Chris Morris (I)

Review: The Frequency of Laughter; Raw Meat Radio

There was much to laugh at on the radio last week, not least a three-hour tribute to Chris Morris.

Unheard Chris Morris Sketch Still Unheard

The planned Chris Morris broadcast is no longer happening.

Review: Raw Meat Radio (Chris Morris retrospective)

Raw Meat Radio on Radio 4 Extra showed the Brass Eye star wasn't just pushing at boundaries, he was pole-vaulting over the top of them and gleefully legging it over the horizon.

How Chris Morris' radio comedies electrified

The Day Today creator will debut a new radio sketch on Sunday. It's welcome news: from On the Hour to Blue Jam, radio is the medium that made him.

New Chris Morris sketch to air on BBC 6Music on Sunday

A sketch written by Chris Morris, Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding will be broadcast this Sunday on Mary Anne Hobbs' BBC 6Music show, which airs between seven and 10am.

In the 1990s, I used to do a Sunday afternoon show on the late, lamented GLR (now BBC London). There would only be one person on the premises when I turned up and this was a tall, intense cove who unfailingly enquired whether I planned to play anything by the Pixies. This, I discovered, was Chris Morris, laying the foundations of a broadcasting career which would see him repeatedly fired by the very people who are now gathering to celebrate his contribution to British humour in special seasons on Radio 4 Extra and programmes such as Raw Meat Radio (Saturday, 7pm, Radio 4 Extra). The latter features collaborators, admirers and occasional firers such as Armando Iannucci, David Quantick and Matthew Bannister. There's also a repeat of his Radio 1 series Blue Jam on 4Extra at 11pm on Friday. Incidentally, if the powers that be wish to know how they can reproduce the circumstances in which Chris Morris did a lot of his best stuff, they might care to note that he was paid next to no money, given no help, and left the hell alone. I fear there's very little of that in today's BBC.

5 excellent things about Comedy Vehicle series 3

Chris Morris, context, actual jokes ... a few thoughts on this rather excellent series.

The best film about Islamic terroists is a comedy

Chris Morris' Four Lions, released four years ago, skewers the pointlessness and confusion of wannabe jihadists.

Chris Morris's magnificent series of self-fulfilling prophecies reached its peak with its paedophilia special, spoofing kneejerk tabloid hysteria and corralling dumb celebrities to spout utter tosh (or "Nonce Sense", if you prefer) about how paedophiles share DNA with crabs. A media storm duly followed - the Daily Star's criticisms appearing next to photos of 15-year-old Charlotte Church looking "chest swell" - punctuated by politicians pompously denouncing the programme before having to admit that they hadn't actually seen it. Plus ça change.

In Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Stewart Lee made a confession. "I haven't seen Breaking Bad. I don't need to watch hundreds of hours of television about a man who supports his family by doing something he knows is beneath him."

We may speculate about the veracity of that remark. Lee may or may not have seen Breaking Bad but he's smart enough to know the value of good comedy. In fact, his weakness is a need to be too smart, a flaw he indulges in a format framed with a postmodern confessional in which Chris Morris pretends to be interrogating him, or at least lending a therapeutic ear to his comedic insecurities.

Lee protests too much, as he surely knows, and he might be better advised to park his vehicle and just deliver the comedy straight. Because, actually, he's a brilliant stand-up. You might call him fearless, except that all his jokes seem to be based on fearful self-loathing.

He is self-deprecating in the extreme, passive-aggressive and self-abusive, and - here's the scary bit - frighteningly truthful. Yes, he is capable of a baroque flourish, comparing himself, for example, to a "parasitical worm in a cat's anus", but his reflections on the other assorted horrors of middle-aged maleness are calibrated with precision. He is also one of the few comedians who understands the comic potential of the name "Andrew Graham-Dixon", though the market for routines about the presenter of The Culture Show is probably quite limited.