Free Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall Page A

plot to defraud them, and they threatened Roberts with the police. The problem for the station was that BBC editorial guidelines insisted that people should be told they were to be on air. ‘I hope he told them eventually that he’d made the recording for broadcast,’ says Roberts, adding less optimistically, ‘I’m not sure that he always did.’
    It was Morris’s irreverent attitude to the news which provided the most frequent battles with senior station staff, with a subversion that took many different forms. He couldn’t help it, he later said, it just ‘leaked through’. 24 Newsreaders doing a late slot would often get a buzz from Morris over the intercom. ‘Your task tonight is to use “colander” in the bulletin,’ he’d challenge. When he had to read the news himself in the course of his own programmes, particularly the late-night edition, he would sometimes add his own undermining remarks on the stories of the day. He even did the same to the national news; because that came down a feed one-way from the BBC in London, the newsreader wouldn’t have heard such additions as apple munching or newspaper rustling.
    ‘When I was reading the news,’ remembers John Armstrong, ‘he mainly indulged in comments or noises. Or sometimes just a word – “duffer”, “tosspot”. Roberts and [programme organizer Malcolm] Brammer used to hate it – undermining authority et cetera, et cetera.’ It was almost midnight one Friday, remembers Matt Sica, when they decided to see if they could provoke some reaction from the audience. ‘Chris was fed up because nobody was listening, we hadn’t had a phone call for half an hour and so he decided to really push the boat out. His voice got quieter and quieter, there was a long pause, and there was this quiet, muttered whisper of “Bollocks”. And we just waited. And nothing happened!’
    But while his despairing bosses might have disagreed, he wasn’t reckless in his mischief. He punctiliously checked the news bulletins to ensure that he wouldn’t be playing for laughs over some genuine major tragedy – a small but telling point that was frequently missed out in the retelling of exploits which were already beginning to form part of a growing Chris Morris legend.
    It was clear that his wayward inventiveness could not be constrained for long by Radio Bristol. By early 1990 Morris had been doing a weekly commute to London for nearly eighteen months, working on his Sunday show on GLR. It was only ninety minutes up the M4, but the two stations were planets apart in terms of their output. In the capital, Morris found himself working alongside creative presenters with an ambitious view of what radio could be that Bristol never even set out to match. He was still being featured on Pick of the Week and was branching out into print, including the successful transferral of some of his best features, such as DJ Wayne Carr, into amusing interviews with the NME in 1990. But though it never seemed likely that Morris would always be content in working only with what Bristol had to offer, when the end came in the early part of that year, it was sudden and unpleasant.
    In later press profiles of Morris it would routinely be said that he was sacked after commentating on the news. Like the story about him filling a studio with helium, the version of events went largely unchecked and would become a cornerstone of his reputation for being a dangerous and unstable character, a vile and repeated slur on his professionalism for which the source seemed to be largely Chris Morris. It was what he told friends such as Nick Barraclough who, on hearing what he had been up to, thought it ‘a fabulous thing to do, absolutely wonderful’, but at the same time told him, ‘I’m not surprised you’ve been sacked!’ It was a beguiling image – Morris yanked mid-broadcast from the studio by the burly bodyguards of news and slung out of the BBC.
    But Morris was still a freelancer whose contract had