Chris Morris (satirist)

On graduating, Morris pursued a career as a musician in various bands, for which he played the bass guitar. He then went to work for Radio West, a local radio station in Bristol. He then took up a news traineeship with BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, where he took advantage of access to editing and recording equipment to create elaborate spoofs and parodies.[13] He also spent time in early 1987 hosting a 2–4pm afternoon show and finally ended up presenting Saturday morning show I.T.

In July 1987, he moved on to BBC Radio Bristol to present his own show No Known Cure, broadcast on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The show was surreal and satirical, with odd interviews conducted with unsuspecting members of the public. He was fired from Bristol in 1990 after "talking over the news bulletins and making silly noises".[14] In 1988 he also joined, from its launch, Greater London Radio (GLR). He presented The Chris Morris Show on GLR until 1993, when one show got suspended after a sketch was broadcast involving a child "outing" celebrities.[15]

In 1991, Morris joined Armando Iannucci's spoof news project On the Hour. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, it saw him work alongside Iannucci, Steve Coogan, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring and Rebecca Front.[3] In 1992, Morris hosted Danny Baker's Radio 5 Morning Edition show for a week whilst Baker was on holiday. In 1994, Morris began a weekly evening show, the Chris Morris Music Show, on BBC Radio 1 alongside Peter Baynham and 'man with a mobile phone' Paul Garner. In the shows, Morris perfected the spoof interview style that would become a central component of his Brass Eye programme. In the same year, Morris teamed up with Peter Cook (as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling), in a series of improvised conversations for BBC Radio 3 entitled Why Bother?.

In 1994, a BBC Two television series based on On the Hour was broadcast under the name The Day Today. The Day Today made a star of Morris, and marked the television debut of Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character. The programme ended on a high after just one series, with Morris winning the 1994 British Comedy Award for Best Newcomer for his lead role as the Paxmanesque news anchor.[17][3][18]

In 1996, Morris appeared on the daytime programme The Time, The Place, posing as an academic, Thurston Lowe, in a discussion entitled "Are British Men Lousy Lovers?", but was found out when a producer alerted the show's host, John Stapleton.[17]

In 1997, the black humour which had featured in On the Hour and The Day Today became more prominent in Brass Eye, another spoof of current affairs television documentary, shown on Channel 4. All three series satirised and exaggerated issues expected of news shows.[19] The second episode of Brass Eye, for example, satirised drugs and the political rhetoric surrounding them.[19][20] To help convey the satire, Morris invented a fictional drug by the name of "cake". In the episode, British celebrities and politicians describe the supposed symptoms in detail; David Amess mentioned the fictional drug at Parliament. In 2001, Morris' satirized the moral panic regarding pedophilia in the most controversial episode of Brass Eye, "Paedogeddon". Channel 4 apologised for the episode after receiving criticism from tabloids and around 3,000 complaints from viewers, which, at the time, was the most for an episode of British television.[19]

From 1997 to 1999, Morris created Blue Jam for BBC Radio 1, a surreal taboo-breaking radio show set to an ambient soundtrack.[1] In 2000, this was followed by Jam, a television reworking.[1] Morris released a 'remix' version of this, entitled Jaaaaam.[1]

In 2002, Morris ventured into film, directing the short My Wrongs#8245–8249 & 117, adapted from a Blue Jam monologue about a man led astray by a sinister talking dog. It was the first film project of Warp Films, a branch of Warp Records. In 2002 it won the BAFTA for best short film.[21] In 2005 Morris worked on a sitcom entitled Nathan Barley, based on the character created by Charlie Brooker for his website TVGoHome (Morris had contributed to TVGoHome on occasion, under the pseudonym 'Sid Peach'[22]). Co-written by Brooker and Morris, the series was broadcast on Channel 4 in early 2005.

Morris appeared in The IT Crowd, a Channel 4 sitcom which focuses on the information technology department of the fictional company Reynholm Industries. The series was written and directed by Graham Linehan (with whom Morris collaborated on The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam) and produced by Ash Atalla. Morris played Denholm Reynholm, the eccentric managing director of the company. This marked the first time Morris had acted in a substantial role in a project which he has not developed himself. Morris' character appeared to leave the series during episode two of the second series. His character made a brief return in the first episode of the third series.

In November 2007, Morris wrote an article for The Observer in response to Ronan Bennett's article published six days earlier in The Guardian. Bennett's article, "Shame on us", accused the novelist Martin Amis of racism. Morris' response, "The absurd world of Martin Amis", was also highly critical of Amis; although he did not accede to Bennett's accusation of racism, Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed for inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred.[23]

Morris served as script editor for the 2009 series Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, working with former colleagues Stewart Lee, Kevin Eldon and Armando Iannucci. He maintained this role for the second (2011) and third series (2014), also appearing as a mock interviewer dubbed the "hostile interrogator" in the third and fourth series.

Morris completed his debut feature film Four Lions in late 2009, a satire based on a group of Islamist terrorists in Sheffield.[25] It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010 and was short-listed for the festival's World Cinema Narrative prize.[26] The film (working title Boilerhouse) was picked up by Film Four.[27] Morris told The Sunday Times that the film sought to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad's Army, the classic BBC comedy, did for the Nazis by showing them as "scary but also ridiculous".[28]

In 2012, Morris directed the seventh and penultimate episode of the first season of Veep, an Armando Iannucci-devised American version of The Thick of It.[29] In 2013, he returned to direct two episodes for the second season of Veep, and a further episode for season three in 2014.

In 2013, Morris appeared briefly in Richard Ayoade's The Double, a black comedy film based on the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella of the same name. Morris had previously worked with Ayoade on Nathan Barley and The IT Crowd.

In February 2014, Morris made a surprise appearance at the beginning of a Stewart Lee live show, introducing the comedian with fictional anecdotes about their work together.[30] The following month, Morris appeared in the third series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle as a "hostile interrogator",[31] a role previously occupied by Armando Iannucci.

In December 2014, it was announced that a short radio collaboration with Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade would be broadcast on BBC Radio 6.[32] According to Fielding, the work had been in progress since around 2006.[33] However, in January 2015 it was decided, 'in consultation with [Morris]', that the project was not yet complete, and so the intended broadcast did not go ahead.[34]

A statement released by Film4 in February 2016 made reference to funding what would be Morris' second feature film.[35] In November 2017 it was reported that Morris had shot the movie, starring Anna Kendrick, in the Dominican Republic[36] but the title was not made public. It was later reported in January 2018 that Jim Gaffigan and Rupert Friend had joined the cast of the still-untitled film, and that the plot would revolve around an FBI hostage situation gone wrong.[37] The completed film, titled The Day Shall Come, had its world premiere at South by Southwest on 11 March 2019.[38]

Morris often co-writes and performs incidental music for his television shows, notably with Jam and the 'extended remix' version, Jaaaaam. In the early 1990s Morris contributed a Pixies parody track entitled "Motherbanger" to a flexi-disc given away with an edition of Select music magazine.[39] Morris supplied sketches for British band Saint Etienne's 1993 single "You're in a Bad Way" (the sketch 'Spongbake' appears at the end of the 4th track on the CD single).

In 2000, he collaborated by mail with Amon Tobin to create the track "Bad Sex", which was released as a B-side on the Tobin single "Slowly".[40] British band Stereolab's song "Nothing to Do with Me" from their 2001 album Sound-Dust featured various lines from Chris Morris sketches as lyrics.[41]

Morris won the Best TV Comedy Newcomer award from the British Comedy Awards in 1994 for his performance in The Day Today.[49] He has won two BAFTA awards: the BAFTA Award for Best Short Film in 2002 for My Wrongs #8245–8249 & 117,[21] and the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut by a British director, writer or producer in 2011 for Four Lions.[50]

• Various works at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (1986–1987) (presenter)
• No Known Cure (July 1987 – March 1990, BBC Radio Bristol) (presenter)
• Chris Morris (1988–1993, BBC GLR) (presenter)
• Morning Edition (July 1990, BBC Radio 5) (guest presenter)
• The Chris Morris Christmas Show (25 December 1990, BBC Radio 1)
• On the Hour (1991–1992, BBC Radio 4) (co-writer, performer)
• It's Only TV (September 1992, LWT) (unbroadcast pilot)
• Why Bother? (1994, BBC Radio 3) (performer, editor)
• The Chris Morris Music Show (1994, BBC Radio 1) (presenter)
• Blue Jam (1997–1999, BBC Radio 1) (writer, director, performer, editor)
• Second Class Male/Time To Go (1999, newspaper column for The Observer)
• The Smokehammer (2002, website)
• Absolute Atrocity Special (2002, newspaper pullout for The Observer)