had to prove himself in his first
The Day Today
meeting, he had no way of knowing he’d done himself a great favour with his outbreak of horses on the London Tube. Zoology graduate Morris had long been obsessed with the comic potential of animals, particularly ‘the horse’ as slang for heroin. Bovine comedy was another fascination – spherical cows regularly rolled over his horizon, and in his brief guest appearance on
I’m Alan Partridge
Morris’s character is farmer Peter Baxendale-Thomas, furious at the inane slurs Partridge has made on the conditions in which he keeps his cattle. ‘This is exactly the sort of rubbish you came up with the other day,’ he says, ‘when you talked about putting a spine in a bap.’

In
Blue Jam
, freed from the frameworks of interviews and parodies, Morris whispered his nightmare confirmation of the world being much stranger than it appears to be directly into the listener’s ear, giving his favourite preoccupations their fullest expression. Lions were set free in the suburbs by unconcerned residents. Neighbours fell out over the nuisance of a pet giant living in the garden. The quality of being ‘vague enough in the mind’ that Morris had used in Feedback Reports was taken to its furthest reaches: the unlikely notions that he once got real people to comment on could be performed by the characters in his sketches. The lines dividing what for them was real, what was imagined and what was a strong belief became ever more blurred until they disappeared entirely into the exploration of the powerful and persuasive imagery conjured by depression, illness and mortality. And for the GPs’ son the essential unreliability of figures of authority was characterized by regular consultations with a doctor whose ‘What seems to be the problem?’ presaged a diagnosis as sympathetic as it was complete nonsense.

The subtle skill that Morris showed in storytelling went entirely unappreciated by the celebrities he caught out. But their fury and sense of humiliation in some ways provided their own tribute to the strength of his stories. He didn’t hide behind a comic personality they could say they had felt they had to indulge. It was essentially his words and his lightning responses, leaving them raw and exposed from the mental equivalent of an abrasive rub-down with a wire brush. Very few celebrities would look back fondly on their experience. It was a contrast to the traditions of satire. Public figures lampooned on
Spitting Image
were said eventually to have asked if they could have their puppets to keep at home. Back in the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan regarded his tormentors with a tolerance that bordered on affection. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy asked him whether he thought the US should invade and Macmillan stalled for time. He later confided to his diary that but for the deadly seriousness of the situation the dialogue sounded ‘just like a revue called
Beyond the Fringe
which takes off the leading politicians’.
⁷⁹
There was no such cosiness with Morris. Even given the years that have passed since
Brass Eye
, no celebrity who had been successfully taken in would be interviewed for this book.

On occasion, Chris Morris’s supporters would invoke the name of Jonathan Swift in the press in defence of what he did, but if this was intended to reassure those who were already feeling foolish, it had the opposite effect. It invited the response that Swift’s subjects were more worthy, more appropriate, and that his style was better formed – altogether more acceptable. It seemed a rather pointless argument on both sides which didn’t go much further than to note that other people had done satire, too – Morris’s work by its nature would never be justified in terms of earlier writers. It had to stand on its own merits in the context of its own times. A more useful comparison to be made between the two as writers was in their lithe use of language and their ability to make scenes of fantasy live in the head as if they were real. And those were qualities that were more impressive and, in the end, made for more durable work than even the most fearless satire.

IN THE 1990S CHANNEL 4 BECAME ACCUSTOMED TO BEING accused by middle England of defending the indefensible. Minorities, sexuality and explicit foreign films (flagged up on screen with a red triangle) were served up with a teasingly obnoxious side order of
The Word
to earn boss Michael Grade the title of Britain’s ‘pornographer-in-chief’ in the
Daily Mail
. When
Brass Eye
began in 1997, the press needed little prompting to step up and take their partners for the Channel 4 moral-outrage two-step. Yet
Brass Eye
was different – though even its most outspoken critics didn’t seem to realize why. They hadn’t noticed that they didn’t need to construct an argument for the prosecution. The show simply broke the broadcasting code. Programme-makers were not permitted to mislead interviewees for entertainment. Channel 4 knew it when they commissioned it. Talkback knew it when they made it. And Chris Morris knew it when he conceived it.
Brass Eye
was his first solo TV show – and it really shouldn’t have been allowed.

Only news and current affairs could deceive interviewees and even then only if their makers could show it was part of an investigation in the public interest. The options in entertainment were much more limited. It was OK to set people up as long as your presenter confessed at the conclusion – what was called doing a reveal. Even then, you had to get people to sign a release form for the footage. Morris’s typically ingenious way around this was to prove that there was a public interest in exposing the way in which celebrities attached the respect and reputation of their names to anything that would get them on the television. In other words, there was no reason why a comedy couldn’t adopt the justification used by undercover journalism. Every aspect of the
Brass Eye
campaigns would be as ridiculous as possible and vulnerable to exposure by the most rudimentary checking. If a celebrity still willingly appeared on the show, they’d only have themselves to blame. That would – he hoped – provide the defence, albeit retrospectively. It was a high-risk strategy.

‘That was the rule: the letters we sent out, the letterheads, everything was stupid,’ said Morris.
⁸⁰
The tools of the deception were all shown on screen – the badly designed press releases of the bogus organizations, their T-shirts and coffee mugs with their inept logos. Even the names of
Brass Eye
’s campaigns were in themselves clues – Free the United Kingdom from Drugs and British Opposition to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs (FUKD and BOMBD). Its letterhead featured a huge syringe skewering three unhappy cartoon figures, the last of which was a glum little skeleton.

The letters were packed with spurious jargon – more clues – such as ‘zoochosis’ as an explanation for the plight of Karla the elephant, which had wedged her trunk up her own bottom. Morris was, he told colleagues, being generous to his interviewees by giving them the chance to read about what they were getting themselves into. They had more time to reverse out than was allowed by most prank shows. ‘Chris asked me how many people I thought genuinely gave consent,’ says controller of Channel 4 legal compliance Prash Naik of other shows. ‘They approach subjects on camera as soon as they’ve revealed. Some of those people feel under pressure to say “yes”, to appear to have a sense of humour.’

And the logical conclusion – at least for Morris – was that his setups were more honest in that he didn’t even ask permission. It would be argued instead that appearing on camera implied consent for broadcast. Only those interviews conducted in studio discussions had release forms, and even those said only that they would be used in an unspecified late-night Channel 4 show.

The case for justifying the show, if defence itself was impossible, was built slowly over the months of the show’s production. The question was: would it be convincing enough? They would know only when the series was broadcast.

It was a long time coming. The pilot was begun in early 1995, just after the conclusion of Morris’s Radio 1 shows, and absolute secrecy about the true nature of the show would have to be preserved for almost two years. Most importantly, the crew had to avoid interviewees making a connection between the various campaigning organizations and Talkback. For the most part, they were successful, after an initial hiccup involving the Kray twins. The pilot was then in the early stages of production for the BBC under the name
Torque TV
. Much of the material in the show formed the later Animals episode. As Morris had previously explored in his Radio 1 shows, it was a subject that could be relied on to make anyone go gooey and drop their guard – even Reggie Kray. From the phone on his landing in Maidstone Prison, he recorded his support for WOFDCAP (World Organization for Decreasing Captive Animal Problems), incorporating AAAAAAAZ (Against Animal Anger and Autocausal Abuse Atrocities in Zoos). Morris told him he wasn’t sounding the ‘aaa’s long enough. He got him to repeat it again and again, Kray preparing with wheezy deep breaths.

Late the following afternoon, researcher Andrew Newman opened the door at Talkback’s office in their Percy Street house to a large gentleman from the Krays’ organization. The man was holding the letter Reggie had received from WOFDCAP and was very angry. ‘I seem to remember him having a baseball bat,’ says Newman, ‘but that might be just embellishing the story.’ He pretended he’d not heard of the campaign or of Andrew Dean, the pseudonym under which he worked. Talkback’s receptionist had gone home and there was nobody to pick up calls. ‘If I ring this fucking number,’ his visitor roared, the letter in one hand and Newman in the other, ‘will your fucking phone ring? Because if it does, I’m going to break your fucking head.’ Newman assured him it wouldn’t as well as he could while being pinned against the wall, waiting uncomfortably for the switchboard to light up his desperate lie. Another member of the production crew came downstairs and disappeared into the back office, where Morris and a few others stayed rather than riding out to rescue Newman. Whether distracted by the interruption or having concluded, correctly, that frighteners had adequately been applied, the visitor left, warning, ‘And remember there are three Kray brothers – and only one of them’s dead. Do you know what I’m saying?’