Disgusting Bliss (31 page)

The aim was to get a version of the US law which allowed communities to be told when a paedophile moved into the area. Between July and September, the paper printed endless stories about the most abusive UK paedophiles, promising to name all 110,000 on the sex offenders’ register – ‘virtually one for every square mile of the country’.
¹²⁴
Ignoring those who said that attacks by strangers were far outnumbered by abuse within the home, every week they published photos of fugitive paedophiles, despite being refused permission to do so by the police. The paper was filled with headlines such as ‘What to do if there is a pervert on your doorstep’ and ‘Ten facts to shock every parent’.
¹²⁵

Though the paper denied it was encouraging vigilantism, within a day of the first report, mobs hunted the ‘named and shamed’ paedophiles, and many offenders fled their homes in panic. Celebrities such as Esther Rantzen and GMTV’s Eamonn Holmes backed the campaign: ‘If you had a person living next door who had a contagious disease, you’d be told,’ Holmes said. ‘Why should this be different?’
¹²⁶
In Manchester an offender killed himself when his home was surrounded. Another had his flat attacked in Portsmouth on the Paulsgrove estate, which had the most energetic rabble and a long, if largely speculative, list of paedophiles. Cars were torched, innocent families were targeted. ‘They should be burned alive,’ offered one Paulsgrove woman as she protested about a local man, while nearby a young girl chanted, ‘Burn him, stab him, kill him.’
¹²⁷

A march held in gentrified Balham in London near where Chris Morris lived was inevitably called ‘posh Paulsgrove’ in the press, but the unmediated emotion on display was pretty much the same. Morris had gone along to find out what protesters really thought of paedophilia beyond the headlines and was told by one parent that they would rather their child were murdered. It was a comment that played a decisive part in convincing him that there was something worth looking into, along with the personal contact he’d had himself with officers investigating child abuse allegations at his old school, Stonyhurst. He’d felt that the investigation – which resulted in no convictions – was also driven by panic. Morris returned to Balham in filming the
Special
, dressed in a top hat and riding gear and inhaling helium gas, obtained for the production at great trouble at the last moment. He went door to door in a sequence that didn’t make the final programme, warning people of a paedophile moving in nearby who wore strange clothes and spoke in a squeaky voice.

Morris later said: ‘The very specific nature of
Brass Eye
is in identifying a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction to an issue. If you tackle drugs or paedophilia, then you’re dealing with something where people’s brains are nowhere near the point of debate.’
¹²⁸
Debate was actively discouraged during the
News of the World
campaign, when those judges, MPs and newspapers who suggested that perhaps there might not be a paedophile under every cot in the country were named in the paper and ridiculed by its editor Rebekah Wade as ‘feeble men’.
¹²⁹
It seemed as if just the act of walking past children’s playgrounds might result in being the subject of a hunt by a baying crowd of demented parents. A paediatrician had to leave her town after vigilantes got confused about her job title and scrawled ‘paedo’ over her front door.

The
News of the World
never formally agreed to drop its campaign, despite protests from groups representing both offenders and children. In practice, as the lynch mobs spread, the naming and shaming aspect was quietly dropped – at least until the following year, when it would be revived specially for the cast and crew of the
Special
– and the headlines died out, leaving a sense that the traditional image of the English as a reserved people was not necessarily to be relied on.

By the beginning of the following year, pre-production had begun on the
Special
, known within Talkback and Channel 4 only as
Trombone
. The reputation of the original series guaranteed goodwill, but also brought its own risks. Chris Morris had become a legendary figure in the industry, and there was a generation who had grown up with his shows and would have wanted to work with him whatever he was doing. Ali MacPhail joked that he was surrounded by fans rather than colleagues. He thought she had a point. ‘Mm. Maybe you’re right,’ he told her. ‘I can walk to the water cooler and people fall about laughing these days.’ To ensure that the show wasn’t thrown together on autopilot, Morris canvassed impartial advice from friends such as Armando Iannucci, who introduced his longtime producer and friend Sarah Smith. Experienced and with a cool head, she could be relied on to point out the gratuitous. She became the
Special
’s script consultant. ‘He wanted to make the right points and only the right points,’ she says, ‘and he wanted to be careful about why he was doing it, and I think he just wanted to be challenged along the way whether or not the stuff was in there because it appeals to someone’s evil comic instinct as opposed to guessing at something specific. It was really important in that show that it did have a fundamental satirical intent.’ And quite apart from anything else, it was enjoyable for her to engage in Morris’s extended debates about comedy without the stressful responsibility of having to run the show herself. ‘I just went in and sat with him every now and then and argued.’

It was an enviable freedom from the point of view of those who were returning to full-time front-line duties: ‘By the end of
Jam
I was absolutely exhausted,’ says line producer Philippa Catt, ‘and I’d lost loads of weight. Going back to
Brass Eye
, I was quite excited at the prospect of working with Chris again, but the whole politics of all the money shit and having to fight about [it] all the time – everything is so intense.’ Faced with the prospect of having to mediate between Morris and Peter Fincham at Talkback for months, she decided to walk away and had almost made it to liberty before Chris and Sally Debonnaire convinced her over the course of a weekend to return.

Many other familiar faces returned to the show, including Jump Design, whose minimalist opening sequence reflected a more self-conscious mode of current affairs presentation. They were partnered once again on the musical side by Jonathan Whitehead.

Among the new contributors was Charlie Brooker, who was probably the most notable addition to Morris’s circle, despite not getting a particularly large amount of material in the
Special
itself. But his involvement marked the start of a productive new writing partnership which would culminate in 2005’s
Nathan Barley
. Like Morris, Brooker was wildly creative and a naturally comic writer. Production crew who have worked with both men say that Brooker demonstrates the same inspiring leadership quality, and he would get his own TV team behind him for his later
Screenwipe
show, pulling together to create last-minute bits of extra invention. His early career was also spent in the media rather than in performing comedy. As a teenager, Brooker had contributed cartoons to
Viz
-alike comic
Oink!
He later worked as a games journalist for
PC Zone
magazine, where he was given a regular slot for his artwork which prompted the entire publication to be withdrawn the month he created a fake advert for a zoo that encouraged animal abuse. He had doctored Argos catalogue images of kids with animal toys to look like the results of the wanton slaughter players could inflict on wildlife as Lara Croft in
Tomb Raider
. ‘There wasn’t any satirical point to be made there,’ he says. ‘I just liked the idea that it was wilfully unpleasant. That becomes amusing in itself, when it’s that unnecessary.’ He also investigated the comic potential of prank calls, a series of which he made as irritating customers calling computer helplines which were featured on a
PC Zone
cover disk. Off the back of that he was asked to co-present a technology show on TV.

But it was his spoof TV listings webpage that gave him cult status and brought him to Morris’s attention.
TV Go Home
’s layout imitated the reassuring look of the
Radio Times
, but read as if years of churning out bland, neutral programme descriptions had led the writer to be consumed by an increasingly rabid hatred of all television and of the viewing hordes.

‘It was a weirdly cathartic thing to be doing,’ says Brooker. ‘It would be about three in the morning every other Thursday in quite a grumpy mood because I was usually knackered and I’d have to be doing something the next day. I do remember specifically there was a Valentine’s edition I wrote the day after an appalling breakup, and it was so bitter that I ended up finding it amusing while I was doing it.’

He stored most of his bile for Nathan Barley, the twenty-something Trustafarian star he created for regular
TV Go Home
documentary
Cunt
: ‘Wearing trousers apparently cut from charcoal-grey crêpe paper, Nathan Barley crosses a busy street clutching a mango smoothie and a punnet of takeaway sushi,’ ran a typical entry, ‘simultaneously listening to a speed garage compilation on his Minidisc walkman, contemplating the purchase of a Nokia WAP phone and mentally picturing himself sliding all the way up to the nutbag in a passing teenage girl in a tissue-thin summer dress.’
¹³⁰
The co-host of Brooker’s TV show knew Morris, showed him
TV Go Home
and introduced the two during the run-up to production of the
Brass Eye Special
.

Brooker was invited to writing meetings, and in return Morris and Peter Baynham both contributed to
TV Go Home
. Morris’s pieces included a description of a Nathan Barley attempt at short film-making: ‘
11.39 (deckbang)
. A crack-crazed Yardie sprays an Uzi round the top deck of a number 23 bus; as the mortally-wounded passengers writhe in the blood, smoke, dribble and spilt bags, their moments of eye contact provide cues for fantasy porn vignettes in which they have sex with the person whose dying face they’ve just glimpsed. Music by Goldfrapp.’
¹³¹

Nathan had been born of an undefined sense of bitterness that Brooker had felt years before towards the confident, young media types hanging out near the flat he could ill afford just off Chepstow Road in gentrified Westbourne Park. It was the kind of ‘weird modern fuck who can kind of effortlessly get away with anything’, says Brooker, ‘and just seems to succeed and is operating behind about ten layers of irony which are constantly flipping around so you can’t pin them down’. Readers would approvingly email
TV Go Home
about the sharp satire of idiotic new trends and fads which Brooker had been under the impression were entirely his own invention. The extraordinary savagery of his writing prompted further emails expressing fears for Brooker’s mental well-being. ‘I seem to remember Chris suggested that I should toy with the idea of making it more demented until it really looked like I was going a bit
Network
,’ he says.

It was also Morris who suggested that Nathan could be developed into something more than a simple receptacle of hatred. The TV series would take five years to get to the screen, Brooker and Morris discussing how the show might work as far back as sessions for the
Brass Eye Special
, when they were joined by Peter Baynham. For a while they experimented with having a character playing the part of the rage-filled observer in
TV Go Home
, with documentary-maker Claire Ashcroft one candidate. Nathan himself was considered for the role of violent monster, but they found more humour in him being at heart a rather desperate figure. They talked about the show for so long that Brooker, unused to Morris’s deep and long approaches to development, wondered at times if it would ever happen. In the meantime Brooker drew on his computer journalism experience for the
Special
, discussing such accoutrements of the modern paedophile as online games and working on rapper JLb-8, the Eminem figure who writes his tales of abuse into ‘nu-ass’ music and dates girls ‘as young as seven’.

The cast of the
Special
included Doon Mackichan. Since the original series, she had been in Talkback’s
Smack the Pony
, the show winning an international Emmy in 1999. She came to be Morris’s co-host on the
Special
and, sharing with him a deep hatred of
Crimewatch
, was particularly enthused to discover they were to take off its presenting style. Her Swanchita Haze combined the disturbingly still quality of
The Day Today
’s Collaterlie Sisters with an absurdly sexualized Fiona Bruce off
Crimewatch
and dripped suggestively over every line – ‘We believe his story is actually too upsetting to transmit. We only do so tonight with that proviso.’

Doon Mackichan remembers
Smack the Pony
and
Big Train
comparing notes to avoid doing the same gags, and they joined forces again as
Big Train
’s Amelia Bullmore, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap arrived on the
Special
via
Jam
. Their former co-star Simon Pegg, who had gone on to find fame with his sitcom
Spaced
, made a show-stealing appearance as Gerard Chote, studio-storming spokesman for militant paedophile organization Milit-Pede.

Pegg’s scene attracted some of the greatest criticism of the show for its apparent involvement of a child playing Chris Morris’s son. The boy is shown to Gerard, who denies wanting to have sex with him – but not for any moral reason. ‘I just don’t. I don’t find him attractive,’ he explains apologetically. Morris’s face betrays his character’s agonized confusion on hearing this news about his son – relief battling wounded pride. But the boy, like all of the young actors, was never really exposed to any adult conversations – he was filmed only in long shot and otherwise painted in during postproduction. All parents were fully consulted and aware of what was happening in the show, just as had been the case in
Jam
.