How Chris Morris's radio comedies electrified the airwaves
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Version 0 of 1. Radio is where Chris Morris began. And radio, with its unwavering zeroing in on language and the cadence of speech, is where his work is often at its most absurd and beguiling. This weekend sees a repeat of Morris’ ghostly, ghastly Blue Jam, as well as the broadcast of a brand new radio sketch. Morris wrote and produced the new eight-minute sketch – which will premiere on Mary Anne Hobbs’ 6 Music show on Sunday – with The IT Crowd alumni Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding, who play the parts of an old man and his carer. The new sketch is redolent of Blue Jam, which was a hermetic world of guts and grime where people “vault through closed windows” and parents adopt laissez-faire attitudes to the abduction of their own progeny. Woozy Warp Records instrumentals danced around the background. “It’s In the Night Garden – in hell,” according to regular collaborator David Quantick, and it later appeared on Channel 4 in TV form as Jam. In his 2010 biography, Disgusting Bliss, Lucian Randall revealed that Morris began his radio career urinating on the BBC Radio Cambridgeshire radiocar to defrost the broadcasting aerial. He went on to present No Known Cure on Radio Bristol, but the new Radio 4 Extra retrospective Raw Meat Radio picks up the story when Morris is working for GLR and meets Armando Iannucci. Raw Meat Radio is a three-hour banquet of 1990s BBC archive and offcuts harvested from fansite Cookd and Bombd. It’s presented by Hobbs, whose Breezeblock show Morris contributed to. Raw Meat Radio has sketches from On the Hour – produced by Iannucci, and which featured writing by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, the late Steven Wells, and Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge debut – and formed the backbone of the breathtaking TV version, The Day Today, which itself celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. On the Hour, The Day Today and then Brass Eye ripped the self-satisfied news media of the time to shreds. And, as well as the hack-bashing of On the Hour and the surreal sludge of Blue Jam, Raw Meat Radio dredges up other Morris radio moments you might have forgotten. It’s interesting that, apart from On the Hour, none of this came via the Beeb’s natural comedy home, Radio 4. Morris’ improvised conversations with Peter Cook were titled Why Bother and broadcast on Radio 3, while Blue Jam and Morris’ more conventional show were on Radio 1. More conventional perhaps, but still provocative: it was on these Radio 1 programmes that Morris announced the death of both Michael Heseltine and Johnnie Walker, even calling up a French taxidermist to enquire about whether “le disque jockey” Walker could be stuffed. When Matthew Bannister is interviewed in Raw Meat Radio about suspending Morris for the Heseltine prank, you have to do the aural equivalent of a double take to check it’s not Last Word and the whole thing is an extended obituary. It comes with glorious tributes from people Morris has corralled in his ringmaster’s circus of satire: Iannucci, Quantick, Randall, Paul Garner and Peter Baynham, whom Morris instructs to “drag dead Johnnie Walker into our studio” at one point. No matter what moral point he’s ramming home, Morris’ work is electrifying. Using the tired old medium of paragraphs of prose written in a serious, broadsheet tone to describe a ruthless satirist with a surrealist’s eye who rewrote the rules of broadcasting seems unworthy of the man. Which is why I’ve written this piece stripped naked, slathered in marmalade, and surrounded by a hired herd of increasingly baffled-looking zebra. It’s what Chris would have wanted. • Blue Jam series 2 begins on Radio 4 Extra tomorrow on Friday night at 11pm. Chris Morris’ new sketch is on Mary Anne Hobbs’ 6 Music show on Sunday morning from 7am. Raw Meat Radio is available on iPlayer until the end of December. |