Chris Morris (I)

Chris Morris on his newest film 'The Day Shall Come'

British comedian and filmmaker Chris Morris has made a career of combining scathing comedy with news-worthy topicality.

Chris Morris on 'The Day Shall Come'

In a rare interview, the man behind some of the U.K.'s most influential and incendiary satire discusses his long-awaited follow-up to Four Lions and shifting his satirical skewer to U.S. shores.

The Day Shall Come review

Chris Morris returns with wild farce.

The Day Today is still predicting the future of TV news

"It's a programme designed to knock current affairs broadcasting off its axis," the Radio Times wrote in 1994, "then blow a hole in its spluttering head". It did nothing of the sort.

How The Day Today changed satire forever

25 years ago, Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci's uproarious news spoof unleashed Fake News on the world (not to mention Alan Partridge).

How The Day Today could have been made for 2019

When The Day Today was first broadcast on 19 January 1994, its rambunctious, attention-demanding presentation and news items on 'bomb dogs' the theft of the pound and wild horses running amok on the London Underground was obvious satire. But revisiting Chris Morris' sharp-as-a-tack spoof today, the lines somehow blur.

Chris Morris returns to satirising the war on terror

Chris Morris's new film, The Day Shall Come, revisits Four Lions's satire on the war on terrorism and draws upon the life of Malcolm X.

Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's prophetic Channel 4 sitcom skewered east London hipster culture to a tee through its odious protagonist, a self-proclaimed "self-facilitating media node" and purveyor of witless viral videos via his website TrashBat.co.ck (registered in the Cook Islands).

But the show's true concern was the plight of depressed journalist Dan Ashcroft (Julian Barrett), surviving unhappily in the offices of Sugar Ape, too ill-motivated and sickened by the buffoons around him to better himself. His article "Rise of the Idiots", in which he takes his tormentors to task, only makes matters worse, proving a hit and seeing him hailed as "Preacher Man" by the same fools he sought to destroy.

His sister Claire (Claire Keelan), an aspiring and idealistic documentarian, is similarly thwarted by Barley and his kind.

Ashcroft's failed interview at The Sunday Times, where he humiliates himself by stating a preference for "Dutch wine", is excruciating and made worse by his having to return contrite to Hosegate to retract his resignation from Charlie Condou's withering editor, Jonathan Yeah? (the question mark added by deed poll), who gloats deliciously.

Chris Morris - the master satirist of his day - followed his TV news spoofs On the Hour (1991-92) and The Day Today (1994) with this glorious send-up of investigative journalism.

Again starring Morris in stentorian, Paxmanesque anchorman mode, the series tackled such weighty themes as animal welfare and drugs in ludicrous fashion, conning well meaning and/or publicity hungry celebrities into endorsing bogus causes without bothering to do their research. The show's overblown graphics were particularly inspired.

Brass Eye's "Paedogedon!" special caused uproar in 2001 but the sight of pop star Phil Collins wearing a baseball cap promoting "Nonce sense" belongs to the ages.

The provocations of Sacha Baron Cohen's recent Who is America? owe a huge debt to Morris.

Meet Brass Eye, the original Who Is America?

The premiere of Sacha Baron Cohen's new show, Who Is America?, surprised viewers by exposing the incredible lengths some politicians and pundits will go to when provided with a teleprompter to read from while on a legitimate-looking television set. Fans of British satirist Christopher Morris's 1997 TV show Brass Eye, however, were already well-aware of this phenomenon.