He's been called 'TV's sick joker'. But if you want to tell the truth, sometimes fibbing is the only option
By Tim Adams
Sunday April 4, 1999
Chris Morris is, among other things, the most articulate of television critics. When I meet him, in a bar across the road from his office in Soho,
he is immediately in the middle of a rant about the previous evening's Newsnight, which had featured footage of the opening salvo against Serbia.
Morris replays a voice-over in his word-perfect Paxman: 'Aaaah. Thass a bomb. Bang,' he slurs wearily. 'Dunno what that was - don't suppose John
Simpson knows either... ' He raises a lethargic eyebrow at an imaginary talking head on a screen: 'He says bombing is the only option. Yeltsin says
no way.' And then with curled lip and disdainful vowels, he delivers the trademark insolent payoff: 'Who's right?'
Morris, who first made his name on TV with his exquisite parody of the bombast of news presentation on The Day Today, has a professional interest
in the performance of his alter ego: 'I really feel it's gone beyond mockery,' he says, a little sadly. 'You've got Jeremy, because of his
loyalty, cast under such a spell of melancholia that he can hardly raise a question and Simpson wittering away on the phone like some old turkey... The
whole show, rather than telling you much about Kosovo, becomes a monologue about a loss of nerve at Newsnight. There is,' he says, more generally, 'a
kind of seriousness crisis. People [in journalism] have been mocked out of believing that there is a constituency who want to be informed as well as
entertained.'
Some might see this as a surprising line for Chris Morris to argue. After all, this is the man who was once suspended from the BBC for announcing the
death of Michael Heseltine on national radio (and getting MPs to offer on-the-spot obituaries); a man who is known to readers of the Daily Express
as 'a sick joker' who has, with his 'spoofs on child abuse and Aids plumbed new depths on television'. In fact, his attitudes are entirely consistent.
Like all great satirists - though he would never say as much - Chris Morris is obsessed with truth-telling.
Perhaps this is a result of his upbringing. The son of two Cambridgeshire doctors, he attended a strict ('but not run-naked-in-the-hills strict')
Jesuit boarding school, and it is tempting - in a 'show me the child at seven' way - to see in his manner a legacy of this, a formal, inquisitorial
quality. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that his greatest service to fidelity was the laser-guided assault on TV pundits that was Brass Eye (and
if in the process he did not destroy the practice of celebrities offering opinions on subjects of which they know nothing and care less, he at least,
as he says, 'spanked it until it bled').
On Brass Eye, Morris discussed at length with Rhodes Boyson the question of whether the crime-prevention methods of an
American called Bruce Wayne, in a place called Gotham City, would translate to Britain's inner cities; he looked on, straight-faced from behind a Groucho Marx moustache, as Carla
Lane denounced the horrors of men fighting weasels in the East End of London; he discussed with Eve Pollard the medical ethics of keeping a giant,
genetically modified human testicle alive in an incubator; and he famously persuaded Bernard Manning, Noel Edmonds and the idiotic Tory MP David Amess
to autocue against the evils of the made-up drug 'cake', a pill the size of a football, while wearing T-shirts bearing the acronym 'F.U.K.D. and
B.O.M.B.D'.
Oddly, it was Morris, rather than his rent-a-quote interviewees, who got most of the flak for what he refers to now as his 'bollock in a cot' series.
Michael Grade, then head of Channel 4, almost caved in to the tabloids who had labelled him Britain's 'pornographer-in-chief', and tried to stop the
show being aired. Grade was persuaded otherwise only by the combined intervention of his commissioning editors, and (perhaps) by a fax campaign
from Morris. (Paul Simon, for example, received a note wondering if he would care to comment on the fact that Grade had always considered Art Garfunkel
to be the superior musical talent in their duo.)
Morris, taller and scruffier than you imagine, looks tired just remembering that period. 'I was deeply hammered afterwards,' he says, looking back.
'You're completely played out because you've been forced to be a lawyer for four or five months. When friends said, "How are you?" I'd go, "I refer you
to subsection paragraph B subclause 2.1 which states that in certain circumstances I'm actually feeling well though the over-riding situation is
that I'm not too good."'
Is he on speaking terms with Grade?
'Let's just say we haven't exchanged cards or trousers,' he says, smiling.
Morris 'rebooted' by throwing himself into his radio show Blue Jam: an inspired mixture of ambient music and edgy sketches which had a tendency to
unfold slowly into nightmares. Morris tried to get Radio One to put the show out at four in the morning, 'because at that hour, on insomniac radio, the
amplitude of terrible things is enormously overblown'. In the end they broadcast it at midnight, but the effect was the same.
After Brass Eye, Morris had thought he might never do a stunt-driven show again, but he suffers, he says, from 'compulsive interview disorder'. He
can't stop himself 'meeting people just to see what happens' and as if to prove the point he has just released on tape a series of improvised
conversations he had with Peter Cook (Cook in the guise of his character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, bee-keeping raconteur and discoverer of the remains
of the infant Christ). The interviews were recorded in 1994, but Morris has only now got around to doing anything with them.
On tape, Cook and Morris make a perfect pair. Morris's approach to interviewing is a simple, but fearless one: 'I just say the sort of things
you might say on a whim to someone you've never met before at a party.'
The result with Cook was that 'the questions I asked him are really harsh and the answers he gives are totally good-humoured'. Sometimes, the exchange
is reminiscent of the later, crueller Derek and Clive dialogues. On one occasion, Morris, recalls, Cook, who was drinking heavily, arrived at the
studio in some pain: 'He'd crashed around his bathroom and banged his arm into a lump of marble and his arm had come up to about the thickness of a
thigh and gone purple.' He thus opened his interview with the observation: 'Sir Arthur, you're very shortly going to be dead. And the idea of this
amuses me.' Cook fended him off effortlessly but there is, on tape, as Morris says, 'a tension there that comes from playing on real frailty. As
Cook was well aware, dialogue can be about power, and power is always intoxicating.'
If Morris is intoxicated by power it doesn't show outside the studio. Despite his critical success, he has resisted the temptation to become a
media property. He very rarely talks to the press, refuses to be photographed off set, and, unlike his friends Steve Coogan and Patrick
Marber, has no plans to move from his 'studenty, Soho kind of world' to Hollywood or Broadway. He says this allows him the freedom to do only the
projects he wants to do, and to set his own standards. The adjectives that attach themselves to him tend to be 'driven' and 'perfectionist', but he is
relaxed and self-effacing in person.
He describes himself as 'a pathological self-criticiser' and relies entirely on this instinctive judgment to guide him on questions of taste: 'You have
to be very aware of what you are doing all the time,' he says. 'I will happily cut excessive language or excessive images. But other things I will
defend to the point of lying to the broadcaster, giving them the wrong tape to transmit [as he did with Brass Eye]. Ultimately I think the degree to
which you are prepared to fight for something says how much you care.'
Morris will not be drawn on what he is working on next, though many of his recent interviews have taken him to the States. He has confronted Bret
Easton Ellis with the question of why he writes in 'those chapter things'; and floated an idea for a Jerry Springer show that had Jerry Springer
muttering about going too far: 'I fell in love with the man who was shooting my kids.'
And he has also been talking, triumphantly, to Michael Moore. If Morris prides himself on anything I would guess it is that he comes to things with
no agenda other than to collapse pomposity, and to make people laugh. He therefore loathes the more politicised, bandwagon-jumping pranks of Moore.
'His tone is That's Life,' he says. 'I made up a corrupt English businessman with a totally ludicrous name who had sacked all his staff and then
methodically patrolled local schools, carrying a big banner that read "I sacked your Dad because he's totally fucking useless". And Moore is such a
knee-jerk that he's saying, [he adopts a perfect Moore whine] ' "You know what, we've gotta get this guy. Why doesn't anyone do this in Britain?" And
I said, well there is a guy called Mark Thomas who also goes around and bullies receptionists. And Moore goes, "NOT THOMAS. You need a guy who
really kicks ass." '
If only Moore had realised that he was talking to him...
* Peter Cook/Chris Morris Why Bother? is available from the BBC Radio Collection (6.99).
