Chris Morris's Last Tape

Those are the subheadlines. God I wish they weren't

Other than being one of the last unfallen British 90s comedians, what sets apart Chris Morris? Punking celebrities, politicians and the public, satirising news media have been done before and since. What else makes Morris Morris?

In my Best of ’22 post, I quoted Borges calling Joyce, “a millionaire of voices and styles”. So too are Morris & co. From radio show On The Hour onwards, through to The Day Today, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, and even the US-set Veep, theirs is a comedy that’s developed its own English idiolect, as distinctive a verbal signature as Martin Amis’s or Iris Murdoch’s.

People love to quote comedies especially, in part to stake out their sensibility and sense of humour. This can give it a competitive edge; see the hipper-than-thou oneupmanship of Chris Finch and David Brent in The Office. But quotations are also citing evidence: of why something is good. Here’s a sample of consistently good Morrisese, as well as a survey of its many voices and styles:

• Most well known is Morris’s Paxmanesque news anchor, ranging from low-level contempt to blimpish outrage, like how he berates his colleague Peter O’Hanra-hanrahan, “When you cross the road, don’t bother looking”, or the promo for The Day Today where he yells, “I HATE Sebastian Coe!”

• Morris is just as good at the smarmy faux-friendliness of current affairs talkshow hosts: “Who says AIDS guys are puny?! This guy’s got AIDS and he’s about to beat me in an arm wrestle! Well done!”

• From smarm to genteelisms, the irregular syntax of which Morris likes to parody, as with his character Austin Tasseltine’s, “Proof, if proof be need be.”

• He also parodies twee archaisms, like when he cites those who scoff at urban decay: “Others say tish and fipsy.” (Good name that for a detective duo in a cosy-crime novel.)

• At the same time he spans social registers, whether it’s an East End weasel-fighter boasting, “Women, they fancy you if they see you kicking the shit out of a weasel”; or middle class druggie drivel: “I don’t want to end up triple-jacked over a steeple-hammer with a jessop jessop jessop jessop”; or the waffle of a toff justifying his sport-hunting: “The fox feels nothing. It’s made of string.”

• He can also seemingly do any regional UK accent, from the smug Mancunian of “It’s in a jar, mate” (explaining where your nose might end up after too much coke) to East Country twang, finickily different to West Country: “He was let free on a technicaality.” (He’s also great at celebrity impressions - I wonder if this is part of his kinship with Kayvan Novak - listen to him on The Adam Buxton Podcast doing both sides of an interview between actor Steven Berkoff and playwright Anthony Clare. And he’s a great musical impressionist: see his soundalike versions of Nirvana, Pulp (or ‘Blouse’), creepy glam-rock, 90s hip-hop, and best of all The Pixies parody, ‘Motherbanger’.)

• Morris-English comes in a US variety. Varieties rather. Again, Morris & co. really hear how various American media voices sound, whether it’s the crass humour of a radio shock-jock: “More like dongress” (“I can’t believe you said that!” guffaw his cronies) or that particular accent known as ‘cable newscaster’: “Thick ropey mucaaas,” says a male version; while a female version talks in euphemisms grosser than what they cover up: “And proceeded to manipulate them to issue.” Morris collaborator Doona Mackichan even nailed the snippy patter of Camille Paglia: “But do we listen? No, we just weep like teased vaginas.”

• Morris nails the high-style grandiloquence of moral panics, such as, “Science! You are accused of going too far! Of intoxifaction and the pollutement of men’s minds.” Then there’s the words he gave to UK Gladiator, Wolf, to protest a zoo not helping an elephant with his trunk stuck up his anus—Wolf’s awkward delivery becomes a kind of metered verse, the beautifully paid-off bathos in: “He needs Wolf Power. Or he will explode. In a shower, of pulped yams.”

• Morris takes special glee in grammatical clogs and snags, which are all the more ear-wormy for it. There’s his drill sergeant screaming, “Where’s your self-re-cocking-spect?!” Or the robotic barbarisms of tabloid headlines in The Day Today: LORD MAYOR’S PIROUETTE IN FIRE-CHIEF WIFE DECAPITATION

• Similar are his many mispronunciations. I don’t think I’ve pronounced the word ‘metaphor’ correctly since Morris as reporter Ted Maul gave us the line delivery, “Sick’s a sort of metaffer for the state of things in Cosick.”

• He has a great ear for jargon, too, like naming the part of the brain that deals with time perception ‘Shatner’s bassoon’, or a condition that makes you masturbate in public ‘Prestadigwig’s Congina’.

• And an ear for English slang; in the spirit of real-world terms such as ‘happy-slapping’ his juvenile delinquents go ‘git-surfing’ (def. piggyback joyriding old people); or coin-minting non-sequiturs like, “as gay as a window.”

• What really sets apart Morris is his cockiness in making certain jokes almost indiscernible, like the pun in “FAGATTA!” which we see as a tabloid headline about a closeted navy captain. And as for the purely aural, it took me ages to get the pun in Morris’s weary statement on the social permissiveness of the decade: “These are less the nineties and more the ja-danketies.”

• And from here to the full-on absurd. Pynchonian place names like ‘Wabznasm’ or character names like ‘Accelorata Jengold’. Long flights of surreality like the list of nicknames with which a reporter accosts a paedophile: “You’re a Unabummer, you’re a nut administrator, you’re a bent ref, you’re The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.” And from the same episode of Brass Eye, a speech as bejewelled as the rhapsody of clichés in the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses: “The orgy of sly-winking usury only came to an end with a stairwell nonce-bashing, which left North braindead and quadraspazzed on a life-glug.”

What unifies all of these? What’s the point of Morris’s anti-poetry of bad taste and dead language, why this obsession with clichés, jargon, slang, cant, guff? With English at its most twaddly?

A clue is in who else he gets to say his words: either lampooned interviewees or gullible talking-heads:

• There’s the pretentious muso chat he gets out of Babylon Zoo’s Jas Mann: “Have you ever written a spherical song?” / “No.” / Has Michael Nyman? / “He’s getting there.”

• And the wannabe street-smart gab of DJ Tommy Vance addressing young offenders: “I want to take your bad half outside and do it a severe physical discourtesy and then take your good half out for a pint of foaming, nut-brown ale. Cheers!”

• Or Morris asking a coolly credulous Brett Easton Ellis if his novel was “all chapter, no book?”

• Or getting Thatcher’s Press Secretary Bernard Ingham to say, “Use your cheese box! Say no to cake!” which, as Bernard Manning explained, is a made-up drug. (“It’s not made from plants. It’s made from chemicals, by sick bastards.”) With similar macho outrage to Ingham’s, Manning asks of one cake-victim, “Imagine ’ow ’is mother felt. It’s a fuggen disgrace.”

• Or the own-goal Morris draws from Phil Collins saying, “I’m talking nonce sense.”

• Finally, the contrived earnestness of Noel Edmonds (a favourite target) when he says, “Stay safe. And I do mean: stay safe.”

These famous people, the way they talked, what they were willing to say or read out were proof of what Morris satirised. And in an age where our screens are awash with the talk of Madeley and Piers Morgan, the lesson of Morrisese still stands.

“And today, we saw Richard Madeley beating up a cleaner. And later being apprehended for fucking a coffee machine.” - Jam

For the thing Morris and his co-writers were sensitive to was the flip-side of English eloquence and wit and pithiness, of Churchillian bombast or Stephen Fry on audiobook. It’s the language’s fertile capacity for what Morris called the “pig-ignorant and stultifyingly ill-informed”. English might be Shakespeare but it’s also the inane buzzwords of our PR’d politicians, the received pronunciation and received wisdom of our journalists, and the pabulum of our rent-a-gob celebrities. John Bull is really John Bullshit.

Morris-collaborator Charlie Brooker once said, “satire is a sarcastic version of reality.” Morrisese is a sarcastic version of English. He doesn’t just regurgitate it, he exaggerates it to absurd points which attest to the strength of his contempt. It’s like the heat of his contempt warps English into monstrous versions of itself, which give the lie to its inherent monstrosity.

If Morris’s USP is his language does that mean his best work isn’t on-screen? Richard Geefe, the Second Class Male, a columnist he invented and co-wrote with Richard Katz, is a rare gem of print prose. And The Day Today had a precursor in his and Armando Iannucci’s Radio 4 show On The Hour. But if you want pure verbal Chris Morris then there’s Why Bother?

Why Bother? was a short-lived, not-widely-enough-heard series of hostile and nonsensical radio interviews Chris Morris conducted with one Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, played by Peter Cook. Topics included Sir Arthur’s caddish behaviour as a POW, and his archaeological discovery of the mummified larvae of premature Christs.

The series was a showcase for both comedians’ flair for surreal improv, but without the constraints of having to mug for a live audience, while at the same time being built out of flashes of live inspiration which were polished by Morris in the edit. (Lucian Randall’s book on Chris Morris, Disgusting Bliss has the full story.)

When Morris interviewed celebrities elsewhere it was to sucker them into speaking crap, a fate they earned through their eagerness to appear on any media; whereas with Why Bother? the celeb was in on the gag. But that didn’t mean the series lacked Morris’s provocativeness. Despite his admiration for Cook, the series wasn’t a mutual jerkoff: in one episode Morris mocked the old and visibly unwell Cook as not being long for this world—not out of cruelty, mind, but to see what new funny edge he could push the veteran comedian to.

Yet there’s still something pure about Why Bother? As well as both comedians’ commitment to the bit, the show feels singular. We’re getting bored now of spoof-interviews, the format reaching a smug limit with Sacha Baron Cohen, a comedian once as ruthless as Morris but now more likely to have his showbiz pals in on the joke at the expense of out-crowd plebs. (Whatever Chris Morris’s rarely divulged politics, you imagine there’s no one of any stripe he wouldn’t have at). As for surreal comedy, had broadcasting rules been laxer earlier, you can imagine Monty Python doing a sketch where a sobbing y-fronted man spanks a fat woman over a tree-bough while she sings Minnie Ripperton’s ‘Loving you is easy coz you’re beautiful’, as Morris & co. did with Jam.

Why Bother? is more singular, more essential, not because it’s the funniest necessarily, though it is very funny. It’s not the richest or most comprehensive or outrageous work Morris ever made. It’s essential in that it’s what you might show to someone ignorant of Morris so they got what he’s about. And yet even though Why Bother? was a purely verbal format where Morris could show off his linguistic prowess, and even though it’s considered a cult classic, the series still isn’t the connoisseurs’ choice, the most Morrisy Morris.

Gay as a window

Not least because the real star of Why Bother? is Peter Cook. Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, the clueless dubious old gent, is a character Cook had already created for 1960s sketch comedy show Not only… but also. Cook’s contributions to Why Bother? are so inspired and never wrong-footed by Morris that the latter gave him a co-writer credit. As an initially sceptical Morris himself said:

I held out no great hopes that he wouldn’t be a boozy old sack of lard with his hair falling out and scarcely able to get a sentence out, because he hadn’t given much evidence that that wouldn’t be the case. But, in fact, he stumbled in with a Safeways bag full of Kestrel lager and loads of fags and then proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper. Really quite extraordinary.

(from http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/spiggott/morris.htm)

Chris Morris was to return to the foreground and to radio only a few years later. After Why Bother? on Radio 3, he was given the graveyard slot at Radio 1 for the show Blue Jam, audio precursor to the TV show Jam, as discombobulating an experience for an unprepared listener as Too Many Cooks would be for the late-night stoners watching Adult Swim.

While radio show On The Hour was superseded by the TV show The Day Today, the radio show of Blue Jam was superior to its TV version, but not because of any difference in quality. Blue Jam as nothing but voices, sound effects and parody electronica, wormed from your headphones deep into your psyche. From Joyce we’ve arrived at Samuel Beckett; the intros alone were like the voice from Krapp’s Last Tape giving you “GBH of the ol’ lughole” as Morris said to Frankie Fraser. “Welcome in Jam,” the intros concluded, the jarringly wrong preposition setting the tone. Even the name of the show ‘Blue Jam’ has a wrongness to it. Listening to a lot of Blue Jam in one go is a disturbingly mystical experience. No wonder Will Self likened Chris Morris to a god.

Blue Jam exploited its audio-only format in thorough and throughly dark ways. There’s the snooped-on sex chat of a couple, whose naturally idiosyncratic kinks veer into the freakish: “Shit your leg off… Make your spunk come out green… Sell me a newspaper.” / “Standard!” Or there’s Archers-style radio plays, with all their stagey foley and sighs, but as though written by Marquis de Sade. (Warning: this sketch was banned from the BBC.)

So should you still bother with Why Bother? Yes, because it’s the most artful example of Morris’s standard tack of ‘media psycho interviews clueless politician.’ Most artful because all fictional, hence more original, controlled, less dependant on real-world randomness. And, with no disrespect to Morris’s other sparring partners (who are all to a woman and man great: Steve Coogan, Patrick Marber, David Schneider, Gina McKee, Rebecca Front etc.) but Peter Cook was a legendary match-up for Morris, the kind of pairing you might daydream about with others, like Don Rickles meets Groucho Marx. Meanwhile, why should Blue Jam be your jam? Because it, on the other hand, is crystallised, flavour-intensified Chris Morris. Freebase Morris, only for the real Morris-heads. It’s Morris’s Gravity’s Rainbow, his Finnegans Wake, his sicko Silmarillion.

He may have gone on to mainer-stream film and TV success with Four Lions and Veep (not only directing some of the show’s best episodes but providing the voice of a newscaster in a little tribute to himself). But it’s in his radio work that Morris most cleanly and articulately expresses his genius, demonstrating that English is at its most compelling not when it’s sonorous and lyrical and pretty like a John Banville book but bent out of shape, when you harness your grim fascination with the language’s lowest registers to take it somewhere gross and strange and new. As Walter Benjamin said of pornography:

Just as Niagara Falls feeds power stations, in the same way the downward torrent of language into smut and vulgarity should be used as a mighty source of energy to drive the dynamo of the creative act.

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Dedicated to the memory of Glyn, with whom I watched my first Chris Morris, and who liked quoting his favourite lines like, “Crime is confusing!”, “fleeced on the cobbles”, “a rattly pair of old puffins”, “Crouched with police”, and “Technology!” He always quoted them with such glee.