Radio After graduating from university, Morris pursued a career as a musician in various bands, for which he played the bass guitar. He went to work for Radio West, a radio station in Bristol. He then took up a news traineeship with
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, where he took advantage of access to editing and recording equipment to create elaborate
spoofs and parodies. He also spent time in early 1987 hosting a 2–4pm afternoon show and later the Saturday morning show
I.T. In July 1987, Morris moved on to
BBC Radio Bristol to present his own show,
No Known Cure, broadcast on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The show was surreal and satirical, with odd interviews conducted with unsuspecting members of the public. He was fired from Bristol in 1990 after "talking over the news bulletins and making silly noises". In 1988 he also joined, from its launch,
Greater London Radio (GLR). He presented
The Chris Morris Show on GLR until 1993, when one show was suspended after a sketch was broadcast involving a child "outing" celebrities. In 1991, Morris joined
Armando Iannucci's spoof news project
On the Hour. Broadcast on
BBC Radio 4, it saw him work alongside Iannucci,
Steve Coogan,
Stewart Lee,
Richard Herring and
Rebecca Front. In 1996, Morris appeared on the daytime programme
The Time, The Place, posing as an academic, Thurston Lowe, in a discussion entitled "Are British Men Lousy Lovers?", but was found out when a producer alerted the show's host,
John Stapleton. The second episode for example, satirised drugs and the political rhetoric surrounding them. To help convey the satire, Morris invented a fictional drug by the name of "cake". In the episode, British celebrities and politicians describe the supposed symptoms in detail;
David Amess mentioned the fictional drug at Parliament. In 2001, Morris satirised the moral panic regarding paedophilia in the most controversial episode of
Brass Eye, "
Paedogeddon". Channel 4 apologised for the episode after receiving criticism from tabloids and around 3,000 complaints from viewers, which, at the time, was the most for an episode of British television. From 1997 to 1999, Morris created
Blue Jam for
BBC Radio 1, a surreal, taboo-breaking radio show set to an ambient soundtrack. In 2005 Morris worked on the sitcom
Nathan Barley, based on the character created by
Charlie Brooker for his website
TVGoHome (Morris had contributed to TVGoHome on occasion, under the pseudonym 'Sid Peach'). Co-written by Brooker and Morris, the series was broadcast on
Channel 4 in early 2005.
The IT Crowd and Comedy Vehicle Morris appeared in
The IT Crowd, a
Channel 4 sitcom which focuses on the information technology department of the fictional company Reynholm Industries. The series was written and directed by
Graham Linehan (with whom Morris collaborated on
The Day Today,
Brass Eye and
Jam) and produced by
Ash Atalla. Morris played Denholm Reynholm, the eccentric managing director of the company. This marked the first time Morris had acted in a substantial role in a project which he has not developed himself. Morris's character was killed off during episode two of the second series. His character made a brief return in the first episode of the third series. In November 2007, Morris wrote an article for
The Observer in response to
Ronan Bennett's article published six days earlier in
The Guardian. Bennett's article, "Shame on us", accused the novelist
Martin Amis of racism. Morris's response, "The absurd world of Martin Amis", was also highly critical of Amis; although he did not accede to Bennett's accusation of racism, Morris likened Amis to the Muslim cleric
Abu Hamza (who was jailed for
inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting that both men employ "mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Qu'ran" to incite hatred. Morris was a script editor for the 2009 series ''
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle'', with Lee, Eldon and Iannucci. He maintained this role for the second (2011) and third series (2014), also appearing as a mock interviewer dubbed the "hostile interrogator" in the third and fourth series.
Four Lions, Veep, and other appearances Morris completed his debut feature film
Four Lions in late 2009, a satire based on a group of Islamist terrorists in Sheffield. It premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival in January 2010 and was short-listed for the festival's World Cinema Narrative prize. The film (working title
Boilerhouse) was picked up by
Film Four. Morris told
The Sunday Times that the film sought to do for Islamic terrorism what the BBC sitcom ''
Dad's Army'' for the
Nazis by showing them as "scary but also ridiculous". In 2012, Morris directed the seventh and penultimate episode of the first season of
Veep, an Armando Iannucci-devised American version of
The Thick of It. In 2013, he returned to direct two episodes for the second season of
Veep, and a further episode for season three in 2014. In 2013, Morris appeared briefly in
Richard Ayoade's
The Double, a black comedy film based on the
Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella of the same name. Morris had previously worked with Ayoade on
Nathan Barley and
The IT Crowd. In February 2014, Morris made a surprise appearance at the beginning of a
Stewart Lee live show, introducing Lee with fictional anecdotes about their work together. The following month, Morris appeared in the third series of ''Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle'' as a "hostile interrogator", a role previously occupied by Iannucci. In December 2014, it was announced that a short radio collaboration with
Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade would be broadcast on BBC Radio 6. According to Fielding, the work had been in progress since around 2006. However, in January 2015 it was decided, 'in consultation with [Morris]', that the project was not yet complete, and so the intended broadcast did not go ahead.
The Day Shall Come A statement released by
Film4 in February 2016 made reference to funding what would be Morris's second feature film. In November 2017 it was reported that Morris had shot the movie, starring
Anna Kendrick, in the
Dominican Republic but the title was not made public. It was later reported in January 2018 that
Jim Gaffigan and
Rupert Friend had joined the cast of the still-untitled film, and that the plot would revolve around an FBI hostage situation gone wrong. The film,
The Day Shall Come, had its world premiere at
South by Southwest on 11 March 2019.
Music Morris often co-writes and performs incidental music for his television shows, notably with
Jam and the 'extended remix' version,
Jaaaaam. In the early 1990s Morris contributed a
Pixies parody track entitled "Motherbanger" to a
flexi-disc given away with an edition of
Select music magazine. Morris supplied sketches for British band
Saint Etienne's 1993 single "
You're in a Bad Way" (the sketch 'Spongbake' appears at the end of the 4th track on the CD single). In 2000, Morris collaborated by mail with
Amon Tobin to create the track "Bad Sex", which was released as a B-side on the Tobin single "Slowly". Anglo-French band
Stereolab's song "Nothing to Do with Me" from their 2001 album
Sound-Dust featured various lines from Chris Morris sketches as lyrics. == Style ==