chris morris & four boundary-stretching comedy shows

in the channel 4 programme 'the comedians' comedian', a list compiled by comedy writers and performers, i was glad to see that chris morris came out close to the top



i first saw him in 1994 in the brilliant bbc2 news spoof 'the day today' which was originally a radio 4 show, 'on the hour' - he co-wrote 'the day today' with, amongst others, graham linehan and arthur matthews who went on to do 'father ted' and 'big train' and contributed material to other morris shows, steve coogan, whose alan partridge character was first introduced as sports presenter on the show, and armando iannucci, who also produced the mary whitehouse experience and subsequent alan partridge shows and who has written and presented a lot of great satirical tv and radio shows (the most recent being 'time trumpet')



i think 'the day today' is the best parody of a news show i've seen - segments which stand out in my memory are the swimming pool documentary with steve coogan as the security guard reciting a long list of the years where no one died in the pool in a deadpan monotone, collately sisters' surreal financial reports featuring 'the currency arse', barbara wintergreen's grisly american news-style reports featuring death row criminals being executed in imaginative ways and chris morris' trendy hip mtv-style presenter's music reports, one of which plumbed the depths of bad taste by featuring a skeleton swinging backwards and forwards across the screen from a rope fastened around its neck declaring itself to be ian curtis and saying why he liked watching the show - all linked together by chris morris' anchorman holding forth like an over-the-top jeremy paxman




in 1997 he developed the news parody further with his channel 4 series 'brass eye', a spoof of news documentaries where again he played a variety of characters - this was the series where he famously duped celebrities into promoting made up campaigns (such as "Free the United Kingdom From Drugs" and "British Opposition to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs" - the acronym of which comes out as F.U.K.D. & B.O.M.B.D.) or taking part in silly studio interviews which they thought were the real thing - his parody of pulp where he impersonates jarvis cocker singing a love song to moors murderer myra hindley is a classic



as is the 2001 paedophilia special which, at the time, registered more complaints in uk tv history than any other show in the days before before 'jerry springer: the opera', which now holds the record - it was fairly obvious morris was parodying the frenzied paranoia of the media which threw up the morally dodgy news of the world 'name and shame' campaign, the alarmingly thuggish and neanderthal reaction to this from a certain section of the population and the disturbing displays of uninformed mob-mentality which followed the publishing of the news of the world's list and photos



after the 'brass eye' series morris went back to radio, the medium in which he started as a dj in the late eighties, and made three series of comedy sketches for radio one called 'blue jam', which mixed surreal and disturbingly black comedy sketches with ambient music - a channel 4 late night tv version, 'jam', visually reinterpreted many of these audio sketches - the actors lipsynched their voices from the radio soundtrack and much of the material was shown in slow motion, giving the show a psychedelic drug-induced trip atmosphere - morris himself didn't play a big acting part in the show which i found disappointing, mainly restricting himself to the weird monologues which introduced each programme



he did take part in two memorable sketches, playing a dutch porn star discussing an unfortunate condition striking down his colleagues of unstoppable semen ejaculation resulting in death, and, as a witness to a suicide, he gives a detailed description of the death of a man who chooses to kill himself in a very unusual way



for me, 'jam' pushes the boundaries of comedy and taste more than any other tv sketch show i've ever watched - it's like a much darker version of 'big train', with which it shares a lot of its main actors



morris' most recent show, the channel 4 sitcom, 'nathan barley', was co-written with charlie brooker and was his first venture into situation comedy, satirising shallow media types whose talentless work is given status by and exposure through an internet and media obssessed society which is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between over-hyped garbage and intelligent, meaningful journalism - for me the most interesting part of the series is watching the painful progress of one of the central characters, the frustrated writer dan, played by 'mighty boosh' star julian barratt - out of all the characters, he is the only one with any outward self-awareness - through an article he writes about the crass stupidity of his fellow media colleagues, referring to them as 'the idiots', he is unwittingly adopted as their spokesman and given the title of 'preacher man' because they are far too thick and self-involved to understand that they are 'the idiots' - dan's disillusionment with the world he shares with the idiots is not helped by his laziness which prevents him from doing anything constructive to extricate himself from this banal, vacuous, self-important society of non-entities, a society in which he often becomes a fully-fledged member through his own apathy - his failed escape attempt in a scene from the first episode, where he pleads with the boss of a glossy upmarket magazine to take him on is embarrassingly cringe-worthy in exactly the same way that many classic moments from ricky gervais' spoof documentary 'the office' were



the last show i saw chris morris in was earlier this year, the new graham linehan comedy on channel 4, the IT crowd, which was hilarious - he played a completely mad, overbearing managing director (is there any other kind?) of a large company who intimidates his workers in many entertaining ways, most notably by threatening to sack anyone who is stressed out by the end of the day and firing on the spot a complete department of people for not working well as a team - this is the first time he's acted in a show without any writing or directing responsibilities - i look forward enthusiastically to his next self-penned project - until then the dvds of 'the day today,' 'brass eye,' 'jam' and 'nathan barley' will have to suffice



relevant humourous links...

www.thesmokehammer.com - contains a great video of george bush's state of the union speech re-edited in a most amusing way

www.warprecords.com/bluejam/barguide/ - an interesting guide to non-existent bars in london

http://chilled.cream.org/forums/portal.php - a website with downloads of radio shows in which chris morris has been involved - the loose ends snippet and his 1993 rant about the launch of virgin radio are very funny