Free Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall

presenter much in Morris’s inventive mould. Not so for Morris and Jonathan Maitland: ‘I was trying to get out of Radio Bristol like nobody’s business,’ says Maitland. When he eventually achieved escape velocity it was to make it first as a reporter on Radio 4’s Today programme and then later on ITV.
    Meanwhile, back in his York penthouse flat, as he styled it in his radio shows, was Victor Lewis-Smith, another radio natural who was further down the road to recognition than Morris. Lewis-Smith started out on Radio York in 1983 and went on to contribute to Radio 4 shows as both a broadcaster and a producer. Evolving a breakneck, powerhouse style of his own as a performer of radio comedy, Lewis-Smith created lightning-fast, densely-packed sketches, often linked by manic tape winds. He multitracked multiple characters and did his own jingles in mocking BBC harmonies. He was, said Morris, a ‘fully loaded weapon’, 22 someone who had also come up through radio rather than stand-up and ‘unquestionably one of the few who’ve taken radio by the horns.’ 23 But Morris didn’t say it until much later in his career.
    From their broadcasting citadels in the 1980s, the princes of Bristol and York regarded one another with mutual suspicion. There might have been plenty of room for two talents like theirs to develop in tandem, but as young men with everything to prove it seemed they were trying to occupy exactly the same space, and a mutual loathing developed which, over the years, would be not so much barely disguised as played out in public at every opportunity. ‘There was a lot of snideness on both sides,’ says John Armstrong.
    In 1987 Lewis-Smith was a feature on Radio 4’s Loose Ends . He poked fun at anyone and everything, from Ned Sherrin downwards. With collaborator Paul Sparks, he would send contributions to the show as late as possible so that they could sneak more contentious material through, a technique Morris would later use to his own great advantage.
    Morris and Lewis-Smith followed each other’s work very closely. A senior colleague at Bristol observes that for Morris ‘it seemed to be quite an obsession’. He was getting national exposure with No Known Cure items appearing on Radio 4’s Pick of the Week , and it was only a matter of time before Ned Sherrin played a clip of one of Morris’s tapes on Loose Ends in January 1989, introducing it by drily commenting that Lewis-Smith was reportedly ‘thrilled’ about the ‘young broadcaster from the West Country’ as a precursor to what indeed was a very direct homage by Morris. He had perfectly caught the manic technical and presentation side of Lewis-Smith, he just hadn’t quite found his own voice at that time. But even at what was a fairly embryonic stage, there was a detectable sense of energy, of a ferocious talent ripping through a whole palette of broadcasting techniques, discarding what didn’t work and beginning to create something new out of what did.
    The process of development brought Morris into ever more frequent clashes with management. He had quickly established something of a familiar relationship with them on joining the station which many other staff never attained, but there was always something of an edge to it. ‘Chris is a guy who wants to challenge policies, practices and procedures all the time. And obviously he did so,’ says Roy Roberts. ‘He tended not to ask if he could do things; he’d try and do things to see what he could get away with.’ Up to a point, the battles were something that Roberts himself accepted as a part of working with Morris, whose show was gaining the cult audience the station had hoped for. Morris’s prank phone calls, a popular feature on the programme, regularly resulted in complaints. A football pools company went into panic when Morris asked if he could send in his entry after the game had been played. He was passed around the company, who seemed to think they were victims of a serious