Disgusting Bliss (9 page)

The process of development brought Morris into ever more frequent clashes with management. He had quickly established something of a familiar relationship with them on joining the station which many other staff never attained, but there was always something of an edge to it. ‘Chris is a guy who wants to challenge policies, practices and procedures all the time. And obviously he did so,’ says Roy Roberts. ‘He tended not to ask if he could do things; he’d try and do things to see what he could get away with.’ Up to a point, the battles were something that Roberts himself accepted as a part of working with Morris, whose show was gaining the cult audience the station had hoped for. Morris’s prank phone calls, a popular feature on the programme, regularly resulted in complaints. A football pools company went into panic when Morris asked if he could send in his entry after the game had been played. He was passed around the company, who seemed to think they were victims of a serious plot to defraud them, and they threatened Roberts with the police. The problem for the station was that BBC editorial guidelines insisted that people should be told they were to be on air. ‘I hope he told them eventually that he’d made the recording for broadcast,’ says Roberts, adding less optimistically, ‘I’m not sure that he always did.’

It was Morris’s irreverent attitude to the news which provided the most frequent battles with senior station staff, with a subversion that took many different forms. He couldn’t help it, he later said, it just ‘leaked through’.
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Newsreaders doing a late slot would often get a buzz from Morris over the intercom. ‘Your task tonight is to use “colander” in the bulletin,’ he’d challenge. When he had to read the news himself in the course of his own programmes, particularly the late-night edition, he would sometimes add his own undermining remarks on the stories of the day. He even did the same to the national news; because that came down a feed one-way from the BBC in London, the newsreader wouldn’t have heard such additions as apple munching or newspaper rustling.

‘When I was reading the news,’ remembers John Armstrong, ‘he mainly indulged in comments or noises. Or sometimes just a word – “duffer”, “tosspot”. Roberts and [programme organizer Malcolm] Brammer used to hate it – undermining authority et cetera, et cetera.’ It was almost midnight one Friday, remembers Matt Sica, when they decided to see if they could provoke some reaction from the audience. ‘Chris was fed up because nobody was listening, we hadn’t had a phone call for half an hour and so he decided to really push the boat out. His voice got quieter and quieter, there was a long pause, and there was this quiet, muttered whisper of “Bollocks”. And we just waited. And nothing happened!’

But while his despairing bosses might have disagreed, he wasn’t reckless in his mischief. He punctiliously checked the news bulletins to ensure that he wouldn’t be playing for laughs over some genuine major tragedy – a small but telling point that was frequently missed out in the retelling of exploits which were already beginning to form part of a growing Chris Morris legend.

It was clear that his wayward inventiveness could not be constrained for long by Radio Bristol. By early 1990 Morris had been doing a weekly commute to London for nearly eighteen months, working on his Sunday show on GLR. It was only ninety minutes up the M4, but the two stations were planets apart in terms of their output. In the capital, Morris found himself working alongside creative presenters with an ambitious view of what radio could be that Bristol never even set out to match. He was still being featured on
Pick of the Week
and was branching out into print, including the successful transferral of some of his best features, such as DJ Wayne Carr, into amusing interviews with the
NME
in 1990. But though it never seemed likely that Morris would always be content in working only with what Bristol had to offer, when the end came in the early part of that year, it was sudden and unpleasant.

In later press profiles of Morris it would routinely be said that he was sacked after commentating on the news. Like the story about him filling a studio with helium, the version of events went largely unchecked and would become a cornerstone of his reputation for being a dangerous and unstable character, a vile and repeated slur on his professionalism for which the source seemed to be largely Chris Morris. It was what he told friends such as Nick Barraclough who, on hearing what he had been up to, thought it ‘a fabulous thing to do, absolutely wonderful’, but at the same time told him, ‘I’m not surprised you’ve been sacked!’ It was a beguiling image – Morris yanked mid-broadcast from the studio by the burly bodyguards of news and slung out of the BBC.

But Morris was still a freelancer whose contract had to be renewed and, as managing editor Roy Roberts discreetly comments, because of the amount of work he was getting in London he didn’t want to stay on. When pushed on the detail, Roberts concedes, ‘I guess the accurate thing was that over a period his relationships with those who supervised his work at Radio Bristol got increasingly strained.’ It had essentially become impossible for Morris to work at the station any longer. In particular, he’d completely fallen out with programme organizer Malcolm Brammer, who had succeeded David Solomons. It might not have been the summary dismissal of legend, but it was genuinely sour. His final shows were broadcast in early 1990 and by March he had gone. Colleagues remember that there was very little ceremony as Morris gathered the piles of his tapes which he always kept by his desk and swiftly disappeared. The BBC retained nothing of his work.

By the time Morris left for London, he had also split from Jane Solomons, though their break-up was far more amicable. She doesn’t cite a particular moment when it ended, just the sensation that they were going different ways. ‘We just drifted apart a bit, I suppose,’ she says. They had been together four or five years, she remembers, Morris at first commuting from Bristol back to Cambridge at weekends to see her. She remained in Bristol, where she had a successful career at HTV, becoming a presenter for the TV station.

Long after his departure, the presence of Chris Morris hung around the studios of Whiteladies Road as a palpable influence – or like a bad smell, depending on your view of him. Alison MacPhail, who would later be a key member of Morris’s production crew on
The Day Today
and
Brass Eye
, started at Radio Bristol some months after he left. She remembers how his greatest moments were still very present in the collective memory. The prank phone calls, the news tweaking, the management baiting. Mostly the tone was admiring – nothing quite like him had ever passed through the station doors – but a fair disapproving few conceded the management point of view and thought he had got above himself.

Newspapers later still came sniffing around for gossip about him in the wake of
Brass Eye
, and his friends took the opportunity to play along by loyally making up things which were frequently printed wholesale in the newspapers. Steve Yabsley claimed that Morris drank in the studio and managed to get the
Independent
to believe that he had an addiction to garlic and once came to work having cooked a chicken with twenty cloves. Even manager Roy Roberts could never quite bring himself to refute the story of Morris filling a studio with helium at Bristol. In reality, just as staff at Radio Cambridgeshire still believe the incident took place, only somewhere else, Roberts knows that Morris didn’t do it on his watch. But it was almost as if by perpetuating the myths, those around Morris were sharing in his impish spirit. And even those whose job it was to keep him in check could never resist finding out how that felt.

IN OCTOBER 1988 A NEW AND DISTINCTIVE VOICE WAS HEARD in London. When GLR started broadcasting, it made the assumption that its listeners were intelligent but also liked rock and good pop music – and that all three things weren’t mutually exclusive. Chris Morris was part of the launch, and GLR would go on to play a prominent part in his career for the next five years. The capital’s BBC predecessor, Radio London, had failed even after a series of relaunches, and the new station was given the freedom to do what it wanted. It took a risk on unknown presenters and those who had been in the wilderness for various reasons to assemble a line-up who were positively encouraged to be daring.

Morris did a Sunday show alongside his Radio Bristol programmes until 1990 and after that would leave GLR for extended periods to work on the first and then second series of
On the Hour
. But he kept returning to the station until the middle of 1993, by which time filming had begun on
The Day Today
.

The station boss was Matthew Bannister, who had worked in the BBC and on Capital Radio in both news and entertainment. His programme organizer was Trevor Dann, a former colleague. They didn’t hesitate in getting rid of existing staff where they felt they wouldn’t fit in with the new ethos. There was arrogance in their idiosyncratic vision of the new station and by the time they had the place looking the way they wanted it they had lost some of their audience – but those who remained loved it. It became a sort of club for those who appreciated its mix of current affairs and music.

‘It wasn’t aimed at a literate minority,’ says Trevor Dann, ‘but the truth is that Matthew and I both felt, possibly instinctively, that we needed to raise the intellectual level of traditional local radio to win an audience at all in London.’

DJs such as Emma Freud, Dave Pearce, Annie Nightingale, Johnnie Walker and Tommy Vance were soon joined by Danny Baker, an established telly name taking his first steps in radio. He was produced by a young Chris Evans, hot off the train from radio in Manchester. In defiance of radio etiquette, Danny Baker broadcast standing up. On his first day he excitedly banged the table in the studio, shouting, ‘This is raw meat radio!’ and ‘There’s a new sheriff in town!’ Evans told him to stop and Baker retorted that he would walk out rather than be told what to do. Evans had to explain that it was simply that the mikes were rattling on the table and nobody could hear a word he was saying.

Quickly a fan of Baker, Morris commented on air, ‘It’s the sort of programme about which one day people will be saying, “Did you ever hear that?” They will be exchanging treasured tapes for return on pain of death if they’re broken.’ They would also be saying very similar things about his own show.

Morris had come to GLR through Trevor Dann, with whom he kept in contact after their days together at Radio Cambridgeshire. He’d sent the station a tape he made for the twentieth anniversary of BBC local radio in November 1987. ‘Neighbour shall be unspeakable unto neighbour,’ he wrote on the case. The tape included a spoof of local news which anticipated
On the Hour
by some four years and was very recognizable for Matthew Bannister. He had created and co-presented Capital Radio’s news programme
The Way It Is
, itself providing inspiration for Armando Iannucci in devising his news parody. ‘We wanted people who shared our view that quite a lot of the things that happen on local radio are a bit crap,’ says Matthew Bannister. ‘[Morris] seemed like a natural fit.’

Morris was hired on a freelance basis, given total freedom on the show, though as Trevor Dann observes, ‘even if I’d asked him to, he wouldn’t have followed the rules’. After Dann himself took over the station, Morris called him at home just as he should have been starting his live Easter Monday show in 1991. He’d got a colleague to cover for his first few minutes on air by announcing that he had been held up in traffic and pretended he was calling from Scotland to tell Dan to find an immediate replacement. Something in Dann, a form of inbuilt Morris-warning system, let him know that all wasn’t right and he guessed at the last minute – correctly – that he was supposed to oblige with an hysterical outburst.

Morris slid into his show late, breezily explaining to the audience, ‘I’m not here,’ before introducing a tape of the freshly recorded conversation which concluded with him taunting the bemused Dann: ‘You didn’t seriously think I’d come in, did you?’ There was a short, anguished silence before Dann wordlessly hung up and, back on the show, Morris cued in Bowie’s ‘Queen Bitch’, contentedly repeating to his listeners, ‘I’m not here . . .’
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‘He was always doing this kind of stuff, always upsetting people,’ says Dann. ‘Even if you fly with him, he’s still going to kick you. He will always push it to the point where it is dangerous.’ In April 1993, just a month before Morris’s final show on GLR, an IRA bomb went off in Bishopsgate, and on that day’s show Morris made a direct reference to it when a caller joked that she was so disappointed to get a competition question wrong she was going to kill herself. ‘All right,’ says Morris, ‘well, go to Bishopsgate.’
²⁶

‘The weekend scheduling is inevitably very different on local radio stations, because there’s nobody there,’ says Trevor Dann. ‘So the reality is that presenters turn up and press the button and pretty much do what the fuck they like.’ Morris broadcast his show without assistance. ‘When I brought him in to do Friday afternoons, I think we did give him a producer, but I don’t know who he was. It wouldn’t have been anyone he ever spoke to. He’d have been very dismissive.’

Morris’s GLR programmes shared much with
No Known Cure
– right from the multilayered, breakneck jingles, cut up and manipulated so even his name was obscured. But it was so much more suited to being broadcast in London. The capital inevitably attracted the knowing, the chaotic and the surprising, and in its sprawl there was always room for something to come shrieking out of some side alleyway to give you a shock. That was the nature of the city and what GLR reflected so well. Morris’s show was constantly shifting, impossible to pin down. Bristol listeners would have recognized features such as ‘Ten ideas to change the world’ with Michael Alexander St John, the interjections of Sergeant Murphy and Feedback Reports.