Chris Morris articles

[weirdbeard]

Occasionally, I idly flicking through various newspaper websites trying to grab articles to put onto the wiki.  So, until Neil gets the rest of the articles back online, I thought I'd post a few of them on here, if anyone's remotely bothered.  And a few of them might be nice to talk about.

Just stumbled on this great one, from the heart of the Brass Eye Special hysteria.  Nice photo I'd not seen as well.

The Mirror: Profile: Chris Morris - Unmasked - Spotty, cocky TV joker who loathes being photographed HOW PUBLIC SCHOOL PRANKSTER CHRIS GREW UP TO SHOCK BRITAIN
Saturday, August 4, 2001
Author: CLAIRE DONNELLY



HE'S the man who thought it was a good idea to make jokes about paedophilia and send up celebrities who want to help child abuse victims.

Brass Eye presenter Chris Morris outraged Channel 4 viewers last week by relentlessly poking fun at the subject.  Dressed up to the nines in suit and tie, with hair firmly greased back and wearing heavy make-up, he smirked his way through the show as a spoof news anchor.  But when he sees our exclusive pictures of himself before he was famous, sick TV star Morris is unlikely to get the joke.  As a young radio reporter in Bristol and sporting a bedraggled bow-tie, old man's jacket and studio headphones, the man who likes putting others in the spotlight looked distinctly uneasy when the camera was turned on him.  Another shot shows him in a tasteless pose - pushing a shotgun into his mouth in a mock suicide attempt.

Even now he is a familiar face on screen, Morris still hates being photographed because of the strawberry-coloured birthmark on the left-hand side of his face, exaggerated by acne scarring he suffered as a teenager.  He shuns publicity, appearing only in full make-up.  When he came out of hiding and returned to his South London home this week, he wasn't worried about the effect of his damaging show. But the fact that photographers were outside his house terrified him.  A friend and former colleague, Steve Yabsley , says: "He emailed me and was complaining that photographers were stalking him all the time."  Colleague Greg Day, who worked with him on previous Brass Eyes, adds: "He really doesn't like being photo-graphed. We had to use video grabs of him for publicity because he just didn't turn up for the photo-shoots."

Others who have worked with Morris say he is an arrogant, egotistical character, driven by an almost psychopathic need to shock but too cowardly to account for his actions.  As soon as complaints about his show started flooding in - Channel 4 had more than 2,000 calls - he fled to the South of France with his actress girlfriend and their two young sons. It's a disappearing trick he's pulled before.  Morris is no stranger to controversy. Previous episodes of the show had to be cut before they were allowed out.

What makes a 38-year-old graduate find child abuse funny?

EDUCATED at a tough northern boarding school, he was different even then, despite a deeply conventional upbringing.  He enjoyed a comfortable middle-class childhood as the son of doctor parents - his mother Rosemary was a GP and his father Michael the senior partner in his practice in Buckden, Cambs.  Morris grew up with two brothers - Ben, now a playwright, and Tom, artistic director at the Battersea Arts Centre in South London. His main interests were cricket and playing bass guitar.  But there was always a darker side to his humour. And the laughs came at the expense of those closest to him.  As a boy, he was highly amused by the sight of his disabled grandmother being knocked over by the hearse at her husband's funeral.  As she sat crying in a wheelchair, the car reversed over her, sending young Chris into fits of laughter. He said later: "My blood pressure must have quadrupled trying to keep the laugh in. Things like that are red rags to me."  His family became the butt of his jokes. He would goad them into fierce arguments and record them secretly, listening to the tapes later in his bedroom.

Morris still thinks everyone else shares his warped sense of humour. He says: "People ought to acknowledge that of course we laugh at sick jokes - don't be so precious about it."  He didn't stop playing pranks even when he was beaten with a whalebone strap at his strict Jesuit school, Stonyhurst College. But he was no anti-establishment rebel. He went on to university, graduating with a 2:1 in zoology at Bristol.  Despite his attempts to get noticed, he didn't make much of an impression on tutors. All teacher Roger Avery remembers of him was that he was "quite a big guy with curly hair".

Morris signed up as a reporter at BBC Radio Cambridge in 1983, and although he did well, his appetite for self-destruction soon got the better of him.  He left after filling the newsroom with helium during a live news broadcast. But he had been shrewd enough to learn editing - a skill that helped him win a job at BBC Radio Bristol.  There he continued to develop his deliberately eccentric persona.  Colleague Steve Yabsley remembers: "He used to wear stupid clothes - golfing trousers and a bow-tie and a scruffy white shirt with holes in it.  "He had this mop of unruly hair. He still looks odd now, really. He used to sit in a corner in the office, a glass of wine in one hand, making notes with the other.  He once cooked a chicken with 20 cloves of garlic and then came to work - he had to go outside because of his breath. And he brought a turkey into a production meeting."

Even now, Morris sends out weird Christmas cards. An insider says: "Every year, he goes to the trouble of making his own. Last year, he stuck a phial filled with earth and a phial filled with urine on a piece of card. There were two tiny medical ampoules stuck on the front of this card and the message underneath was a rude version of 'Peace On Earth'.  "Typical Chris - it was totally off the wall. Inside the card was a conventional festive greeting with messages from his children to mine.  "His 1999 card was a piece of slate sprayed with red paint. I don't know what the significance was.  "It must take him hours and cost him a fortune. The slate alone would have cost hundreds of pounds and there is the packaging and postage."

"He was always joking about. Late at night, he used to ring up the newsreader on air and tell them he wanted them to get a certain word or words into the report. The newsreader would be told to include the phrase - such as 'violin case'..  "Chris was the scourge of the stuffed suits in charge of the station. They were always trying to get him to do things the BBC way and he wouldn't play ball.  "To Chris nothing is sacred or too sensitive to be the subject of a prank. He was always upsetting elderly listeners with his risque humour and falling out with the bosses.  "In his personal life, he is very shy and unassuming, but professionally he is fearless."

It was only a matter of time before he was sacked - this time for munching apples and making rude comments about other newsreaders during live bulletins.  He found work again, hosting a Saturday morning show on the London-based station GLR. But he was told to leave when he put out a heavily-edited version of the Queen's Speech, implying that her father, King George VI, "used to service men and women".  Then he teamed up with comedians Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber and got his first big break on the satirical Radio 4 show On The Hour, which later became The Day Today on TV. Morris appeared in the role he was still hiding behind in last week's Brass Eye - a Jeremy Paxman-style news anchor.  The show was a great success, but ended amid rumours of huge behind-the-scenes bust-ups, with Morris wanting to take more credit for its success. He fell out with producer Armando Ianucci over a sketch he wanted to screen about the fossilised remains of Jesus.  His tantrum-throwing and arrogance won him few friends. A TV insider says: "He is one of these people who thinks he's a lot cleverer than he is. That's one of the reasons he doesn't give interviews.  "His tantrums were well known. The guy is an oddball. He's 38, yet he walks around wearing a bandana, for God's sake."

While Coogan went on to become one of the nation's favourite comedians, Morris decided to go it alone. No sooner had Brass Eye been launched in 1997 than he was in the headlines again.  He set out to confuse, saying: "The challenge was to see how far you could send the human mind the wrong way."  It worked. At production meetings, control freak Morris threw his weight around, calling colleagues "ignoramus" and "buffoon" when he didn't get his way.  The tasteless sexual gags were there already. In one sketch, he asked a supposed teenage abuse victim: "If you fall over in the snow, do you make a couple of bumps?'  Things came to a head when Morris planned to run a sketch about the Yorkshire Ripper starring in a musical about his life. Channel 4 boss Michael Grade ordered the item to be cut.  Morris did it, but got revenge by inserting the split-second message "Michael Grade is a c***" into the show.  Even after that, Channel 4 decided to give his twisted humour another chance - with last week's disastrous results.

Surprisingly, Steve Coogan stands by his former colleague. He said this week: "Chris is very challenging and he challenges people's preconceptions.  "He makes comments on the media and he is a moral person. But you need to understand where the comedy is coming from. There are bigger criminals out there."  But as outrage at the paedophilia show refuses to go away, few are prepared to be as forgiving as Coogan.  As Morris said in a rare moment of unguarded reflection: "I'm pretty foolish, because I'm always surprised when something ludicrous happens.  "I open my mouth before I can shut it. What I do is rooted in intense stupidity."

We couldn't agree more.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

Here's Simon's Melody Maker article:

http://www.angelfire.com/id/bjsg/MMarticle.html

By Simon Price

When you sick so sad you cry and in crying cry a whole leopard from your eye...

It's a voice we recognise. It's the voice of authority. But the usual Stentorian certainty has been usurped by by an unfamiliar new tone: Frightened, troubled, battered and buffeted by doubt.

There's a robotic whir a computer bleep, then an android voice cuts in offering the simple diagnostic sad mammal. The first voice continues: ...If you angry so mad ye tongue bursts and mouth juice run gall bladder bitter...When you sick so sad you place your face in the puddle of a layby and wait for lorry to splash it... And when you are inside the infinite misery jumper, pulling it over and over your head, with no hope of escape because it's replicating at the waistband and you never get out. Then ee welcome... then ee arth welcome in Blue Jam.

It's the voice of Chris Morris the pin striped anchor man behind Brass eye The Day Today and On the Hour. It's as if David Dimbleby has done a Colonel Kurtz and gone native 100km up river, pencils in nostrils and boxer shorts on head. Staring at the speaker caught between disbelief and mild supresed terror, my first thought is we are hearing what one of Morris' myriad alter ego's Ted Maul would describe as: "The twisted brainwrong of a one-off man-mental." Has Chris Morris finally actually gone mad?

It's a possibility he accepts with calm equanimity.

"I'd be the last person to give you a valid answer. All I can say is, it's nothing new to me."


To the rest of us this is something new.

"Brass Eye", the awesomely sacriligeous fearlessly iconoclastic mock-ummentary series he made for Channel Four earlier this year, caused headlines before, during and after its six week run., and it wasn't difficult to see why. In one episode a scientist claimed that the disabled weren't really disabled at all but simply lazy. Another began with explicit footage of Morris shafting a woman from behind. In another a Kilroy-style debate show host drew a distinction between people suffering from "Good AIDS" (haemophiliacs, blood transplant patients) and "Bad AIDS" (homosexuals, drug users) and asked improper, perverted questions to a teenage girl who had been sexually abused ("if you fall over in the snow, do you make a couple of bumps?")

Most spectacularly he subverted our implicit trust in "experts" by fooling a host of celebrities and politicians to denounce a made up drug called Cake and campaigned on behalf of Carla, an East German elephant with her head jammed up her anus ("She's got eyes... but she hasn't got any ears") And these were just the bits that got shown. Among excerpts considered too much for British audiences were: A children's board game based on the Holocaust, an American pro guns advert featuring Christ shooting Judas, and famously, a musical based on the life of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe (the axing of which provoked Morris into inserting a subliminal split-second frame into the broadcast version reading Grade is a cunt.

All great stuff, which like The Day Today and On The Hour before it, instilled in the viewer a healthy inability to take TV news seriously. But we're almost used to it now. "Blue Jam" though is... something else.

"It feels like the latest time of day."

Chris Morris stops, and ponders what he's just said.

"What is the latest time of day? It certainly isn't midnight, which is unfortunately when the show is going out. It's ... 3am, only more so. It's lying disheveled in a heap, in this chilled landscape. It's a show for when you've reached a stage of evolution where stumbling is more advanced than walking. It's somewhere between groove aesthesia and aneasthesia."

Hearing Blue Jam for the first time feels like eavesdropping on the last assembly of the Heaven's Gate cult before their mass suicide. Burroughism surrealist monolgues fade in and out of dubby, trippy beatscapes. It's like a Boris Vian novel directed by Louis Brunuel with a score by Tricky.

"It's in tune with the metabolic rate you reach when you've been awake for three days," Morris continues. "Or if you've been in a flotation tank for a year. Thoughts float in and out of your mind unbidden. It's like being handed a Filofax with a section marked 'Ideas' and it's already filled in for you."

Is this a drug thing? One imagines that Blue Jam would make a lot more sense when your Shatner's Bassoon is f-u-k-d and b-o-m-b-d on yellow bentines.

"I think of it more as a disease thing. Imagine it's Sunday, 3 or 4am. You've got a mild disease, and you're slightly curdled. Maybe influenza. It's a flu groove."

This is how Chris Morris talks. Completely off the cuff, he'll say something as bizarre, brilliant and enlightening as anything in one of his shows and, never pausing for applause or a self-satisfied chuckle, move swiftly on to the next one.

Blue Jam is much less in-your-face than Brass Eye ... "Yeah, it's more Thom Yorke than Keith Prodigy. It's more sliding into the room and grinning down it's jumper. It's more monged and warmly grim." ...and not so much of a slap around the cheeks. "Maybe a slow motion slap. Imagine a slap lasting a week."

Satire is dead. It was assassinated in 1997 by three separate, JFK-style bullets.

The first flew from Chris Morris' own handgun (Brass Eye was so perfect and extreme that no one, not even he, can take the genre any further). The second the election of a Labour government (even though that nice Mr Blair and his mafia are ripe material, most comedians are too thankful to be rid of the Tories to turn on them just yet). The third happened on the last day of August.

The compulsory mourning which saturated the media following the death of Diana, Princess Of Wales, completely failed to acknowledge a sizeable proportion of the population - anyone I've ever met, for a start - who didn't give a flying one . While the grateful peasents  rang radio stations and requested Elton John records, we rang each other, sharing all the latest, sickest jokes, disseminating the punchlines ("a Wallbanger with six chasers") as far and wide as possible.

We were the Chris Morris nation. We were the people who only reluctantly voted Labour on May 1 because Chris Morris declined to stand for Prime Minister. Faced with the spectacle of stage managed grief, we couldn't help wondering ... what d'you reckon he's thinking?

"Part of me was glad to be out of it, to be able to take a distanced look at it all. But another part of me thought "Fucking hell, it'd be interesting to be involved in radio on a day like this'."

Satire died with Diana, because if any one subject is untouchable, taboo, beyond parody, then all satire is compromised.

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out from appearing in Blue Jam. Maybe the French police will announce the baby they've chosen to reconstruct Diana's entire life. I would have to argue, though, that if satire is dead, then it was never alive. Satire is essentially a conservative form. As soon as you stand up in front of an audience, you're immediately relying on the consent of more than half the audience which neuters the whole exercise. If you look at Private Eye, which is the most prominent satirical organ in this country, it's little more than a more intelligent and witty version of saying 'whatever next ...'."

The sorry state of this art is typified by Victor Lewis-Smith's hopelessly dated TV Offal.

"That smacked of an unevolved Eighties thing. I mean, how many Spitting Image-type songs about people like David Attenborough do we want to hear? And slagging off student TV - maybe that's something that bothered him when he was a student, but if he still feels that way when he's 40, you've got to wonder."

Is that why you've abandoned satire this time?

"No, I just think of it as one more thing in the cupboard. Instead of pointing out the ridiculousness of public life, I'm doing it to the way people are privately. There's one sketch with this couple where the guy has amputated both his legs just to make his girlfriends life a misery. They're trapped in a mutual loathing, but it works, they've reached a symbiosis where they both get something from it. I'd rather be doing that than pointing out how hopelessly cosmetic the Labour Party is. Anyway, I've never really thought of what I do as satire. I think of it as opening my mouth before I can shut it. What I do is rooted in ... intense stupidity."

It's faintly incredible, considering his bridges-burning. no-prisoners-taking, multiple-sacking career, that Morris has found any network, radio or tv, willing to give him airtime. It's even more improbable that it should be Radio 1. Last time he worked for them he was suspended for announcing the death Michael Heseltine on air.


"Well, I wasn't planning the Heseltine storm last time. What happened with me and Radio 1 was, they saw this grenade with a pin hanging off a Christmas tree, they picked it, and they were suprised to end up in hospital. I think Radio 1 are using Blue Jam as a weapon in the ratings war between Zoe Ball and Chris Evans. They're hoping people will fall asleep with Blue Jam and wake up with their breakfast show."

The show merits a place on Radio 1 on purely musical grounds. Morris is a man of tastes: sketches and vignettes weave and spiral around such mellow, nocturnal sounds as Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg's "Bonnie and Clyde", the Alessi Brothers' "Oh Laurie", Barry Adamson, Eels, Stereolab, The Aloof, "anything with character, somewhere between ambient and groove". It also features some of the most horrible new age incidental music this side of a Discovery Channel documentary on wildlife (a new genre: dolphoncore?).

"It may well have been from the Discovery Channel, actually. The radio hardware has enabled me to muck about with about 20 different things at once on a computer, as opposed to being stuck in a room drowning in endless spools of tape."

Morris' keen awareness of musical mores will not be news to anyone familiar with the merciless parodies of Pulp (renamed Blouse), Ice-T ('Fur-Q'), Pixies and Nirvana. Any plans for a record?

"The idea is completely ... dissable. On the show, if they pop out of the blue, that's good, but when you put them all together, it doesn't work. Also, when the Bonzo Dog Doo Daa Band did musical parodies, they'd cover three or four musical styles in the space of one song, which actually did merit repeated listening. But to release a straight forward Eighties style musical satire ..."

You've heard The Shirehorses, then.

"Aah, fucking hell! Man!"

His reluctance is thoroughly in character. He recently turned down an offer to write a Brass Eye Christmas book. A less "Look at me! I'm funny!" comedian you'd be hard pressed to find. While his former Day Today colleagues hurtle towards mainstream Children In Need respectability, Morris is happier existing in relative anonymity (and besides making his activities as an undercover media terrorist that much easier).

"I guess they all seem to be involved in a race to be on BBC1. I don't know what that means ..."

You'll never see Chris Morris smirking along side Angus Deyton on Have I Got News For You or advertising Pot Noodles. Which presumably explains the way Blue Jam has just sneaked out with zero hype, zero publicity, zero profile.

Is it intended to become a word of mouth thing? A cult?

"Well ... Beck used to a called 'cult', but if you owned Mellow Gold you never felt that you were part of a cult. It's hardly comparable to dressing up as Gary Numan or putting a sack on your head."

Sack or no sack, how are we meant to listened to Blue Jam?

"Just ... be there in this pissed world."

[Emma Raducanu]

Just stumbled on this great one

I enjoy the article's desperate ploy to interpret everything as a negative. 'He wears stupid clothes' being the most funny example, to me. I'm almost completely unfamiliar with the Mirror but I never realised they were one of those papers that like to give it's audience the moral stepladder by encouring them to be collectively outraged by something they'd probably otherwise not be.

[Retinend]

I liked the bit about the Grandmother the most.

Anybody have the Kerrang! article?

[mcbpete]

I made it as a far as "What makes a 38-year-old graduate find child abuse funny?" and got very angry. It frequently astounds me quite how stupid journalists can be. Reading newspapers left on the morning train make me arrive at work in a foul mood.

[Lfbarfe]

It frequently astounds me quite how stupid journalists can be.

It's more a case of how stupid some journalists are trained to think their readers must be.

[Glebe]

Thanks for posting these. I think I read the Melody Maker interview before. I have an issue The Face with a Morris interview somewhere.

The Mirror article's portrayal of Morris as a monster is worthy of Brass Eye itself.

"Surprisingly, Steve Coogan stands by his former colleague."

Why surprizing?

"The guy is an oddball. He's 38, yet he walks around wearing a bandana, for God's sake."

There's something hilarious about that comment for some reason.

[DJ One Record]

Colleague Steve Yabsley remembers: "He used to wear stupid clothes - golfing trousers and a bow-tie and a scruffy white shirt with holes in it.  "He had this mop of unruly hair. He still looks odd now, really. He used to sit in a corner in the office, a glass of wine in one hand, making notes with the other.  He once cooked a chicken with 20 cloves of garlic and then came to work - he had to go outside because of his breath. And he brought a turkey into a production meeting."

I'm surprised he didn't say "I remember once he got his bum out."

[ProvanFan]

Here's Will Self proclaiming his love:

THE OBSERVER REVIEW
THE WEEK IN REVIEWS: TELEVISION: CHRIS THE SAVIOUR
March 11, 1997
by WILL SELF



About halfway through Wednesday night's final episode of Brass Eye (Channel 4), it began to occur to me that Chris Morris might possibly be God. The idea of a Morrisian deity is appealing for a number of reasons: it explains why the world is so consummately absurd; it explains why there is little real justice to be had for the poor and the oppressed; and it provides a convincing explanation for why public life in this country is dominated by talented mediocrities.
The sketch that occasioned this lurch of theism on my part was a typical piece of Morrisian excess. We were asked to take on board the idea that an utterly undistinguished, ring-road, provincial business had decided to incentivise its management by providing them with unlimited quantities of drugs. As the sketch began, we were treated to the sight of various middle-managem ent types snorting lines of cocaine, toking on joints and shooting up smack (the managing director). Not only were all the paraphernalia and substances depicted with uncanny accuracy rare on television but the reactions of the drugged executives were also utterly credible.



Another comic might have dared this scenario but would have cut it short. Not Morris. As the anguished, bearded face of the new marketing manager went puce with the effects of excess cocaine and the camera stayed right on him, it became apparent to me that this was art of a very high order indeed. David Lynch used the same technique of dramatically over-extended emotion to telling effect in Twin Peaks, but both contemporary satirists have really borrowed the idea from the high avatar of absurdism Samuel Beckett.
As the new marketing manager fell out of the tedious boardroom gasping and retching, one of Morris's henchwomen intoned in perfect cod voiceover: 'Soon he will learn to maintain his levels.' Maybe he will but I doubt Chris Morris ever will. Put starkly, this man genuinely knows no limits. His programme is the televisual exemplar of Yossarian's motto in Catch-22: 'Death to all moderators.' I didn't see a great deal of The Day Today, because its transmission coincided with my long period of box furlough but what I did see was both brilliant and congruent with the strange, satiric anti-persona that Morris developed during his radio days. Coming to Brass Eye was witnessing that most unusual and remarkable of phenomena: an artist who has grown and reached the height of his powers.

I had read the pieces about it; I had heard the substance of the brouhaha. When, in the first episode of Brass Eye 'Animals' I saw Carla Lane, Jilly Cooper et al being not so much led, as driven up the warped garden path of Morris's contempt, I, like any self-respecting bourgeois couch potato, thought: really, he has gone too far this time. Claire Rayner one of the spoofees writing in this paper, had the nous to be able to identify what it is about duping 'real' people into fake broadcast scenarios that might undercut the meaning and purpose of satire.

If satire exists to provoke moral reform in H.L. Mencken's formulation, 'To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable' then the muddying of the distinction between 'real' and 'fake' can only be conceived of as a perversion of satiric justice. But Claire Rayner, in her impassioned, self-regarding piece about her experience with Morris, got it wrong in one vital particular. It wasn't us the afflicted who were being spoofed; it was her the comfortable. In fact, I'll go further than that: the reason why it's legitimate to gull people like Rayner into making silly asses of themselves on television is that, in a very important sense, they aren't real at all.

Rhodes Boyson is real-ish. He's real enough for me to have seen him walking through the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament the other day. I looked into his guileless, headteacher's countenance. I recognised him. I thought about it hard, but as ever it was a killing case of esprit d'escalier; what I should have shouted at the mutton-chopped former Minister was: 'Oi! Got any cake, Rhodes?!' Because Boyson was credulous and bigoted enough to allow himself to be conned into deploring the effects of a drug called 'cake', on the Brass Eye episode that dealt with narcotics.

Morris in one of his numerous personae apprised all of the dimwits who fell for it that 'cake' was a 'made-up' drug. He called his pressure group founded to rid society of the evil of cake 'F.U.C.K.D. and B.O.M.B.D.'; he described the effects of cake in lurid, pantomime terms that wouldn't have convinced a 14-year-old ingenue.

So why did these people fall for such fakery? The Rayners, Boysons, Mad Frankie Frasers and Worsthornes of this world? Because they aren't real people any more they're hyperreal. They've made the Faustian pact of being that oxymoronic incarnation, 'television personalities'.

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. They are like nose-pickers for whom the wind has definitively changed.

All Morris has done is to give these unpersons an opportunity to demonstrate the fact that they'll do anything to get a chauffeured car, a Styrofoam beaker of tea and five minutes in the green room goofing out with others of their ilk.

The other important point to be made about Morris's elision of 'real' and 'unreal' is that it's at the very core of his attack on television itself. What Morris realises is that television isn't a 'medium' in any meaningful sense at all. Rather it's a skein of different media imprisoned in a bogus proscenium. Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. There are filmic artists working in television, and there are dramatic artists; there are costume and set designers; there are actors. None of them are peculiar to the 'medium' all could be set in different contexts.

All except Chris Morris, that is. His savage truncations of Shakespearean English I particularly relished tags such as: 'Whatever you forget about tonight's programme remember this'; his fantastical nomenclature last week's show included a slaughter man called 'Gypsum Fantastic'; his subversion of the apparent logic of television graphics a bogus diagram featuring the heads of dead foxes; and his own crazed demonism on screen a brilliant character actor acting the part of a brilliant character actor; all of it testifies to the fact that this man is a true television artist perhaps the only one currently at work.

When the semi-fraudulent credits of the last episode of Brass Eye began rolling up, I turned to the friend I had watched it with and we both said almost in unison it's a privilege to be alive when people such as Morris are at work. And as for his much-feted reticence and unwillingness to be made into a 'personality' himself well, you'd have to say that was the icing on the cake.

Elsewhere on the non-medium, the current torrent of superbly photographed wildlife programmes continued with The Eagle Empire (BBC1). Sea eagles hang out in the arctic north of Norway because they've been pushed back there by us. They're partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves. This Wildlife on One programme didn't feature the staggering bird's-eye photography we'd seen in Incredible Journeys, but it made up for it with astonishingly intimate and slow-motion photography.

There was that, and there was the ineffable presence of David Attenborough. He ended the programme on an up note, telling us that sea eagles were heading south once more, extending their empire after years of attrition. I dare say we'll soon see one of the elegant birds being interviewed by David Jatt on Brass Eye.

Last Sunday, I did something nobody should ever do. I watched the omnibus edition of EastEnders (BBC1) and then I watched the preview tapes for all of last week's episodes back-to-back. It was almost like having a soap opera that ran in real rather than virtual time (Pauline says: 'I'll just put on the kettle' and then everybody waits in silence for five minutes while it boils); either that, or like watching The Family, the hideous soap opera Ray Bradbury created for his dystopic fantasy Fahrenheit 451. Viewers of The Family broadcast on three, wall-sized screens receive a copy of that day's script, complete with their 'own' lines. At certain key moments in the action, all the actors peer out of the screen and say: 'What do you think, Will?' Or Paul, or Jenny, or whoever it is watching. Whereupon I find myself replying: 'Yeah, I wouldn't mind shagging Grant Mitchell, save for the fact that I couldn't run my fingers through his hair. . .'

[j_u_d_a_s]

It's more a case of how stupid some journalists are trained to think their readers must be.

Oh certainly. There's no question about the gutter press knowing the joke was clearly on them which is why it resorts to name and shame tactics, taking advantage of the mob mentality of their readership.

[actwithoutwords]

underneath was a rude version of 'Peace On Earth'.

That made me laugh the most.

[Sam]

Am I only one who found both the Melody Maker and Will Self articles a bit embarrassing? Mind you, those reflect the time when Morris was making waves and seemed genuinely exciting; it's much easier to wince at lines in those articles now with the benefit of hindsight and the decade of disappointment making me jaded.

Somehow, the Mirror's laughable hackery has more to say about its subject. The article is a goldmine of unintentional (intentional?) hilarity.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

They are both overly gushing, but yeah, I imagine in their context they weren't.

[Mob Bunkhaus]

I automatically read the first 3 pars in the voice of Ted Maul.

Cheers, Wb.

[Morrisfan82]

Heh, I remember reading that Mirror article at the time. This is fantastic:

"His 1999 card was a piece of slate sprayed with red paint. I don't know what the significance was.  "It must take him hours and cost him a fortune. The slate alone would have cost hundreds of pounds and there is the packaging and postage."

It's the 'worried' tone of it that does it.

[lipsink]

"Surprisingly, Steve Coogan stands by his former colleague."

Why surprizing?

Because the Mirror and The Sun love Coogan because he's Alan Partridge and he appeals to the 'eh lads' crowd. The cunts that wrote all that shit around the time probably had 'BrassEye'/'The Day Today' DVDs/videos at home anyway and were assigned the story and just got on with it. I give up reading that article too cos I started getting angry too.

[samadriel]

Thanks for posting these. I think I read the Melody Maker interview before. I have an issue The Face with a Morris interview somewhere.

I think The Face might have reprinted that MM article (maybe with an extra sidebar or something) -- I've never read MM, but I've read that article in print before.

[Johnny Townmouse]

For some reason, I had never, ever read that Morris had a birthmark on his face. I have never mentioned it on here because I thought it was perhaps a bit of an invasion into his privacy, and perhaps an industry secret. But it appears to be common, public knowledge.

That's left me red-faced. (oh christ....)

[Steve Lampkins]

Ha, that Mirror article reads almost like a spoof that Morris could have written about himself.

[amputeeporn]

Ha, that Mirror article reads almost like a spoof that Morris could have written about himself.

He basically has - a lot of the 'facts' in there are bollocks or just silly things exagerated by Morris himself to off-foot people like the press aren't they? I found it really funny - how on earth could someone keep up that level of shaken disbelief. Reminds me of that part in Fear and Loathing where a man walks in on HST doing drugs in a toilet.

"With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never understand."

[ProvanFan]

Pardon my apparent stupidity but I can't seem to edit my post. The Will Self thing was from 9th March 1997, not 11th.

Here's something else:

11th June 1992
FEUDS CORNER;
Victor Lewis-Smith v Chris Morris
BYLINE: RUTH PICARDIE


FEUDING is a favourite pastime for men of a certain age. There are, however, isolated examples of the angry youngster, notably radio satirists and telephone hoax kings Victor Lewis-Smith (33) and Chris Morris (29).
They met in September 1988, when Morris interviewed Lewis-Smith for his regular Radio Bristol show. They didn't get along. Lewis-Smith says he gave a "non-interview"; Morris didn't find him at all amusing and "trashed the interview because it was useless".

When it wasn't aired, Lewis-Smith began to stew. Unconsoled by the fact that Morris was subsequently sacked by Radio Bristol for doing running commentaries over live news bulletins, he became increasingly concerned by the thought that Morris was "stealing" his comic persona.
"Basically," said Morris "he got it into his head that I was somehow nicking his jokes, recasting them and chucking them out myself, which, as far as I'm concerned, would be a suicidal thing to do. He reserves the sole right to recycle his own material so frequently - I don't know why anyone else would bother."

Later, Private Eye ran a piece which described Morris's Radio 4 show, On The Hour, as "Citizens without the jokes". Lewis-Smith, who writes for Private Eye, says he wasn't the author. He did however write to Radio 4 controller Michael Green, in April this year, complaining that Morris was being given far more freedom in his telephone hoaxing than he ever was.

Then, two weeks ago Lewis-Smith wrote to Time Out, after another flurry of letters about plagiarism and whether Lewis-Smith was writing fake letters of complaint about the show to the BBC: "I have not heard any of the present series of On The Hour," he wrote, ". . . now fuck off and leave me alone."

Even Lewis-Smith admits things may be getting out of hand. "What's the point? You take a tape into somebody's office and say listen to this - that man's a thief! And they look at you and think this is somebody with an obsession."

Morris is more relaxed about it. "He's like an unofficial publicity agent who takes great pains to put my name in print whenever he can."

Listeners can judge for themselves next month. Morris's On The Hour is going out on Saturday mornings on Radio 4, and Lewis-Smith's new evening show is on Radio 1.

Meanwhile, the feud goes on: "Imitation is the sincerest form of being an unoriginal thieving bastard," says Lewis-Smith. "It will run and run," says Morris, "until he has a heart attack and falls flat on his fat face."

[Portaccio]

I can't believe VLS ran to Radio 4 and complained like a tattling baby. Even if there were similarities between the two back then, I just can't sympathize with a white guy w/ dreadlocks.

[The Pan Shandies]

Thanks for these you guys, what a treat. The second one is a bit strange but the first one is hilarious and I'm looking forward to reading the others. One of my friends had a treasured copy of possibly/most probably the Mail from just after the broadcast of the Brass Eye Special which was all kinds of ridiculous if memory serves, with a naming and shaming of these SICKOS bit and everything. Didn't Pegg attempt to distance himself from the special in one of the papers when everything kicked off?

"Typical Chris - it was totally off the wall."

Brill.

[weirdbeard]

"THE SORDID TRUTH ABOUT BRASS EYE; Britain's liberals yesterday attacked those who dared to criticise Brass Eye. Here the Mail, with apologies to its readers, carries extracts from the show and asks: What kind of people can defend such sickness?"

(July 31, 2001): p5

Byline: MICHAEL SEAMARK

DESPITE its two screenings last week, only one and a half million viewers have actually seen the Brass Eye special all the way through.

Defenders of Channel 4 and presenter Chris Morris claim critics are missing the point and condemning the show without having seen it. Here MICHAEL SEAMARK explains why its scenes, featuring child actors as young as six, have caused such offence.

We apologise to the readers who will be upset by the detail. We know we lay ourselves open to accusations of hypocrisy. But unless people know the content of the programme, they cannot appreciate why so many are outraged by it.

The introduction

FIVE youngsters are shown. 'These are our children; they skip down the street,' booms Morris's voiceover. 'But the paedophile is waiting.' Aping Jeremy Paxman, Morris stands in front of a map and bellows: 'Why can we no longer think of the British Isles without the word Paedoph in front of them?'

as the caption flashes to 'Paedophisles'.

Morris switches to mimicking Nick Ross and Crimewatch. Standing in front of banks of TVs he adds: 'Welcome to Paedogeddon.' He says his own children are in the studio for their protection and is filmed closing filing- cabinet drawers with two youngsters and their teddies inside. 'Goodnight children,' he says, adding to the viewers: 'They're safe tonight.' Again and again during the frenetic programme, the action will cut to a reporter broadcasting 'live from outside Dredgemore Prison' where a baying mob of protesters congregate, and eventually burn alive, paedophile 'Jezz North' in a 25ft wicker phallus.

The real paedophile

BRASS Eye even turns its attention to a real-life paedophile. Sidney Cooke, Britain's most notorious child sex offender who killed 14-year-old Jason Swift during a homosexual orgy, has been fired into space, says Morris, to spend the rest of his life in a one-man prison vessel.

But an eight-year- old boy has been placed on board by mistake and is 'trapped alone in space with the monster'.

The naked woman

PURPORTEDLY providing a history of paedophilia, a naked 'Victorian' woman is shown writhing on a bed. 'This man is having sex with a ten-year-old girl,' says the voiceover. 'In our reconstruction she is played by a 25-year- old woman.

The breasts are inaccurate. A child's breasts are smaller, the nipples much like those of a boy.' Afterwards, a little girl is heard asking: 'Can I have the money now, please?'

The jailed offender

THE programme runs a 'reconstruction' of the fictitious paedophile Jezz North's history. A bearded man is filmed furtively spying on young boys before grabbing one around the neck. Footage gives the impression of ejaculation. He is imprisoned, says the voiceover, but allowed to write articles for a magazine edited by a man who had a nephew with 'a nice pink arse and no hair on his balls'.'Kelly', one victim of Jezz North, is asked to demonstrate one of North's perversions and a woman rubs her naked breasts on screen.

The pervert on the bus

'WHO wants a sweetie?' chortles an actor playing 'convicted paedophile Fenton Beasley', to a minibus full of teenage boys and girls.'You will have to do something for Uncle Beasley first,' he says, aboard a school bus he uses to provide guided tours of his old haunts. To a pretty blonde girl in the front seat, he continues: 'Now, lift up your skirt and show us your knickers.' The teenagers all laugh nervously as the paedophile, looking down at the girl, adds: 'But what's that?

Hair? I don't like hair.' The sick clip ends with him telling the youngsters: 'When you have children of your own you remember Uncle Beasley - and get them to undress by the window.

Would you do that for me? Only kidding.'

The breast implants

'TARTED-up tots at an American pageant,' says the voiceover introduction to one of the sickest segments of the programme. 'How long before we see this in Nuneaton or Diss?' Purporting to be film of young children in U.S. beauty contests, the camera homes in one little blonde child and the father opens her dark-blue top to expose her chest. The programme pixillates her tiny torso - now visually complete with breasts - as another woman gasps: 'Wow, are they real?' 'Well, they are enhanced,' replies the child's 'mother'. 'Oh, they are so cute,' says the other woman. 'Well, we didn't want to go too big,' explains 'mother'.

The 'father' then picks up the tiny tot and gently shakes her.

'Kinda jiggle,' he says.

The rap artist

MORRIS plays an American rap artist, JLB-8, pronounced 'Jailbait'. The Eminem-based character and his 'Nu-ass' music have sold 80mil-lion records worldwide and he 'dates girls as young as seven', says the voiceover.

Two girls, barely ten years old, are interviewed as 'fans' and pronounce him 'the coolest'. The film then cuts to JLB-8 performing on stage with a life-sized baby doll attached to his lower body, its face to his groin.

Amidst the crude, pornographic lyrics, Morris talks of being sexually abused by his father and mimics forcing the doll to perform a sex act on him.

The two girls are asked whether they would object if he tried to kiss them.

'No', they reply.

The doctored pictures

MIKE HAMES, former head of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad, understood he was being asked by the programme to judge seriously whether images were depraved. One shows a young girl's head superimposed on a naked woman's body; another a young boy's head on a dog's body with a large, human penis between its hind legs.

A third photograph shows a doll with a large penis protruding from its nappy.

The man in the stocks

THE studio is 'invaded' by Gerard Chote, spokesman for 'Milit-Pede'. The actor is put in stocks and tells Morris he believes in sex with children.'Stop right there,' says Morris as he brings a young boy in shorts and T-shirt on screen. 'That's my son Johnny, right? Have a look at him.' As the child stands innocently by, Morris continues:' Now, are you prepared to tell me you want to have sex with my son?' 'No', replies Chote. 'You are ashamed, aren't you,' says Morris. ' No, I'm not ashamed,' says the paedophile.

'Then tell me you want to have sex with my son,' says Morris.

Chote says he doesn't want to have sex with the fair-haired boy, who stands meekly by Morris as the crude dialogue continues. 'Why not?' asks Morris.

Chote replies: 'I don't fancy him. I don't find him attractive. I'm sorry.'

The sex song

AFTER countless scenes in which well-meaning celebrities are duped into making ridiculous claims, the programme ends with Morris and co-presenter Doon Mackichan saying what a 'great night' it has been.

Morris tells viewers: 'Look, if a child does take your fancy, please remember, give it a couple of years.' Mackichan adds, with a smirk: 'I did.'

A young girl then appears from 'St Lazarus the Amethyst School Choir', singing the opening line to a song 'One Day' which clearly refers to first sexual experiences. 'One day I want to, but not today,' she sings.

Morris adds his own line: 'She can be kissed - but in an innocent way.'

Mackichan sings of how the girl's 'cherry must ripen naturally'.

Three young girls continue the song: 'One day, but not today, or even tomorrow.' The ditty ends with a blonde girl adding, with a knowing smile: 'But maybe the day after that.'

[The Pan Shandies]

Cool! Thanks Weirdbeard.

[benjula]

these are great!

[eluc55]

It's strange; reading that article about the special back, it reads pretty funnily, certainly far funnier than I rememeber it being.

[An tSaoi]

I've never understood the hatred for the Special. Many people outside of this site would consider it his magnus opus.

[Lee]

VLS's Mirror article on Brass Eye Special:

This Sick Saddo Is Beyond A Jerk
July 21, 2001

I'm no psychologist (unless you count the 20 years I spent in Vienna, working with Adler), but I've often wondered what it is that motivates professional television hoaxers.

In Jeremy Beadle's case, I suspect his desire to "get" people has something to do with his own withered hand which, like his mind, has never grown up and remains forever schoolboy sized.

Chris Morris's facial deformity may well explain why so many of his stunts seem to be motivated not by a desire to amuse, but by a deep-seated hatred of humanity.

Take this week's revelations about his latest Channel 4 Brass Eye programme, in which he tricks celebrities into campaigning publicly against paedophiles.

Phil Collins is considering taking legal action after Morris duped him into wearing a "Nonce Sense" T-shirt, and told him that the video "would be going round schools and colleges in a bid to stem child abduction and abuse".

And Richard Blackwood, who was tricked into recording warnings about internet paedophiles, could scarcely contain his disbelief at being treated in such a way.

"If you think that kiddie porn is funny," he shrugged. "Then you should have a good laugh."

Don't get me wrong. I've always believed that there should be no ghetto areas in comedy, but hoaxes only ring true when they're played on deserving targets.

Yet Morris is so desperate to shock his audience that he apparently doesn't care how he achieves his effect, so long as he gets media attention.

A few years ago, he was banned from broadcasting live on radio after announcing the death of Michael Heseltine (how the politician's friends and family must have laughed when they heard the news).

As head of Channel 4, Michael Grade said that Morris would "never work with me again" after he slipped a gratuitously obscene message about the controller into a programme.

And now Morris has turned to the question of paedophilia, and is targeting not the paedophiles, but those who campaign against child abuse, thereby achieving something that I never thought possible. He's made me sympathise with Phil Collins.

In case you're thinking "Dear Kettle, Yours Sincerely Pot", then it's true that I've also staged many a hoax and made many a phoney phone call in my past (although I haven't done so for years, because frankly I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to keep playing the media equivalent of knock down ginger).

However, my targets were always the pompous, the vain, and the hypocritical, because such people deserve ridicule.

But why on earth mock someone whose only concern is to protect children from molesters?

Not only is it deeply unfunny, but it can only make life easier for paedophiles, and harder for those working in the field of child protection. A proud boast indeed.

So what is Channel 4 doing, by going ahead with the broadcast of such an ill thought out and malevolent programme?

I'm not sure that even they know, and can only assume that chief executive Michael Jackson is so hell-bent on ratings that he's totally lost his sense of judgment.

But surely the C4 chairman, Vanni Treves, hasn't forgotten the ITC's earlier ruling against Brass Eye?

Consider the evidence. Morris's ratings are always dire, insiders tell me that he treats his colleagues like pond filth, and even his status as an enfant terrible is looking pretty threadbare nowadays, because the angry young man of youth programmes is approaching 40 (older than Beadle when he was in his "prime"), and is surely far too old to be pulling juvenile pranks.

However, nobody can deny that he pulled off one magnificent stunt earlier this year.

By getting Channel 4 to recommission his show.

"Not that I am bitter, come on now..."

[An tSaoi]

Facial deformity? It's a birthmark, it's not like he's had his skin burned off. And even if he was a grotesquely ugly freak, how would that be a criticism of his work? That article boggles my mind.