Disgusting Bliss by Lucian Randall Read Free Book Online Page A

freedom. It was arranged that Morris would spend an early morning watching Nick Barraclough and his breakfast team.
    Barraclough was a smart, talented broadcaster who was passionate about his folk and country-based music. Articulate and warm, he had been brought up locally and played professionally in bands for ten years before making his radio debut with Radio Cambridgeshire. He regularly had people in on work experience but the arrival of Chris Morris was memorable. For the whole morning Morris sat in, Barraclough felt he was being watched with unnerving intensity. Most young hopefuls concentrated for a maximum of fifteen minutes before the glamour of BBC local radio wore off and they began to fidget, glaze over or read the morning papers. But as they chatted after the show, Morris quizzed Barraclough on certain techniques he’d observed. He was soon invited back. Nick was an encouraging figure who liked to see what people could do, and Morris demonstrated attractive qualities – he was bright, eager to learn and young. In other words, cheap.
    Well-spoken Morris was soon recording ‘packages’ – two- or three-minute local stories. It was something like an apprenticeship. He read the news, made documentaries and learned how to edit. Everything was on quarter-inch tape, which would be marked with a wax chinagraph pencil before a razor blade was used to cut the tape and it was spliced back together – the basis of all the techniques he would use, from building up basic packages to later more complicated editing for comic effect. And until digital technology took it all on to computer, it was the only way of doing things. ‘You could sit in that station all night and just fiddle about in the production area, turn tapes around, speeding stuff up and down,’ says Nick Barraclough. ‘Frankly, the technical side of radio is easy, if you’ve got common sense. But to do it the way that Chris did it, to think of it . . .’ The process of editing was physically demanding. Robert Katz, who later wrote with Morris, creates a vivid image of how advanced his skills would become when they worked together in London, talking of an obsessive approach to the art of editing: ‘the sheer complexity of his audio montage style used only analogue technology. Sometimes his fingers would be covered in dried blood the next day.’
    Dawn Burford had taken over from Jane Edwards in the radio car and Morris joined as her driving partner, working out how everything functioned and checking for overhead power lines so that the cumbersome telescopic aerial was extended up to something like twenty or thirty feet without causing unnecessary electrocution to either of them. His progress at the station was monitored by its managing editor, Ian Masters, and Morris was taken on as a freelance with rolling short-term contracts of around three months.
    The greatest chunk of output at the station was chokingly parochial, and there wasn’t enough of it. The BBC provided funding for only six hours of broadcast time and, in order for the fledgling station to have any chance to establish itself, it needed to stay on air from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It was not unusual for staff to work an eighteen-hour shift, which was if nothing else an opportunity for someone starting out to find inventive ways of creating programmes of a higher quality than the budget allowed. Morris, absorbed in the work, regularly stayed into the small hours.
    He graduated to presenting a drive-time show, having begun to fill in for absentees after six months at Radio Cambridgeshire: ‘I can remember tuning in one Christmas time,’ says Ian Masters, ‘listening to him and thinking, Yeah, that was good. That was a good show. This boy will go somewhere providing he perseveres and is willing to step along the hard way.’
    Morris got to know his way around the studio so well that presenters would come to him for tech support before they went to the BBC engineers. Colleague Jonathan Amos