Chris Morris is a Jesuit school educated anarchic British comedian who produced arguably the best comedy in the country in the early-mid 1990s. Known to some as the manic boss in TV series The IT Crowd Morris began his career at BBC Bristol going to BBC Greater London Radio, BBC Television in The Day Today and Channel 4 with most moves being forced not by choice but by Chris Morris comedy items attacking his media bosses leading to his being sacked.
If the right-wing media liked to portray Morris as a threat to our moral fabric, Raw Meat Radio, a glorious three-hour retrospective on Radio 4 Extra presented by Mary Anne Hobbs, painted him as a merry prankster and satirist who wasn't just pushing at boundaries, he was pole-vaulting over the top of them and gleefully legging it over the horizon. Morris made in his name on radio on programmes such as Why Bother?, On the Hour and Blue Jam, and amassed an impressive collection of P45s from Radio Bristol, London's GLR and Radio 1. Thus, the programme's delve into the archives yielded all manner of anarchic and rarely heard treasures, from Morris's phone call to a receptionist at United Airlines in which he asked whether planes sniff the building when they pull into the airport gate, to his instructions to his collaborator Paul Garner to douse himself in TCP before hailing a taxi and then insisting to the driver that he check that the indicators were working. It took roughly five minutes for the driver to lose his temper. Morris was a man who railed against convention, loathed pomposity and piety, and revelled in the surreal. Stories abound of him filling his rivals' studios with helium, though, according to his biographer Lucian Randall, "the vile slurs on Chris Morris's professionalism seemed to be started by Chris Morris." Even so, his capacity to push a prank into the realms of bum-clenching embarrassment was second to none. "There's something about going through that pain barrier that becomes funny," noted totally unfunny interloper Armando Iannucci, Morris's very junior partner in crime on the spoof news programme On The Hour (sample headline: "Man with glass face too disgusting for trial, rules judge").
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