Disgusting Bliss Page 2
Morris drove the ancient, battered Merc he’d had for years to meet Iannucci at BBC Radio in Portland Place. As Morris was illegally parked, they quickly went back to his car. A fruitless cruise for spaces around the block gradually turned into a mobile meeting and the start of a partnership which would last for years. ‘We spent about two hours driving around and around Broadcasting House,’ said Iannucci. ‘And I thought, Well, this is interesting. The fact that I can talk to him for two hours and it just feels normal is a good start, really. And we found we liked the same sort of comedy, so we just clicked instantly.’2 It wasn’t just humour, radio and an interest in news and politics that they had in common. As kids they had both been Jesuit-educated and discovered they shared a couple of the same teachers between their respective schools.
The two worked on a pilot completed in April 1991. As a trusted producer, Iannucci was largely left alone to get on with a show for which there was little direct precedent. Comedy featuring the news tended to be either topical jokes about people in the news or the two Ronnies sat at a desk doing gags in their own voices. Even shows like Radio Active, which Iannucci cited as a favourite, alongside Rutland Weekend Television, had been recorded with an audience as a sketch show without going into the minutiae of the business of broadcasting news. The On the Hour team struggle now to recall much in the way of direct influences on the very specific take-off of the genre. There was nobody doing that improvisational, serious approach to spoofing – at least not in the UK. If there was anything at all, for the likes of Dave Schneider and Armando Iannucci, it was to be found from the US in the 1984 movie This is Spinal Tap, the closest cousin in terms of the approach. Its target might have been rock music – specifically heavy metal on the road being quite a ridiculous sight in all its self-regarding pomposity – but like On the Hour it seemed very much as if it could be true and clearly had an affection for the adolescent obsessions of metallers and a feel for the inherent tragedy of the ageing rocker.
On the Hour was to be a magazine show featuring news, sport, weather, finance, environment news and special features. Morris was the anchor, the main presenter, and also played other reporters and interviewees. As in real news shows, his items would be edited and dropped in as complete ‘packages’. Then there was a team of writers and actors who worked almost exclusively with Iannucci. With the overall shape of the programme dictated by Morris and Iannucci, they created the rest of the regular reporters and characters. Ideas either supplied by the writers or less frequently worked up in rehearsals would be developed through improvisation in the studio, and the humour was to come through the contrast between the straight performances and the nonsense content. The choice of cast and writers was vital to the success of a show that was not going to rely on filling a half-hour slot with topical gags for its humour.
‘Most producers try to follow trends,’ explains comic and On the Hour writer Richard Herring. ‘Armando is really excellent at understanding what good comedy is and who is a good comedian.’ Iannucci didn’t just call in the latest sensations from the Edinburgh Festival or select from actors’ directories like Spotlight. He had amassed a bunch of friends through performing comedy since his days at university in Oxford and knew people through his production work, and he was equally prepared to search outside the industry to find exactly the right people for the job. Iannucci’s cast didn’t have to have a background in performing – one of the first to be involved wasn’t even interested in making comedy a full-time career. Andrew Glover had been a longtime friend and partner with Iannucci deep in the mines of student comedy but had given it up to follow his dream as a management consultant.
Glover met Iannucci just days after starting at University College in Oxford. They wrote at college together and were in separate undergraduate revue shows at the 1985 Edinburgh Fringe. As Iannucci began work on a PhD the following year, they performed regularly as A Pair of Shorts. Even then Iannucci had a quality that marked him out from fellow student performers. ‘He was always a bit more demanding of himself,’ says Glover of the young comic. ‘If something feels at all obvious, he’ll want to put three twists in it.’ Having contributed some material for Iannucci who started his career at Radio Scotland, he supplied material for Week Ending when Iannucci helmed it. They continued the informal relationship into On the Hour, Glover enjoying the process of writing for the show without the pressure of it being a primary source of income. Amiable and smart, he would be relaxed about moving further away from the core of the On the Hour group as his very sensible career at washing-powder giants Procter & Gamble grew more demanding.
Rather more serious about the idea of making a go of it was Dave Schneider, another Oxford graduate who had occasionally joined Iannucci in A Pair of Shorts after Glover’s departure. Schneider had studied modern languages after attending the City of London School. ‘Armando was bloody good. Voices, impressions, stupidness,’ says Schneider. ‘There is a slapstick quality to Armando as well, which people don’t associate with him.’ The two would bunk off the Bodleian Library to spend time in coffee bars chatting about comedy and friends who had gone professional. Among Schneider’s own comedy heroes was Danny Kaye, like him a Jewish comic with a physical aspect to his act which inspired Schneider as he included clowning around in his live show, wrestling with tables or playing a talentless magician. Both he and Iannucci favoured surreal material and Schneider started to research around Yiddish theatre for a PhD, but neither he nor Iannucci completed their higher studies. While Iannucci went to Radio Scotland, Schneider acted at the National Theatre and ended up on TV’s Up To Something!, a forgotten sketch show with Shane Richie for which Iannucci was also a writer. Schneider was around for the flickering initial ember of On the Hour that Iannucci made for his BBC production course and has a vague recollection of contributing an interview with a brain-damaged boxer.
The permutations of friends from Iannucci’s Oxford days became more tangled with the addition of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, two comics who had met at the university. Iannucci used masses of their material on Week Ending, a show the pair regarded with mixed feelings. It was good to have a professional outlet, but, although Iannucci had freshened up the format, they still found it embarrassingly formulaic. Worse, as new, young writers they were featured in documentaries about it. They got their own back with an On the Hour sketch ripping up what they saw as the old show’s worst excesses of predictable caricatures and groaning puns, ‘Thank God It’s Satire-Day’. The bile was real. After a year on Week Ending, Richard Herring had got to the point where he hid in one of the crates used to store newspapers in the writers’ room to avoid a meeting. ‘I just couldn’t face writing shit topical satire,’ he explains.
Patrick Marber was another performer for whom On the Hour came at just the right time. He’d worked with Iannucci before, including a brief coinciding stint on the inevitable Week Ending. Marber’s own style of humour was much influenced by Ben Elton and Rik Mayall who he saw perform at his Oxford college in 1983. ‘Formatively, hilariously funny,’ says Marber, who also started out on the stand-up circuit. But he was always aware that he was just filling time.
‘I decided that I enjoyed doing this thing,’ he says. ‘“I want to be a serious writer, but I haven’t written anything, so I will bide my time doing comedy until I write my great work.” I think that was my general overview.’ He kept on what was becoming a performing treadmill, including a yearly stint in Edinburgh, but it was becoming painfully obvious to him that he wasn’t in the league of such contemporaries as Eddie Izzard. Marber took a year off around 1990 to live what he thought would be the life of a novelist in Paris, during which time Iannucci called up to ask him to be in On the Hour. Which turned out to be good timing, because Marber had failed to write his book and felt he was doing little more than standing by watching his friends preparing one-hour shows to propel them into stardom. ‘I didn’t have the talent to go all the way as a stand-up. I didn’t have the ambition … I just didn’t want it
,’ he says.
Iannucci and Morris’s show represented a particularly welcome change for Doon Mackichan. She had been appearing in Radio 1’s sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience, in its later series produced by Iannucci, starring David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, and had found it a rather depressing experience. There were few enough good comedic roles around for women and Mary Whitehouse was no exception, the female performers feeling they were left with whatever the men didn’t want to say. If On the Hour had a male perspective, it was dictated more by the newsroom setting than by the rest of the cast. The production of the show would be a collaborative process in which everyone could get something in – as long as they spoke up loud enough. Rebecca Front was another occasional Mary Whitehouse performer who was recruited. Iannucci had also produced a radio series for a double act in which she appeared.
In addition, Front knew Marber from a 1984 Oxford revue show called Stop the Weak, in which they’d done knockabout, physical comedy. And, independently of Iannucci, Marber and Mackichan knew of each other from the stand-up circuit, where both of them had come across the most well known of all the cast and writers, Steve Coogan. He was the one member of the team who hadn’t come across or worked with Iannucci in one of his many roles, but he came recommended. Coogan had been a great mimic from his childhood days, had started doing impressions as part of his stand-up while studying drama at the polytechnic in his home town of Manchester and walked straight into a contract to do voices for Spitting Image. By the time On the Hour came along, he had also appeared in the Royal Variety Performance and, like Patrick Marber, whom he had met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990, was frustrated by the limitations of what he was doing.
‘I was known as a sort of cut-price Rory Bremner. Reliable, but limited,’ he said. ‘I knew that impressions made people laugh and were a short cut to approval from an audience, but I respected other comedians because they got laughs without doing impressions, which meant they had to work a lot harder, and that what they were doing was more substantial. It wound me up. I wanted that respect.’3
Into this potent brew of youthful ambition, burgeoning success and sweaty impatience Armando dropped a couple of veteran New Musical Express writers. David Quantick and Steven Wells were a few years older than most of the others, had been working in the music press since the early 1980s and regarded their mostly lesser-known colleagues with a mixture of condescension and disdain. ‘I just remember thinking, What a bunch of losers,’ says Quantick. ‘These people will never make it.’ His partner felt the same.
‘I wanted to produce the show!’ Wells recalls. ‘I was an arrogant and incredibly frustrated rock writer.’ Although Quantick had also written for Spitting Image, he and Wells had been recruited on the strength of their NME column, called Culture Vulture, Ride the Lizard, or whatever they felt like each week once they’d got completely stoned and filled it with topical music parodies. An item in their column about classical music which included the assertion that it largely involved tiny guitars played under the chin particularly appealed to Iannucci, who felt it was good for the journalistic side of the show to have writers who were funny but as music writers weren’t primarily gag men: ‘More of a way of doing funny non-fiction,’ he explains.
As an actor rather than a comedian, Rebecca Front also contributed to the straight feel of the show, though she was initially uncomfortable with the improvisation. ‘I thought I wouldn’t be funny enough,’ she explains, ‘but Armando talked me out of it … Well, sort of shoved a microphone in front of me and made me get on with it, to be specific.’
In that first meeting, Iannucci handed out copies of his sketches and played an excerpt of the original programme he’d done for his training course. Richard Herring’s notes survive to reveal how advanced the thinking from Morris and Iannucci already was. Amid his doodles were ‘vox pops’, ‘news-clips – false – spurious’, ‘real clips’, ‘professional liars’ and ‘is it specially written or true. News events.’
Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan encountered each other for the first time when the cast first assembled in the studio. ‘I was slightly nervous because he was very quiet,’ said Iannucci. ‘Then we switched the microphones on and he was very funny … I now see that his strangeness was actually a matter of being a bit reserved with people he doesn’t know.’4
For his part, Coogan felt what could have been a sideways move in going to radio had been vindicated. ‘Working with Iannucci was a revelation. He really did reshape things for me … I remember thinking, I’ve been looking for this all my life. We knew we were on to something,’ he later said.5
From briefing to broadcast, the feel of the show remained remarkably unchanged, but Iannucci couldn’t be entirely sure of how the people he knew separately or in different permutations would work together. But his instinct had been spot on. They gelled almost instantly. It helped that, apart from Quantick and Wells, they were all in their late twenties. Less tangibly, the core members of the team were all Catholic – Morris, Iannucci, Coogan and Mackichan – or Jewish – Schneider, Front and Marber. As Armando recalls with a laugh, it was ‘the Judaeo-Catholic conspiracy against the English Establishment …’ Or the On the Hour conspiracy against the media mainstream – the cast had a track record in ignoring fashion even back when they were students. ‘Alternative’ was the buzzword and stand-up the most obvious route to fame when they were coming up in the mid-1980s and their Oxford revues and physical comedy had seemed almost wilfully out of step. It was a stubborn attitude to following their own instincts that informed On the Hour. They rejected the idea that you could have filler material as long as there was a better joke along in a minute. Easy laughs were dropped no matter how topical or populist they might be if it seemed they compromised the tone of the show – whatever that might turn out to be.
The writers were in the dark, having to feel their way to what worked rather than rely on tested standbys. They might tell Iannucci they had ruled out a particular avenue because it didn’t seem to work, only for him to realize that was exactly what he wanted. Even the best initial ideas could be reworked through improvisation. It would be hard to work out exactly who was responsible for any one item.
‘It’s an approach I’ve always been keen on,’ said Iannucci, ‘being non-proprietary about your work. Not saying, “No, you can’t change that, because that’s mine and I’ve spent four months getting that line right.”’6
Morris provided up to a third of the writing of most shows himself and hijacked unused GLR studios at night for his own performances, refining them, multitracking voices and creating his own effects, while Iannucci worked with the rest of the cast to structure the show and create the rest of the material. It was cheap enough to keep the tapes running, so he did, just in case there was a piece of genius that couldn’t be recaptured.
‘It was like being in a little lab, really,’ says Patrick Marber. Just like in a real news programme, sessions were edited down by Iannucci until the best bits remained. The technique formed the basis for the way that he and Morris would both work over the years.
Working alone, Morris rarely needed to be in the main meetings. For much of the first series of On the Hour and into the second one he remained something of an unknown quantity to most of the cast and writers and an intimidating figure from a distance: ‘A bit daunting,’ confirms Rebecca Front, ‘because he is effectively a rather tall brain, but he’s charming with it, so that helped.’
It wasn’t until the show transferred as The Day Today to BBC2 that Morris and the others integrated as they all had to appear in front of the cameras at the same time. The freedom of radio was that Morris could be spliced into the final programme without its being audibly apparent that he didn’t work his material in with the group.
Carol Smith was Iannucci’s production assistant for On the Hour. ‘[Morris] would go off and he’d come back with a five-inch spool of tape and that five-minute piece would be on there, and then he’d play it
to us in the studio and that was it,’ she says. ‘It was in, and we couldn’t touch it, because it was so densely produced and so layered and … you couldn’t get a blade in.’ It meant that Morris could get away with smuggling in material which nobody could then remove. ‘You literally could not get a blade in anywhere to edit and so, y’know, there were some extraordinary things in there, but they went out.’
Iannucci was the one who cut across all the various groups – communicating the shape of the show to the writers and the cast. Patrick Marber recalls, ‘He said, “Look, there’s a way of performing comedy where the jokes are very much told and I want you to bury the humour. I want you to do funny voices but I don’t want them to be too funny. I want you to improvise funny things but don’t be looking for the humour, just trust that it will come.”’ Their very serious approach won On the Hour’s creators a reputation for being unapproachable. Inspired by the concept of the show, they did all seem as if they had a lot to prove.
‘We were all full of the flush of youth and we thought we were the young turks,’ said Coogan.7
‘I don’t think there was a single person there who wasn’t an alpha male,’ recalls Steven Wells. As self-confessed ‘ageing Trot’, he had marched with the Anti-Nazi League and seen The Clash perform for Rock Against Racism in Hackney’s Victoria Park in the late 1970s. While On the Hour wasn’t politically motivated, all of the team took inspiration from a clarity of purpose in the show’s concept which was as bold as any campaigning.
‘I think there is a lot of anger, I think it’s very accessible to comedians,’ says Dave Schneider, ‘and certainly to that group of comedians.’ They took their lead from the top. ‘There’s a sort of “from the pulpits” quality to them [Morris and Iannucci] … vengeful angels.’
The approaches of the members of the cast didn’t always agree. Steven Wells identified the generation that Stewart Lee and Richard Herring belonged to as being more cynical than his as a punk – but individually each knew they had earned the right to be there and that the team worked well together. Armando Iannucci treated everyone decently and inspired loyalty – both he and Chris Morris were motivated by doing something interesting rather than only becoming well known, so the rest of the cast felt comfortable in trying out ideas even when they fell horribly flat.