Free Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall Page B

to be renewed and, as managing editor Roy Roberts discreetly comments, because of the amount of work he was getting in London he didn’t want to stay on. When pushed on the detail, Roberts concedes, ‘I guess the accurate thing was that over a period his relationships with those who supervised his work at Radio Bristol got increasingly strained.’ It had essentially become impossible for Morris to work at the station any longer. In particular, he’d completely fallen out with programme organizer Malcolm Brammer, who had succeeded David Solomons. It might not have been the summary dismissal of legend, but it was genuinely sour. His final shows were broadcast in early 1990 and by March he had gone. Colleagues remember that there was very little ceremony as Morris gathered the piles of his tapes which he always kept by his desk and swiftly disappeared. The BBC retained nothing of his work.
    By the time Morris left for London, he had also split from Jane Solomons, though their break-up was far more amicable. She doesn’t cite a particular moment when it ended, just the sensation that they were going different ways. ‘We just drifted apart a bit, I suppose,’ she says. They had been together four or five years, she remembers, Morris at first commuting from Bristol back to Cambridge at weekends to see her. She remained in Bristol, where she had a successful career at HTV, becoming a presenter for the TV station.
    Long after his departure, the presence of Chris Morris hung around the studios of Whiteladies Road as a palpable influence – or like a bad smell, depending on your view of him. Alison MacPhail, who would later be a key member of Morris’s production crew on The Day Today and Brass Eye , started at Radio Bristol some months after he left. She remembers how his greatest moments were still very present in the collective memory. The prank phone calls, the news tweaking, the management baiting. Mostly the tone was admiring – nothing quite like him had ever passed through the station doors – but a fair disapproving few conceded the management point of view and thought he had got above himself.
    Newspapers later still came sniffing around for gossip about him in the wake of Brass Eye , and his friends took the opportunity to play along by loyally making up things which were frequently printed wholesale in the newspapers. Steve Yabsley claimed that Morris drank in the studio and managed to get the Independent to believe that he had an addiction to garlic and once came to work having cooked a chicken with twenty cloves. Even manager Roy Roberts could never quite bring himself to refute the story of Morris filling a studio with helium at Bristol. In reality, just as staff at Radio Cambridgeshire still believe the incident took place, only somewhere else, Roberts knows that Morris didn’t do it on his watch. But it was almost as if by perpetuating the myths, those around Morris were sharing in his impish spirit. And even those whose job it was to keep him in check could never resist finding out how that felt.
     
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R AW M EAT R ADIO
    IN OCTOBER 1988 A NEW AND DISTINCTIVE VOICE WAS HEARD in London. When GLR started broadcasting, it made the assumption that its listeners were intelligent but also liked rock and good pop music – and that all three things weren’t mutually exclusive. Chris Morris was part of the launch, and GLR would go on to play a prominent part in his career for the next five years. The capital’s BBC predecessor, Radio London, had failed even after a series of relaunches, and the new station was given the freedom to do what it wanted. It took a risk on unknown presenters and those who had been in the wilderness for various reasons to assemble a line-up who were positively encouraged to be daring.
    Morris did a Sunday show alongside his Radio Bristol programmes until 1990 and after that would leave GLR for extended periods to work on the first and then second series of On the Hour . But he kept