Chris Morris praised in today's Sunday Times

[Quincey]

Article is by Tanya Gold, requires subscription to read past the first few lines:

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/tanyagold/article1364299.ece

[Cleaners From Venus]

Article is by Tanya Gold

Not promising...

requires subscription to read past the first few lines:

Nevvvagonnahappen.

[WesterlyWinds]

They paying you to advertise this?

[Neil]

Is there anyone who can paste the full thing in please?

[WesterlyWinds]

Will anyone want to risk outing themselves as a Times subscriber?

[Glebe]

Just got the the paper half an hour ago... haven't read that yet. Too busy getting riled up by Camilla Long.

[alcoholic messiah]

Speakeasy
Tanya Gold
19 January 2014

Too dangerous for TV: the satirist purged for being right

This column is an apology to, or, more technically, a lament for, Chris Morris, who is probably the most gifted British satirist of his generation (he was born in 1962). If you have not heard of Morris, even as his more famous collaborator Steve Coogan is nominated for two Oscars, I will explain why.

In 1997, and again in 2001, Morris created and fronted a series of wondrous satires for Channel 4. They were called Brass Eye and their theme was the idiocy of moral panic. In the episode Drugs he invented a bright yellow fictional drug called cake and, posing as an investigative reporter, persuaded public figures to attack it.

They didn't do any research, so they fell for it. "We all like to party," said the DJ Bruno Brookes. "But only the fool would say, 'Yeah, I'll enter the nightmare of cake.'"

The comedian Bernard Manning said: "One young kiddie on cake cried all the water out of his body. Just imagine how his mother felt."

Cake was, in the words of the Tory MP David Amess, "a big yellow death-bullet in the head of some poor user, or custard gannet, as the dealers call them".

This exposed how the "war on drugs" rhetoric is full of misinformation, bombast and fear; how it lacks intellectual rigour, and sometimes even basic facts. Morris became legendary within comedy; he was called, by the co-writer of Peep Show, "godlike".

The 2001 special Paedogeddon! dealt with paedophilia. It was set in a fake TV newsroom and described, in real time, a paedophilia "outbreak". The children of Britain were herded into stadiums for protection and were given anti-paedophile weapons. Morris's character - the anchorman - pointed to his own children, asleep in a filing cabinet in the studio, and said: "They're safe tonight. Are yours?"

Myths, again told through the mouths of gullible celebrities and politicians, were presented as fact. The DJ Neil Fox said: "Paedophiles have more in common with crabs than they do with you and me... There is no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact." The former Labour MP Syd Rapson said paedophiles were "using an area of the internet the size of Ireland". The former ITN reporter Nicholas Owen described a computer game with a cartoon dog in which "the child can glimpse the molester in that kennel bouncing around and waving".

This was surely one of the most prescient pieces of modern TV comedy. Morris described both the breadth of sexual exploitation of children in Britain and the hysteria of the response to it, which comes very close to denial; what is the point of fury, Morris asks, if it doesn't protect a single child?

The backlash against the show was led by people who admitted they had not watched it - the then home secretary, David Blunkett, was "dismayed", and the minister for child protection, Beverley Hughes, called it "unspeakably sick". It essentially ended Morris's conspicuous career in television, although he made an excellent film, Four Lions, in 2010. I do not know if this was explicit blacklisting or a creative lethargy brought on by misrepresentation, but the glorious trajectory was cut short.

I write about Morris because everything he foretold has come to pass. The hysteria has mounted, but the criminality remains. This brilliant comedian should be woken from his slumber; until then he will remain an archetypal example of how society punishes those who satirise it.

[All Surrogate]

Just pipped, but anyway:

[Cleaners From Venus]

Where to start? Even by Gold's standards, that is woeful.

[Guy]

Next week: Why don't you see white dogshit anymore?

[Neil]

Thank you. Someone should tell her about Veep, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle and The IT Crowd. The BBC also talked to him post-BES and said they'd love to have him back IIRC. "Would you have shown that as it was?" "Hell no."

Bain's quote was:

To his detractors, Morris remains a malign and shadowy hoaxer; a hit-and-run media terrorist whose dislike of the limelight is taken as cowardice. Away from the cameras, he lives quietly with his wife, literary agent Jo Unwin, and their two young sons. He rarely attends public events and almost never gives interviews which, inevitably, only fuels the mystique. When embarking on Four Lions, he corralled the services of two co-writers, Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. For them, part of the appeal was the chance to meet Morris in the flesh. "We wanted to check he really existed," Bain tells me. "He has this reputation as the dark lord of comedy, this godlike presence. It was a surprise to find that he's actually human."

She'd have been better off using the Will Self quote, and mentioning Peep Show's writers in relation to Four Lions.

[Urinal Cake]

Can somebody 'in the know' actually explain why Morris doesn't seem to create very much and just seems to do the odd acting job[nb]and supervise Stew Lee[/nb]? Is it voluntary exile or just that his work is too contentious?

[Thomas]

He's been/he was working with Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding on a radio project for a long while,[nb]if it was, as James Christopher says there, touted as long ago as Nathan Barley.[/nb] and he put of lot of time into the research for Four Lions, so he might be nibbling away at something. But, y'know, he's 51 now. Peter Cook was only 57 when he departed.

'Right, Sir Arthur, you're shortly going to die.'

I've heard, probably on here, the occasional scant pondering that he writes bits here and then under false names, but I've no idea if that's true.

[Urinal Cake]

Hmm Fielding has brought the old band back and Ayoade seems to be reinventing himself as a director so that doesn't seem  to be great news.

[Thomas]

Perhaps he just lurks on here these days, refreshing refreshing refreshing.

[Bored of Canada]

Keep the memory and the joy you had with his work alive in your heart, but there comes a time when you just need to let go, as you can become blinkered and stop yourself from falling in love with new artists.
_{Watch Nathan For You.}

[Urinal Cake]

It's more of, for someone I consider an auteur, it would seem the need to constantly create would be part of his nature. Evidently not.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Where do you go for tv that makes you feel alive, makes you feel like it isn't just you, that makes you feel like for a moment in time the good guys have taken over and are kicking it back with interest?

Where do you go now to experience the feeling that the establishment doesn't always win?

[Bored of Canada]

Where do you go for tv that makes you feel alive, makes you feel like it isn't just you, that makes you feel like for a moment in time the good guys have taken over and are kicking it back with interest?

Where do you go now to experience the feeling that the establishment doesn't always win?

Keep an eye on Nathan Fielder. Perhaps John Oliver's new show for HBO if he goes REALLY big, especially since this is his big chance, he's such a Morris fan and would have that support behind him playing to an American audience who aren't aware of that stuff. I could see him trying somethinh very similar, although I've not read anything more about it giant the fact that he has a show and it's with HBO, so who knows what it'll actually be.

But even more importantly, if there's nothing you can think of, and YOU want it. Then make your own content. Write a book, make a podcast, write a tv series or film and get some friends together and film it. Make something in twine. The material or the software.