RADIO: 'Raw Meat Radio' - Chris Morris Documentary, BBC Radio 4 Extra

Chris Morris is known chiefly for his epithets – “Godlike Genius”; enfant terrible”; “Media Assassin/Terrorist”, and so on.

After his reputation he is known chiefly for his TV work of the 90s, especially The Day Today and even more especially Brass Eye.  And even even more especially the Brass Eye Special.  These news spoofs are indeed absolute classics (although not as flawless as hype would have you believe).  Because the targets of The Day Today and Brass Eye are news presentation they haven’t dated as much as you might fairly expect for programmes made before New Labour came to power.  Probably the most influentuial comedian of the 90s Morris was unique in having no roots in stand-up; he instead came to prominence through radio.

Raw Meat Radio was a documentary concentrating solely on this sometimes neglected aspect of his career, bypassing almost entirely the more familiar TV stuff.  For someone of Morris’ reputation there haven’t been that many insights into his work, and Raw Meat Radio was happy to do some oblige with some talking head material and stories about his career.  Its 3 hours were roughly divided into 3 sections – On The Hour, the Radio One Music Shows and Blue Jam.  

Looking back at On The Hour you find yourself unconsciously

comparing it to its TV incarnation, The Day Today, in a completely unfair way.  On The Hour hasn’t really held up as well as The Day Today has, or certainly not based on the episode included as part of the documentary.  It sounds too bitty, and some sections drag. On The Hour was a game-changer in Radio 4 comedy, brought a new generation of comics to the forefront of the media (especially Steve Coogan), and so on.  But the bits that work the best are mainly bits that sound somehow incomplete because these were perfected on TV.  The best section for me of the episode here was the clip of On The Hour from the 1950s, complete with received pronunciation newscasters and jazz music...

It’s the Radio One Music Show clips that sound the freshest out of all the material in the documentary, partly because it’s the least familiar but also because it sounds so much like Morris letting his hair down and having a laugh.  If you can track down the complete shows on the internet (and you definitely can) you can listen to a great blend of Britpop and Hip Hop from the mid 90s as well as some good old insanity.  (I came across the description ‘chummy psychosis’ somewhere on the internet and that’s as good as any)  Prank calls/interviews and surreal sketches with Peter Baynham about opening tortoises and the dead body of Johnny Walker are the highlights.  Sketches where Morris tells Paul Garner to humiliate himself in public are less interesting, although because of their unpredictability can still be funny.  Garner repeatedly refusing to go back into a shop to ask whether the owner has “been to hell” while Morris and Baynham scream at him is actually funnier than it would have been had he obeyed his orders.  In these sequences it seems pretty clear that Paul Garner is Morris’ dupe, the person we are really laughing at.  I’m not sure Paul Garner always realised this (as he says in the documentary – he could have easily stood in a corner quietly saying that he was obeying his crazy orders without any of the hassle).  It’s certainly the Music Shows where Morris’ skill for persuasion is at its most obvious.

The Music Shows were a bit of a headache for Morris’ boss Matthew Bannister who explains on the documentary that he had okayed a sketch about Michael Heseltine’s obiturary tapes as long as it was made clear Michael Heseltine wasn’t dead.  When Morris opened the show with the decidedly ambiguous “If we hear any news on the death of Michael Heseltine we’ll let you know” led to the show being pre-recorded not very long into its run.  This is probably the most notorious stunt from the Music shows, and at least 5 minutes is spent talking about it.  It’s interesting that Peter Baynham doesn’t hold it as a crowning glory of what they did on the show.  
The documentary moves on to Blue Jam, a project that Matthew Bannister helped bring to Radio 1  was a completely new direction for Morris –

it was a ‘dark’ sketch-show interlinked with monged-chilled records, and didn’t have anything to do with the news.  Listening to the sketches out of context of their show makes them seem unbearably slow-paced – the Unconcerned Parents (who show a shocking lack of interest in the disappearance and murder of their 6 year old son) seems to drag on and on.  Similarly, the Rothko the Dog monologue (“he’s not a very good dog, but he’s an even worse lawyer”) didn’t seem as funny.  I suspect that this is because the bright and breezy approach of the documentary sets completely the wrong mood for enjoying that sort of thing.  It’s funniest when you’re on the verge of falling asleep, not bookended by some reminiscing by the writer.  Even so, one of Blue Jam’s selling points was in fact its power to shock, and it sounded tamer than I remembered.  

3 hours is a long time to listen to a documentary about any subject, but if you’re interested in 90s comedy in general Raw Meat Radio should raise some interest.  It was planned for an old unheard Chris Morris sketch to be exhumed on 6Music the following Saturday, but this was cancelled at the 11th hour – the official line is for reasons of quality control than for any last minute censorship.  But maybe also for reasons of lack of interest.  Chris Morris has finished with radio but he is a genius at it – he is uniquely talented at using his voice to force people to enter his world, without them necessarily realising it.  Not only the unwitting members of the public but the listeners themselves are taken to strange places before they have time to realise what’s going on.    


Listen to Raw Meat Radio here