So it's 2010 in the year of our Morris, Lord of gibber, high preistly of piss archery and cocking Christ's modern dictionary of media quackery.
There's a book that's out now all about him called 'Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris' by Lucian Randall. It's quite good. Sort of a decent overview of the man who was there and in some cases concieved On The Hour/The Day Today/Brass Eye/Blue Jam and his new film Four Lions.
I don't want to really mention Nathan Barley. The book doesn't go into much depth about it either. I don't feel it really shame faced it's targets as it might. On the contrary. The Nathan Barely's out there seemed to bloody multiply. 'That's well Garnett, yeah!'
Morris has been called many things, a spotty geek, a media terrorist, the news rapist, a matrix trained gash manned upgraded Victor Lewis -Smith and a HTV ferret. In an alternate world that I've just made up, he is the actual Aphex Twin, doing time for shanking Jas Mann's 12"s. He's the fifth member of Kraftwerk. Most of his fans love him because he pisses off the tabloids, he pisses on minor self-important celebrities, not all hard targets, granted. He fucks with the minds of members of the public and politicians who will condem anything without having seen it. We've all done that, I suppose. I haven't read or watched the Twilight series, safe in the knoweldge that I already hate them and think that they are sick affronts to the genres of teen and horror and vampire fiction. Chris Morris pretty much makes us all feel like plebs. Not just builders and black people.
Importantly he really screws with the small minds of the Daily Mail and it's loyal damaged readership. I find this the most amusing and hypocritical of of all because it's the journalists who write for these rags that are clearly in denial about the language and techniques Morris exploits to display how it manipulates its consumers. I suspect the Mail, Express, the Sun and the Mirror are fully aware and in awe of Morris but despise him for using the tools of the trade to expose how ridiculoussness, mock seriousness and frothy mouthed, sensationalist panic mongering is the order of the day...today.
After listening to On The Hour and/or watching Brass Eye/The Day Today it is unfailingly impossible to take any tabloid news/print media seriously ever again, much less the breasted, puffed up Nicky Campbell and Jeremy Kyle going through their quest to unite middle england and council estates with their so called hard hitting crusades. Indeed you could be forgiven if any type of manfactured controversy, sensitive news stories can ever pass you by without the temptation to stifile a giggle. In many ways it's always been this way.
What you're left with when the smoke clears and the mirrors have been smashed is a fragile, insecure society of fuck up's. Fear prevails. Pissed up on booze, medicated to the groggy eyeballs with pointlessness and hopelessness, in a permenant state of autumnal bogginess. You really have to laugh. The alternative is far too horrific to contemplate. How could you not find not just the idea but the reality of, say, John McCririck, angrily denouncing the 'idea' of Suitcliffe! the musical about the imprisoned Yorkshire ripper? Or this?
The real controversial crimes out there isn't Morris exposing, observing or criticising the hypocrisy and pomp of the media but the fact that media/social monstrosities are allowed to go by unchecked, you know: Live at Studio Five, ego pieces in newspapers, Cheryl Cole and Wayne Rooney leading the news at the expense of bum rape in Burnley, X-Factor results, Balls of Steel, Danny Dyer, who killed archie? Susan Boyle...Laugh but quietly despise it all. It's the only power you have.
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