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Perhaps one of the biggest surprises about Lucian Randall's biography of satirist Chris Morris is that it is so long. Randall has managed to eke out 259 pages on his subject, a man so guarded about his privacy that getting him to speak in public is a bit like persuading Greta Garbo to accept a friendship request on Facebook.
- Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris
- by Lucian Randall
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Morris, who rarely gives interviews or poses for photographs, trades on his anonymity. When the notorious and brilliant Brass Eye series first aired in 1997, Morris relied on the malleability of his physical appearance to pass unnoticed while tricking gullible celebrities into endorsing absurd public awareness campaigns.
Even before the anarchic daring of Brass Eye, he was ridiculously unwilling to give much away. Randall recounts the time when a hapless Radio Times photographer, sent to take the comedian's portrait in 1994, was issued with instructions to meet on a platform at Waterloo Station. Morris, wearing a black beret and dark glasses like a beatnik Jason Bourne, sidled up to him and engaged in a few minutes of aimless chat before breaking off abruptly and disappearing into a melee of office-workers and tourists on Waterloo Bridge. Randall manages to catch sight of his subject only once and has to wait a year for Morris to respond to his request for a meeting. Frustratingly for Randall, Morris "thinks he's unlikely to be interviewed". Randall is reduced to noting what Morris was wearing on this auspicious occasion – "black trousers, a long scarf and a coat to keep out a February chill" – and emailing a pile of Morris's friends, all of whom were later given permission to speak from the great man himself.
The first quarter of Disgusting Bliss is thus hampered by a lack of interesting information. Randall tries to make the most of not-very-startling facts, such as the revelation that Morris's father was a Cambridgeshire GP who "worked long hours and frequently at weekends" or that Morris was sent to Stonyhurst College, the Catholic boarding school where he "hadn't particularly stood out in his year". But once the undistinguished formative years are out of the way, Disgusting Bliss hits its stride. After university, Morris blazes a trail through Radio Cambridgeshire, taking advantage of the editing equipment to craft elaborate spoofs and parodies. He was less enamoured by the more mundane aspects of local radio. Dispatched to cover a craft fair, Morris complained to a female colleague: "It's full of smelly old women. I can't do this."
Yet Morris proved to be a shrewd observer of human nature. Later, he would satirise the endless round of craft fairs and traffic reports to great effect in On The Hour, the spoof news programme developed with Armando Iannucci, which originally aired on Radio 4, before transferring to television as The Day Today. "His experience in local radio had taught him... the instinctive collective fear that barbarians are around the corner," Randall writes.
The Day Today became one of the most important satirical shows of the 1990s, launching the careers of Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber, among others. Morris was note-perfect as the sneeringly supercilious Paxman-esque anchorman, reporting on a stream of highly entertaining and wholly fictitious news stories, including reports that wild horses were disrupting the London underground and that Crete had been kidnapped by Libya. Although there were only six episodes, The Day Today was meticulously researched: as part of their preparation, both Iannucci and Morris took a BBC news-editing course.
It was an in-depth approach that Morris would stick to throughout his career. As the co-creator of the sitcom Nathan Barley, Morris devoted "at least a full hour" to deciding the font that would most believably be used by the achingly hip style magazine featured in the show. And when, in 1999, he wrote a column for this newspaper under the pseudonym Richard Geefe, he took the trouble to set up a fake book deal with Fourth Estate. A typically dark-humoured creation, Geefe was a depressive who ended up being commissioned by his editor to commit suicide. It was, says Randall, a deliberate attempt to expose the media's voracious appetite for personal suffering: "Each point on the journey had been mapped out by Morris to mock the way in which Geefe's sadness and darkness were ruthlessly exploited."
But for many, the apotheosis of Morris's career was the 2001 Brass Eye special that took as its subject the moral panic surrounding paedophilia. Celebrities including Gary Lineker and Phil Collins appeared in videotaped interviews endorsing an invented charity called "Nonce Sense". DJ Neil Fox was shown informing viewers that paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than humans, before concluding: "There's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact." The Brass Eye special became one of the most complained-about programmes in British television history and Morris was predictably vilified; the Daily Mail described it as "unspeakably sick".
Impeccably researched and fluently written, Disgusting Bliss paints Morris as a frantic-minded perfectionist, a visionary unwilling to cede control of his projects. He emerges from this biography as someone maniacally convinced of the rightness of his vision, who steamrollers opposition and approaches controversy with relish. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Morris's debut feature film, Four Lions – released in the UK next month – is a comic take on home-grown suicide bombers. If anyone can make us giggle at jihad, it is probably Chris Morris.
