THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.104 - CHRIS MORRIS 1

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Adam talks with British comedian, writer and director Chris Morris about his film The Day Shall Come and much else besides.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing. RELATED LINKSTHE DAY SHALL COME (TRAILER, YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR08yvgwPjE&t=2sBONZO DOG BAND - SHIRT (VIV STANSHALL INTRO, YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrU3kROXww&t=7sDISRUPT DISCREDIT AND DIVIDE (ABOUT THE FBI) by MIKE GERMAN (NY TIMES PIECE)https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/books/review/disrupt-discredit-and-divide-mike-german.htmlON FILM MAKING by ALEXANDER 'SANDY' MACKENDRICK (FABER & FABER WEBSITE)https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571215614-on-film-making.htmlTHE NEWBURGH FOUR (2011, GUARDIAN ARTICLE)https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/12/newburgh-four-fbi-entrapment-terrorCOINTELPRO (FBI WEBSITE)https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-proMUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION by GILLAN (YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Oc8GE1Nnm0IN THE PSYCHIATRIST'S CHAIR WITH STEVEN BERKOFF (BBC)https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04bmvvxFOUR LIONS (TRAILER, YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlITHE DAY TODAY (YOUTUBE COMPILATION)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2x4hMr2WLwTHE DAY TODAY PILOT EPISODEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8m3dFcNuAQBRASS EYE DAVID SULLIVAN INTERVIEW (VIMEO)https://vimeo.com/9552422BRASS EYE (YOUTUBE COMPILATION)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lhJ3YJkfcgBRASS EYE - PAEDOGEDDON (YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_4BZnWnXzI&t=30sJAM (EPISODE 1, YOUTUBE)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpn7C6r-WEM Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here.

Thanks very much indeed for joining me for podcast number 104 with British writer, director and comedian, I'm avoiding the word satirist, Chris Morris. If you're already familiar with Chris and his work and would like to skip straight to our conversation, you'll find it at around the seven minute mark. But for the rest of you, here are some Chris Morris facts. I looked up most of these after actually talking to him, which you might think is the wrong way around. But I knew that I wasn't having a kind of career overview conversation with him, so I didn't go in armed with all these amazing facts. Chris is currently aged 57. He grew up in the Cambridgeshire region of southern England and attended a Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire before studying at Bristol University,

where he also started getting involved in radio, first as a trainee and then towards the end of the 80s as the presenter of his own show on both BBC Radio Bristol and then GLR, Greater London Radio. I first became aware of Chris's work when I heard On The Hour, the Radio 4 show he made with Amando Iannucci between 1991 and 92. On The Hour and the subsequent TV version, The Day To Day, which aired in early 1994 on BBC Two, parodied news and current affairs, as well as many other aspects of the media, but it did so with an unprecedented, I'm going for unprecedented, attention to detail. The day-to-day especially poked fun at the way the programmes are technically constructed, as well as the blurred line between news and entertainment, and indeed the whole grammar of TV. Now, all of Chris's projects have involved a great many talented people.

One of those in the day-to-day was Steve Coogan. On the Hour was the first time that anyone had heard of his character Alan Partridge. Chris's next project, minus Armando this time, was Brass Eye, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1997 with a one-off Pedogeddon special in 2001. According to Wikipedia, Brass Eye satirized media portrayal of social ills, in particular sensationalism, unsubstantiated establishmentarian theory masquerading as fact, that was one of the main reasons I tuned in, and the creation of moral panics. featured more of the prank elements that Chris had always been fond of, with a variety of celebrities fooled into being interviewed by one of Chris's ridiculous characters, as well as obligingly reading out surreal pronouncements on topics that included sex, drugs, animals and crime. One of several public figures who didn't take kindly to being sucked into the world of Brass Eye was the sometime pornographer and former owner of the Daily Sport and Sunday Sport, David Sullivan, who subsequently published Chris's home address and telephone number.

That's where my notes finish, so I'm going to have to wing it now. After Brass Eye, you're looking at Blue Jam on Radio 1. I always forget that it went out on Radio 1. It's sort of surreal and arty, a bit like a sketch show on Xanax, with a cool, chill-out DJ playing over the top of it. There was a TV version of Blue Jam called Just Jam in 2000 on Channel 4. Thereafter, Chris directed a short film with Paddy Considine in 2002 called My Wrongs 2005 saw the broadcast of Nathan Barley which he'd worked on with Charlie Brooker his spoof of all

things hipsterish that went out on channel 4 and that was around the time that I met Chris actually I met him a couple of years before that when they were working on Nathan Barley. Myself and Joe Cornish went in and had a meeting with Chris and Charlie just to look through a load of copies of Dazed and Confused and Vice magazine and make stupid comments as part of the process of putting Nathan Barley together. Chris's first film, Four Lions, was released in 2010. And for the last few years, Chris has been working on his second feature, The Day Shall Come,

which was released in the UK a couple of days ago, as I speak. It was written by Chris, along with Jesse Armstrong, whose credits also include Four Lions and Peep Show, Black Mirror and his HBO series Succession. And The Day Shall Come extends some of the themes that Chris explored in Four Lions, but this time focuses on the way the spectre of domestic terrorism is handled by US authorities. Back on the notes here. Anna Kendrick plays an FBI agent who gets involved with what amounts to a sting operation on an impoverished and deluded Miami preacher played by Marshawn Davis. I talked to Chris about The Day Shall Come and some of the strange and real incidents that inspired it, but we talked about a lot of other random bits and pieces too.

Now, I recorded two conversations with Chris in the end. The first one, something went wrong with my recorder. Maybe I didn't press the actual buttons. I don't know. It was a sad time. And it was very frustrating because, of course, Chris doesn't do that much publicity. And I wanted to do a good job anyway. Chris was very nice and sat down to record another conversation with me.

That's what you're going to hear today. But I was able to salvage the backup recording from the first one and so I'm planning to put that out later this week. But right now, here we go. Now I am recording this time. Yeah. I think I am. Yeah. You you really you had a very unfortunate malfunction it was so annoying because we'd had a good conversation and then i went to check the files and they were blank oh and it's just like oh fucking hell how long have i been doing this for crying out loud and i just hadn't pressed the right buttons. Well, that reminded me of when I was a trainee and I recorded an interview with David Attenborough,

who'd come to Cambridge to give a talk. And I had a good 15 minutes with him beforehand. And I recorded it on a Ewer, which had a 15 minute tape. And I mean, he was a sort of heroic figure. I mean, I studied zoology. Life on Earth was an absolutely seminal program. It was used as a teaching aid. So I brought all of that to this interview.

I was extremely pleased to have done it. I checked the tape back. Nothing. I opened the lid and with horror saw that the tape had just all sort of spooled itself off into spaghetti. So I kind of spooled it back on and I intercepted him as he came out and I said look I'm really sorry the tape failed and I'd really be grateful if you could draw the interview again and he went okay and I thought brilliant and then to fill time

whilst I just got everything ready I said I guess you're used to this kind of thing you know sand getting in cameras in the desert. Must happen all the time. And he just looked at me and went, no. Funnily enough, I mean, it just stayed with me. It was like, yeah, well, I mean, you know, you did that. Yeah. You're not going to be let off the hook. No, I mean, I think it was a deliberate dropping of empathy.

And I think probably contained within it a patrician cuff. Maybe these days I would have brought a case against him. For confidence injury. For psychic assault. Psychic assault. Psychic harassment. For mainly masculine aggressive bruising to the mind. Well, you didn't do that with me, and I appreciate it.

Tell you something, though. Go on, then. When I was recording at the BBC, in their newsroom, in their Today programme booth... Is this recently? Yeah. If you open the mic, the room is automatically snooping on you. Now, that's a failsafe against, against oh dear i didn't record the interview but it's what caught out various bbc presenters john humphries i think in talking about pay gaps

because the mic was on conversation recorded no getting out of that one so there's no disclaimer on the studio door though i didn't see one i think it's just known as a thing. You always used to have snoop tapes, but they would be for like live record off transmission so that you had a log of the live program. But to log a studio when it's off air onto a recording device is a step forward. Who's listening to that though? Just bored interns. You always used to be able to listen to studios on a ring main so if you were in a bbc facility you could dial in on the ring man and listen to who was talking to whom in studio two or whatever and that was quite fun not quite the same so there was a sense that a studio with a live mic might not be a private space but i think if you you're so habituated to a

place where you come in and present a news show every morning. You've gone off air and you're having a bit of a chat, a cup of tea. It's easy to forget, isn't it? I'm just trying to think about whether Joe and I were... Yeah, I guess we would say naughty things off air. Joe always... Like, if anyone was going to say something uncool, it would be Joe. And he would say... Like, he called Tony Blair a war criminal.

And this is on the... Off air. No, on air. Well, okay. On the Saturday morning. Yeah, I mean, I say, if you're going to say something bad, say it on air. Yeah. I mean, there was worse things said than that off air.

But he thought that was fine. He was like, well, everyone thinks he's a war criminal, don't they? Well, in light of the current examination of what you can and can't say as a presenter, I would say that that one, I think a retrospective inquiry is called for. Don't you? I mean, that is just full on. Yeah.

This is the week, listeners, when the BBC has declared that they are impartial except when it comes to racism, when they are not impartial. There was a presenter on, what is it? BBC Breakfast. Yes. BBC Breakfast with Frank Boff.

Yes. And she. Selina Scott said. Rolling rat. Handed over to her and they were talking about Trump. And she said, I'm not saying he's racist, but a lot of it is the language of racists. What she said was, if anyone has ever said that to me, then it has been racist.

If anyone has said, go back to where you come from, it's been racist. That's right, because it was Trump talking about the squad and saying, go back where you came from. She also said words to the effect of, I don't want to cast aspersions about anyone else, but that sort of talk is racist. about anyone else, but that sort of talk is racist. So she gave herself a caveat, which seems to me that as a presenter, rather than a reader of the direct news, you know, it wasn't like a news bulletin started, the racist Donald Trump today said.

And I think if you're on soft furnishings as a presenter, then it feels to me like she didn't breach impartiality in what she said. You know, it's a soft furnishings comment. I do think it's different. I do. If you're called a presenter, even if you're a journalist, if you're called a presenter and you do something and she gave herself a caveat, whilst I do understand the idea that you don't want to descend into Fox News and just say, I say what I think, it seemed to me that what she said was absolutely fine

yeah I think so when did you get into radio is that your first job after college I actually while I was a student I used to I used to like radio anyway I mean I when I was at school I used to make recordings stupid recordings on an old ITT tape recorder and at university I did radio and I found I used to relieve boredom I used to get bored in the library revising, and I had a cassette recorder, and I just used to go out into the street and ask people about made-up things, very much in the manner of substantial sort of, we're talking about shirts. You've heard shirts? You've heard shirts, have you? No. No. Wilson Green, and yes, yes brr it is a bit chilly today we're going to talk about shirts and then he just accosts various people come oh what's that governor what's that

oh my man's not probably dressed without a shirt is he all right thanks very much it's just random art college audio stuff but yeah so i used to talk to people about dog dentures or i don't know whatever occurred to me and uh just as a relief from the boredom, the drudge of learning sort of a lot of classification. It was quite a Victorian course, a lot of classification and dense facts. You were doing zoology? Yeah, hence the number of animals in virtually everything I've done. Probably. Why were you doing zoology?

Well, I was at that lucky time where you studied things that you enjoyed. I enjoyed biology at school. I thought, you know, both parents' doctors, that rather puts you off becoming a doctor, but imbues you with a sort of affinity for medical talk. So quite a lot of my friends were medical students when I was at university, but I studied zoology because it seemed to naturally follow. I kind of found animals more interesting than plants. I studied it, you know, because I was interested.

I mean, it was as simple as that. But those days, there was no heavy pressure on your career decision. And zoology pretty much proved you against any sensible answer. Right. What are you going to be, a zookeeper, people used to say in their hilarious late 70s way. But people went off and did all sorts of things. Natural history publishing, conservation, all kinds of different distractions. And when you were doing your radio, talking to people in the street, your substantial stuff, is that just you on your own?

Yeah. Why are you going out on your own? I would be too nervous. Well, I think that was part of it. It's kind of deep breath time. I mean, if you've set yourself six hours of revision, you need things to look forward to. And I guess your friends don't quite cut the mustard every time. You've got to, I don't know, you've just,

it just seemed interesting to me. I just thought, this is going to be fun. So you go out and you be weird and then you play the results back to people? Yeah. There's an element of delayed showing off. If they were any good. If they seemed any good. And obviously they weren't edited so they'd be quite boring as well. I mean later on I then

sort of adapted that tendency. But yeah it seemed fun. I mean it probably would be quite fun even to do it now. Definitely. Would it be valid? Would it be valid?

And would it be the power dynamic now would be under scrutiny, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean, I was a kid. So basically, I was stepping up into some shoes that were way too big for me and standing outside a department store. I mean, saying, we're looking at dog dentures. Who's we? we're looking at dog dentures who's we we're looking at dog dentures i'm a bloody 19 year old you know with a head full of mollusks this isn't really what are you doing so the whole what are you doing aspect was great yeah i mean if you're doing it now you've obviously seriously had a bit of a setback in your mid-50s although actually yeah well in your mid-50s there was a guy who once went i think on the word he was like a career prankster and they got him on the word and he was like yeah

this guy can prank the hell out of anything and he showed how to do it he set up some sort of fake clinic in the east end and hired a bit of space in a hall and to teach people to kind of challenge their inner lion or something and then got about four saps to come in and roll around growling and they did this little VT package and at the end of that it was like brilliant prank achieved and he got it listed in the paper or something I mean well done mate you look at the guy his eyes are dead I mean he's 50 something and he's doing this he knows how to do it. He's died a long, long time ago, and you've hauled him in to parade his inner death. Awful.

To be a prank tutor on the word. We've hit the... Well, no, that's good, because I wanted to go back and ask you a question I've always wanted to ask you, which was, did you really fill a studio with helium? Well, the truth is that i tried but if you've ever tried to do that it's simply not possible no i that's what i was thinking so there were jokes about it wouldn't it be great because you could get someone to do it obviously to speak on air with helium i mean what's the point of helium if not to change your voice and then it just became

i did various other things that i got moved on for but that somehow just got folded into the mix because it would have been a lively discussion because you used to have these maybe still do these contribution studios to the main network if you worked in in a region, the BBC had tiny little NCA studios, which you could imagine filling with gas. So it became amusing to imagine that if you had to let someone in for a 7.40 contribution to the Today programme, that you could fill the cubicle with gas and then they would talk like a chipmunk. That never happened. You know, other things did happen but that as any fool could work out you can't fill a room with helium i mean you'd need a truck outside to do that and you'd have to tape up all the vents and yes yeah you filled a room with helium did he

helium's expensive as well i think it's run out, hasn't it, as well? Helium's run out? I think helium is running out. Get lost. I think it is. Come on. Helium's a fundamental. All those helium nuclei that they've nicked to fire around particle accelerators.

I just know that the last time my wife... I know, I'm back on Google. I swear. Back on Google. I swear helium's running out. How's argon doing? Things are running out. Why the helium's running out. How's argon doing? Things are running out. Why the world is running out of helium?

You've been on our website. Helium could run out within a decade. Well, maybe that's going to be part of the next Extinction Rebellion. I mean, you'd have to... But it's serious because it's a vital component of MRI scanners. And we're just pissing it away on fucking balloons. But it's in because it's a vital component of MRI scanners. And we're just pissing it away on fucking balloons and... But it's in the atmosphere anyway, isn't it? Helium is made either by the nuclear fusion process of the sun.

Yeah. Or by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock. Terrestrial rock! Which accounts for all of the Earth's store of the gas. So it is a renewable, but just slow. Yeah, there's no way of manufacturing it artificially, and practically all of the world's reserves have been derived as a by-product from the extraction of natural gas,

mostly in the giant oil and gas fields of the American Southwest, which historically have had the highest helium concentrations. That was veering Orson Welles in the middle of that. I thought I'd read it slow and give it some gravitas. Well, you've got to put facts in the way of folk. Yeah. Folk need facts. The trouble is they need a coherent narrative,

and I'm not sure if that's what they're getting. I'm weak on coherent narrative. I'm strong on tangents and just skidding around and not remembering where we started. Coherent narrative is very hard. Right. Well, this is good. Look, I'm not going to let that segue just...

I'll just throw that up there. ...flush past. It is hard, isn't it? Do you identify yourself as someone who's OK with structure, narrative structure, or are you a sort of details and jokes guy, or are you both double threat? Top Trump's cards, I'd say I'm pretty terrible card to have, sort of average on quite a wide range. But I do understand the necessity for structure. I am not a natural

confabulator in a ready-formed coherent. I don't sort of tell an anecdote that is a natural three-act anecdote i try occasionally and you know that basically you've got to keep the line tight that's the basic rule has it gone slack it's boring it's kind of more important than anything else and what's that made of it's made of whatever you're conjuring at the time whether it's tension or whether it's a flurry of jokes or whatever, something that holds your attention. It is a nightmare because if you're free-forming and you're doing something which doesn't have to have a structure, then you can say whatever you want. And as long as it's interesting, it's fine. You kind of just jazz it up a bit. But people will immediately call you if that jumps out of line of a story.

And it will call itself so that you're always eliminating all sorts of things that felt great because they're not germane. And I think some people are really good at that. Essentially, at an ancestral level, they would have commanded your attention around the fire in the cave. Naturally, I would have had to go to the back of the cave for several months and scribble on a tablet with charcoal and then come to the fireside and hope that I'd managed to stop people drifting off before two minutes. I'd be asking the main guy questions and going off on tangents. When did the need for structure enter your life, Chris? Because first of all, you're doing little sketchy stuff on the hour, on the radio, day to day, brass eye.

There were one-off episodes that had sort of loose motifs or themes, didn't they? Yeah, it gradually merged. It gradually floated in but i think i used to rely quite a lot on things coming from all directions and that if you are doing a show on the radio which is essentially a list of records then that is your structure that is the false reason that you're there and then all the sort of peppering that you do in between fine and if you come up with a story if you've got a narrative we used to construct things that peter and i used to do you know dead johnny walker in the studio next door or taking a tortoise out

of its shell or whatever it was we or him stealing a baby from someone in regent street and then attaching it to balloons i mean all of those things had a narrative structure but we didn't we weren't really kind of going we didn't read save the cat in order to do that you know you just kind of go what and then what and then what and then what and as long as it's interesting and then you make sure and then you edit it down just to keep it interesting. Whether it is interesting or not, I'm not necessarily claiming, but I just, you know, that's what's guiding your head.

And then things get longer and longer, and you go, God, I have to learn how to do this now. Ah, you know, Four Lions or The Day Shall Come will not be, it's not a small story. You can't just spit it out so you just write so okay did you do your short for warp pre-nathan barley yeah but that was also there were kind of monologues which also had to have a shape so i mean you're you're sort of doing it without realizing things have to have they just have to maintain your interest i mean that's you know you

can't write a script writing manual that says that because it's just a post-it note keep it interesting yeah and i'm not even saying i don't know how far be it for me to claim that that that is something i've successfully done but it is the thing that you constantly ask yourself and i think script writing narrative structure i mean you can get great films without traditional structure. I mean, that's what's so massively wrong with Save the Cat, if you've ever read it. I mean, it's hilarious. It's like a satire on the idea of structure.

It's so reductive. Save the Cat is a book that gives you basically, it promises to teach you exactly beat by beat how to construct a movie that works, right? Like a sort of Hollywood movie. Absolutely. Down to the page number where certain incidents should happen. If your first act is not done by page 26, this script is going in the bin.

That's what makes it funny. It's not that everything in it isn't true. It's just that there are so many ways. The best, I think, the best book on screenwriting is Sandy McKendrick's on filmmaking, because he never intended it to be a book, and it's not didactic. It doesn't make you feel bad for having a different idea to him. He proposes what he's discovered through experience and then says, as he said to his students, you may differ. And if you want to go and do something different, good luck to you. Go and do it, because that's the way you will learn something. And that empowers you, where you will learn something. And that empowers you, whereas a lot of these guides kind of crush your independence of thought. I mean, what are you if you're not your own independent ideas?

That's the only reason why you're going to be there. So it's always in the negotiation, I think. And that's the thing that drives people mad. But only if they're like, they've got half the genes. I mean, like me, I've got about half the genes required to do it. So, I mean, how long did it take Schrader to write Taxi Driver? Three weeks? Really?

Yeah, I think it was a raw. Well, that's the claim anyway, the anecdotal claim. A lot of these things, one doesn't care to examine the truth. But it feels like a film that came out like one raw. That would be a great thing to be able to do wouldn't it amazing it really would wouldn't it you just get that horrible bit out the way and then you can have fun just tweaking it and tightening it and well that's the other thing get it down once and then everything else is rolling that turd in glitter what were you and

charlie like when you were doing Nathan Barley? Lots of ideas and trying to catch them all. And I think we were just trying to, you know, we went to a couple of McKee talks. Oh, yeah. Bob McKee does these talks about, you know, teaching you to become a screenwriter. It was funny to see the selection of people there. There were a lot of people who worked in BBC Current Affairs who were all going along to learn the techniques of telling stories. And in the end, it's fucking snake oil.

It's absolute bullshit. The guy is basically a bully. He's a psychologically unreliable specimen. He'd just given up smoking. He was swearing at people. He was sending them out for challenging the things that he said, which were highly questionable. It was very funny.

He showed Seven as his kind of paradigm of a thriller. And somebody very reasonably said, I'd just like to question this genre as a thriller because I don't really think this is a thriller. And somebody very reasonably said, I'd just like to question this genre as a thriller because I don't really think this is a thriller. And he said, fucking get out. You know, it's like, you massive pranic. And by the time, so we went to one, which was, I think it was about story structure

and one about comedy and we just left. Right, let's go again. what don't you fucking understand kick your fucking ass let's go again what the fuck is it with you i want you off the fucking set you prick no you're a nice guy the fuck are you doing no don't shut me up. No, no. I like this. No, no. Don't shut me up. I like this. Fuck's sake, man, you're amateur.

Seriously, man, you and me, we're fucking done professionally. I imagine with a lot of your stuff, you're occupying areas where you're, there are going to be so many practical problems with what you want to do. So many reasons not to do them like strange ideas where you just think well no this is no one would ever do this i don't know if that's the biggest hold back because if you follow something that you're interested in so with the day shall come there's this news story that is being presented as the biggest plot since 9-11 has just been foiled by the FBI. They've swooped on a warehouse in Miami and they've arrested an army planning a ground war against the US.

That's on the British TV news. Three years later, you bump into somebody who says, do you remember that full ground war coming out of Miami? You know what it was? It was some construction workers who were going to ride into Chicago on horses. That was their plan. And you find out that actually these bankrupt construction workers in Miami had bumped into an FBI informant who was offering them $50,000 to come up with a plan against the government.

There are so many people who speak against the government. And now somebody was going to monetize that speech and turn it into action. Well, these guys tried to play this informant. Their first plan was to lead a protest to the governor's house against conditions in the projects. The informant said, that is not going to fly. You're not going to get the money for that. You've got to think bigger. So they riffed these ideas and came up eventually with the idea of knocking over the Sears Tower, swamping Chicago with a tidal wave. If you look at where the Sears Tower is, that's impossible. Then when the waters subside, they were going to ride in on horses because they reckon that

people respect a guy on a horse. This is not the biggest plot since 9-11. This is just some junk that some people have tried to use to play a man with some money. Yet they all went to jail as Al-Qaeda terrorists, even though most of them were Haitian Catholics. And that, so far, I'm just describing something that is interesting to me because I'm going, what? Really? What? And then you discover that that is not a one-off. It was just part of the evolution of what is an MO for the FBI. So that's still interesting, still interesting. You've not really questioned yourself. You're just talking to people and being led by an interesting idea.

And then when you're going to turn it into a story, I guess you find the thing that really crystallized it was meeting people from the families of targets who had ended up in jail. And you're not looking at people who are in any way conspirators or... I mean, they're not terrorists. You know, I've met radical people and I know you will hear the views and you will hear them go right up to the point of pretty much justifying terrorism. You know what they're like. You know what it feels like. This is nothing like it.

These are sort of dreamers and malcontents and fringe people who are not the terrifying thing that they're being made out to be by the government. Well, there, once you've seen that, once you've seen the human impact of this great government machine, which is so good at coming up with ludicrous ideas and then luring people to try and take part in them and then arresting them for doing that once you've seen the people who it actually affects you've got a as well as the crystalline idea which is this kind of truman show narrative being played out on someone who has no idea what's going on and and then the sort of the drive unit is the feeling of what it's done to people so you've got i think quite a reasonable vehicle

just to take you through all the barriers but yeah i mean the biggest barrier might be getting up in the morning i mean you know the things that your your own motivations are an absolute mess aren't they well me and mine are certainly And so why not take a story like that, or the, did you say Newburgh or Newberg? Depends how you are. Do you say Peterberg? No, no one says Peterberg. We all say Peterberg.

But I don't, I think the Americans say Newberg. The Newberg Four. The Newberg Four. June 2011, four men jailed for 25 years over a US terror plot. The FBI painted them as dedicated fanatics but they were lured by the promise of cash from a fake informant.

What's your source there? Slate or Vice? What is my source there? I don't know. Guess the source. He's reading for the New York Times. Why didn't I? I see I haven't described my sources. Maybe it might be multiple reading. Judge Newman, Federal Appeals Court, 2013.

So two years after this kind of strange case with these four guys who... Shall I tell you that? I mean, it's really... Again, this is another one. Like that Liberty City case, which I mentioned earlier, the guys with horses. This Newburgh case really contains... It shows you the kind of thinking and it shows you what the government can get away with because this slick informant turns up at a

mosque in newberg he's got a cool car and he's rather conspicuously dressed and he's fishing for malcontents and he finds this guy cromity who is quite grumpy about quite a lot of things Cromartie, who is quite grumpy about quite a lot of things, but sits around at home. I think he's on some kind of state aid, maybe on food tokens, something like that, food coupons. And he doesn't like things. He's pissed off. And this informant just starts developing him. Well, what about this? We've got to do something about this, brother. Ages and ages and ages. And Cromartie just keeps kind of going yeah yeah yeah oh we could do this oh yeah maybe we could do that and then not returning calls and it's not until the informant is offering $250,000 $250,000 I mean someone in Newburgh I think in the documentary very good HBO documentary somebody says $10,000 would be enough to blow your mind $ $250,000. What would you do for $250,000? I mean, possibly something. Would you go base jumping?

I'd go base jumping for five quid. For fun, for five quid. But anyway, the thing is that he's got this guy interested because he's got money. And then the FBI meticulously marched this guy through a series of legal indiscretions. so in order to be a conspiracy there's got to be more than one so the informant asks this guy Cromartie to get some other people on board and they all know there's a bit of money involved one of them wants to get the money to pay for his brother's cancer treatment none of this is exculpatory this all goes into the court case they all end up 25 years in jail they want to

put a bomb in the trunk of a car but they only want to let it off at night so that no one gets hurt the FBI get them to take contraband across state lines so that they've broken another law they're just getting them to break a series of laws that then can be delivered to the court as a sort of a syndrome of being prepared to do anything to make your plot come true the judge in that case said if it hadn't been for the government this case wouldn't have happened and the i mean the thing that's farcical is that in court the informant was asked by the defense you're for these guys 250 which, by the way, you can see on the tape recording. And he goes, ah, that was code. And the defense says, what was it code for? He goes, $10,000. And the defense says,

did anyone else know this code apart from you? And he goes, no. But these guys still go to jail. So that's where it becomes farcical. You've got this very effective machine that will jail you despite all of these ridiculous elements in the case and they are doing it in order to meet targets and to satisfy a demand that they perceive from the public to be across terror plots and to protect the american people post 9-11? Well, that's, I mean, look, I think the list of reasons, the formative reasons go back as far as the history of the FBI. The FBI was always opposed to others, to outgroups of some kind or another, which is why COINTELPRO happened. It's why Hoover thought that Martin Luther King was a communist.

And any group that was not white and republican was in some way either the enemy or about to become the enemy. And that was overturned in the 70s and then it was brought back with a vengeance after 9-11. Then what happened was that the FBI went through a series of very bad decisions. They decided they had to cover their arse because they were to some degree culpable in the failure to stop 9-11. So they painted this picture of these impossible to catch people. There were sleeper cells in every city and we need to go after them. So they got federal dollars to do that. They created a state of panic which allowed juries to think that if some poor loser can be goaded into trying to dial a truck bomb then they're the enemy this

is where it came from this is what 9-11 was all about and that person should go to jail even if for all the exonerating reasons i've given you they're not necessarily they're catholic they're asian catholic for god's sake so you have that you have the institutional othering of people and i think that that was the decisive split in all of our minds, really, that happened after 9-11, was we were divided into two. It was us and them. And that haunts us today.

I mean, I think that that's part of what permits Trump. It just, it allows society to go us and them. Bush said, either you're before us or against us. And really from that time, from 9-11 onwards, it seemed to me that the game changed. In fact, even if you're satirising or attacking something, what you need to attack more than anything else is this division. You have to attack division. It's changed the game. Up to that point, you could play filigree games and mock all sorts of elements that were part of your own culture. But now we've entered a new space. And the most corrosive thing, the thing that you're kind of impelled to attack is this constant divisive thinking. do something this is now preachy this is now pulpit but unless we do something about that we've fucking lost the game i mean if we don't work out and i felt this after after seven seven

i basically felt you know look you're on the tube with a bunch of people some of them might be anti-vaxxers all you know they're not your enemy you know what i mean you can ridicule the heck out of your friend but if you declare someone as the this new thinking of like right some of you are the enemy i just thought no i mean like it or not these basically everyone's your friend and in fact london responded really well to seven seven i felt i just thought yeah there's basically there's some we are not afraid or the ironists going we are very afraid. But there was a group feeling of like we're strong against this. And that stuff feels like where you've got to go. narrative rather than say just doing a story that is closely based on one of those incidents where people have been framed essentially well i think the day shall come it was here is this

elaborate mechanism for incriminating people who are not terrorists and here are some people who don't know they're about to be hit by this machine this is the defining relationship between those citizens and their own government how are you going to make that into a film that you want to watch? I felt you have to be with the people on the ground. You have to be with the people who are going to be targeted. And they're going about their quite eccentric life, basically not being terrorists, but talking a bit like panthers or a bit like some sort of independent-minded group who do not like the government. That's enough to give them a little bit of profile on the FBI's radar, and that's enough for the FBI to send in informants to start trying to make them commit some crime. And if you see it from that person's point of view, I think the thing that

struck me was it's the Truman Show moment. It's the point where in real life, sometimes when people are arrested, it's so surprising that they laugh, even as the arresting agents, who are also laughing, arrest them, because it's so surreal. And it's just going to be a very bad outcome for those who are being arrested, and the agents just go on and do their next job. to be a very bad outcome for those who are being arrested and the agents just go on and do their next job so that gives you a sense of where the story is going to be and i think you want to tell a story that kind of universalizes not that moses is quite an everyman but you want to be able to get on board with him and then feel angry about what's happening to him he's an everyman to the extent that he loves his family and he wants to look after them. Well, Marchand said that, yes, when he,

Marchand, who plays Moses, he said, I mean, I haven't gone and checked the maths, but he said, look, I mean, one of the reasons I like this was here was a black guy on screen who loves his family. Now, I'm sure there are many examples of the same thing, but I think he was just saying, look, that's part of this world that's going to be blasted apart by this grand narrative, which is bogus.

And I think you have to be able to ride with his eccentricities. So that was a challenge as well. I just felt that the story is best if you ride this guy into a wall. And were you worried about the fact that those were the only black characters in the film? They're all these sort of eccentric characters. You told me about a Q&A you did where someone said, why are all the black people nutters or something? Well, they're not nutters, but I mean... That's not a good phrase to use. No, no, no, that's a direct quote to paraphrase.

No, but I mean, I think within that, you're telling the story. I mean, after all, from my point of view, I'm investigating a lie that was a news story and then turns out to be this. I'm not doing a sort of my story about growing up in the poorest part of town as a black person. That would be ludicrous. I'm doing this kind of tale which involves black people. They're not just black people stop there. It is a very selected group who fall into the sway of these FBI plots because you have to be vulnerable in order to get tangled up in this. So it's a story about somebody who is vulnerable. Now, sometimes it's drugs, sometimes it's mental health, sometimes it's just being very easily led or very young. But these are the factors which

predispose you to the kind of, I guess they make you gullible enough to fall for this. So it's a story about that. That is why the black characters may look gullible. Because that's what happens. And I think you make a decision. And I quite understand the argument of somebody saying, yeah, but, you know, why do we have to see that? And that is an argument about representation. And given the deal that is handed out, the unfair, the asymmetric deal that is loaded against minorities, why not adjust that problem by representational casting, by Black Panther, by Hamilton? And I get that. But that's not what this is.

This is a story about something that actually happens where you must look close up at this. And when I played it to an all-black audience in Philadelphia, they were just absolutely on it. They went, yes, the law exploits somebody who's mentally frail. And he's only moderately delusional. I mean, he's not a raving madman. No. Just friends of mine believe in ghosts. Some don't. Well, exactly. You know, his deal is that he's struggling with mental health problems,

and he goes off his meds. I think it's very important to keep that in there. And I certainly felt that the, you know, this audience in Philadelphia got that. I mean, they appreciated that because to them, it made it even even more the case you can only see the film from your point of view and it's very interesting to talk to people from different points of view and if one can generalize so far there's a certainly a difference in the perception of threat so that if you're a black person and you see that the law is against your black protagonist you have a much more pessimistic view of the outcome from early on. And you notice that the white people around you are still laughing merrily, whereas you're laughing ironically,

because you know that this in real life doesn't play out well. No, and that contributes very effectively to the tension in the final section of the film. But that's what, you know, by the end of the film, and that's another reason you asked about why tell it as a story, because when I said universal, what I meant was that wherever you start off, by the end, hopefully you've ended up in the same place. In other words, you've sort of eliminated the kind of

othering psychology that happens in the genesis of these cases and you've all ended up in the same place, basically going, what? Or something. And then you offset some of the creepiness of the FBI characters with Anna Kendrick's character struggling. Well, there are people. I mean, you see, of course there are people inside the FBI.

Part of my research was obviously meeting FBI agents people who work for the Department of Justice and they are human beings I mean they are you know this is and the problem is that you're working for an institution that has made so many assumptions that you really can't overturn yeah so that if your president says nearly 20 years ago you're either for us or against us if the government policy is that certain communities are now put under surveillance because they are deemed to be suspicious because they are brown or black, the black communities have the old sort of ideologies, which could be, and I'm just talking like an American government thought now, but they have the old ideologies

that could be reactivated. The brown communities have this new terrifying ideology that seems to want to knock down our buildings and kill people. So they're all under suspicion. You know, these are just some of the groupthink that carries you with it. And if you join as an FBI agent, you sign up to. But I mean, I'm just reading a book by somebody who I spoke to quite a lot during the research for this, who used to be an FBI agent, who joined the FBI more than 25 years ago, because one of its charters is to uphold human rights, is to protect human rights. And that's what he thought he was doing. And he ended up leaving because he found that the FBI was rigging evidence and he felt that was wrong. They said, thank you very much for raising that we're gonna well sort of but they don't fire you they just allow you to wither on your own branch

they just push you to the end of a dry twig and then you you're gonna go you know you're you're just cut off you've suddenly become not not one of us so that's the problem so within the agency people will get to the point where they go should should we do this? You can hear this actually on an accidental recording that an agent made, having been to visit the target, comes back to the station and goes, guys, we're onto a winner here. I've just visited the guy. One, he's an idiot. And two, he hasn't got a pot to piss in. So we're not even going to need to give him more than $50. We can get him to do anything. And there's a bit of a gap. And somebody says, should we be targeting this guy? There's another little gap, and somebody goes, yeah, yeah.

That's a real recording. Yeah, that's a real recording. Because the guy left his recorder on, you know, it was in a key fob or something, it has to be available to the defence. What happened was the defence asked for that to be part of the trial. And then the judge has final say and the judge went, no, I don't think that's relevant. I think it is pretty relevant because it shows the nature of the game. So yes, you have these little shards that show the psychology. So we wanted, Jesse and I wanted Anna's character to be capable of that sort of thought, character to be capable of that sort of thought. Because otherwise, it's not interesting. I mean,

the FBI isn't, you know, it's not a uniform mass machine. There's all sorts of squabbles within it. That's why the attorney says to Andy, the special agent in charge, this building, why he ribs him for the building, because that is the real FBI building that they built after 9-11 as a kind of the building because that is the real FBI building that they built after 9-11 as a kind of public Batman type gesture. We are watching you. It's not the old type of building that was rather discreet. This is really a geometric piece of lunacy. And it does look like a personality disorder. And it was given to the FBI by Bin Laden because without 9-11, that building wouldn't be there. And there's all kinds of little ideological squabbles within the fbi and in fact there are lots of people who go these sting cases are ridiculous but you to put your head above the parapet and say that you risk everything

and in the course of making the film you you did all this research and went and met FBI agents and got shown around. Why did they let you go around there? Have they not seen your stuff? Well, actually, funnily enough, not really. They hadn't. I mean, there were two lucky things. One is that people like to talk and they like to talk about people that they think are going to make films or TV shows about them. Because they look at Quantico or they look at 24 or

Homeland and they think that's right and that's wrong and I'd like the next one to be more right okay and sometimes things can be massively flattering and they don't mind it but I mean if you go in saying I want to get this right then people are going to talk there was somebody who said as I arrived in the la offices they said can we just come up to this disused floor i said yeah they said right we've come here first because this was one liaison officer she said i've just googled you and i think you might be going to do a satire and i don't really like the word satire actually but we'll stick with it for now it's shorthand but i thought this we arranged this three months ago and you've just Googled me now.

She said, you're not going to be nasty about us, are you? Because everybody here works really hard and their jobs mean a lot to them. And they'll feel really sad if somebody just is nasty to them. And I thought this is a very strange approach because I was expecting a kind of authoritarian finger wag, if anything. But this is, please, please don't stamp on my toes and I thought right I'm being gulled into saying no of course I mean of course no nothing critical so I thought no I'm not going to say that I can't say that because then it's on the record so I'm going to have to fudge I just went I'm interested in workplace dynamics and everywhere is essentially the same. And I just want to see how that applies within the FBI, which was true.

But I think she noted that I wasn't saying, no, of course, of course, you guys are great. So I got the very grown up tour. But if you hang around long enough, you then see people dicking about. You see the nicknames they call each other. Some guy was called James Bond. I said, why is he called James Bond? As soon as he turned it back, he thinks he's cool. He thinks he's cool with the women.

He's not. He's a dickhead. You know, and you just suddenly see somebody throwing a kind of ball of paper at somebody else's head. What about the Nerf gun stuff you've got? Yeah, well, the Nerf gun stuff is absolutely that. That was somebody saying to me,

if you want to understand life in a Joint Terrorism Task Force office, you've got to understand nerf guns i was like okay and he said yeah i work in the sunni rank and our arch enemy is the shia rank i was thinking all right this is i'm not going to use that because that's too route one that the fbi sunni file and the shia file are at war that's I'm just going to let you go with that. But he said, yeah, Nerf guns,

because basically about half our time is shooting our fellow agents with Nerf guns and putting them off their phone calls. And the thing is that our ceiling is low. So if I want to get the guy in the far corner on his most important phone call of the day, I have got to aim my trajectory perfectly so that it doesn't hit the polystyrene ceiling, but does travel all the way to hit him on the head.

I just thought, I said, really? And then I said, I sort of went, well, yeah, that's what happens in the sort of the interstices of any important job. You've got dick around space. And if you're doing your job by the end of the day, fine. It's probably an agent in charge walks through the office and catches side of a nerf gun pellet hitting somebody else on the head it's like yeah morale's pretty good today but it tells you something about the reality and this guy also said to me look the FBI present themselves as very grown up and they are a powerful agency but basically every operation is a snafu and we

probably don't know what a snafu is, but he said, and the operative word there is normal, situation normal, all fucked up. In other words, that's just how it is. Each operation is things going wrong and you just trying to get them into line to get to the end of it so the operation works out. And the degree of idiocy and just human fallibility in that path he said you wouldn't believe i mean it's amazing that people haven't been shot more often by their own side you know

so many things go wrong and this is with very strict planning so that also gives you a clue i mean like anything really is we i think we like to think of certain organisations as being like they are in films. And it doesn't really play out like that. In a way, the most realistic people seem to be special forces because they've had to do so much work on very difficult lethal situations. But even then, they'll tell you that things are a rolling snafu and it's basically down to your training as to whether you get through. letting off steamery. But we do a tough job and we're trying to protect the American people from some genuinely dangerous people. And if a few fringe cases fall under the bus,

maybe that's regrettable. But overall, I think you would prefer if we prevented the next 9-11. Yeah. And that's the argument that the court makes to the jury. But mate, if you were in boston don't point your finger no but this is a finger pointy this is worthy of finger pointing right because the idea that they're all out there and they're all against us and if you talk to fb you know hoover thought and nixon and you know many other people thought that basically black people were just about to wage war on them i mean what happens if if all the armed black people just suddenly decide they don't like us in one day? I mean, right now, this was since we made the film, the FBI, since we shot the film anyway,

the FBI looked at black groups who were protesting about black people being shot by the police. And they had this nightmare that what if some of these anti-fascist groups or whatever, Black Lives Matter, what if they team up with ISIS? And what would happen then? They're angry. ISIS are angry. We don't like the sound of that.

We've just imagined something that we can't put back in the box. What are we going to call this problem now? Well, black identity extremists would do. And you're going, what the fuck? Who? When did ISIS just get a look in on this deal? Why don't you just deal with the evidence in front of you that if you shoot a black person, maybe some other black people are going to be pissed off? Don't start dreaming about ISIS. I mean, it's like they are on drugs. So when you ask your question as an FBI agent, I say, first of all, clean up,

get whatever's in your bloodstream out and then have the conversation because it's chasing ghosts. And that's a deep problem to have to deal with. You know, it's an ongoing perception battle fight. Ooh, conversation I really love talking to you so much the other day we were talking about takeover tv which was the show i used to do well it was the first show i did on tv and it led to us doing the adam and joe show me and joe but you were saying what was going on in your head and what was going on in my head was I was at art school and half understanding lots of stuff about postmodernism and playing around with modern culture in that way. But also I was watching the day to day or maybe it was on the hour that was on when I was at college. and I was doing stuff where I was doing news reports, but getting into the delivery and the, you know,

just the vocal ticks and nuances of the way news was delivered. And someone at college said, you should listen to On The Hour. They're doing that. And I said, all right, okay. So I listened to it. I said, oh, shit, they are doing that. That's good. If this were the Rolling Thunder documentary, then there would be a link between your experiments

and conversations between me and Armando. There would be some courier who went, you need to hear this guy at art college. He's doing a newsy thing. He's doing a much worse newsy thing. Well, I think a lot of people, Armando was doing his own newsy things. I was doing mine on the radio in London.

I just liked playing with that voice of authority. So I think it was just gagging for it, wasn't it? The medium itself was going, please come and rip us up. So, you know, you just flocked to that call. The pompous authority, the spurious authority that news had and still very much has. Does it? You see, I'm not sure it does. Do you not?

Well, I was asked about this the other day. I just don't think it does. I don't feel it anyway. Now, you'd have to ask a 25-year-old, but I don't feel it. When I hear the news now, I just hear people making mistakes. I don't feel the sense. I mean, in the whole of society, we've changed. You know, I grew up, what, 70s and 80s,

you know, where things were how they were. And although there was a lot of change and movement, authority hadn't been overthrown to the extent that it has now. And it meant that the news broadcasting system was much more, this is the news. And that automatically sparks something in you, doesn't it? When you just go, that's one of the things that you want to swing something back against,

because it's part of the carapace of authority that you've been banging your head against as you grow up. I'm not sure that that same feeling now is experienced by somebody in their teens. No, it carries less authority, I suppose. It's at war with itself the whole time now. It's wrangling. It doesn't... There's no self-confidence about it. If you look at the way the BBC was,

the BBC, when I first started working for the BBC, had contempt for audience figures. Oh, yes, the audience figures are coming. Yeah, no, we just thought it was very good. End of conversation, on to something else. And it was much more about the qualitative evaluation of a programme. Yeah. We thought it was good for these reasons or bad for these reasons.

Now, you may argue with those, but the audience figures were just a sort of perfunctory thing. Jikra, radar, blah, blah. And now there's so much confidence lost in the BBC's mission that everything is about metrics and place in the market. And you can understand it because of the proliferation of broadcasting outlets and indeed the internet just totally changed the landscape. But also the political environment back then in the 80s

was still very much left versus right. It was the miners' strike, it was Thatcher. I mean, the Cold War was still on. People thought there was, you know, Mutually Sure Destruction was... I mean, Gillen did a song, did he? I can't believe it was fucking Ian Gillen. Did he have a song about Mutually Sure Destruction was, I mean, Gillan did a song, did he? I can't believe it was fucking Ian Gillan did a song about Mutually Sure Destruction. I think he did.

But, you know, it sort of cooked everybody's minds in a certain way. And possibly one gave you a desire to have an authoritative news voice just to sort of Tim Sebastian or whoever it was. Tim Sebastian or whoever it was. Brian Barron was also, you know, these people were giving you the world as it was in the sort of pincer of that great kind of lobster claw of uncertainty. I'm going to start sounding like Stephen Berkhoff for some reason. Did you ever hear Stephen Berkhoff talking to Anthony Clare in the psychiatrist's chair?

No. It's mesmerising. It's like being on drugs. It's fantastic because you can't work out if he's, the whole thing is a kind of put on. He's sort of digging. Oh, yes. Yes, of course.

Well, I would feel that way because an actor is an emissary, isn't it? Sent from God and channels the energy to the audience. Of course, theatre is better than real life. Anthony, do you think for some reason you're difficult at some level? And I honestly, if you listen to it, he goes, the more he goes, it's like he's going, I see myself as a tube with a point on it stuck through a sewer at high pressure. It's my job to delve, to regurgitate the bile and the necrotic soul of human existence i think you might be you're winking at me when you say that you know it's it's great you really

well at least this is my recollection but i don't know why i went there yeah well it's the the world now has been irreparably deconstructed by successive generations of tinkerers and ironists, and now it'll never be seen the same way again. Or at least you think that. I remember I watched the day-to-day and thought, oh, well, they'll never be able to make news programs the same way because they'll be too embarrassed. And it's as if they watched the day-to-day and

thought oh that's how we should do it so all the graphics for example which at the time were that was such a funny joke that i hadn't seen anyone make and the fact that you did you go to a real news graphics company yeah and then we yeah itn guys richard norley et al um russell and they we they were ITN graphics people, and we just sort of imbued them with a kind of turbocharge of, no, we can take it this far and this far and this far, and we really pushed them. And I remember going sort of late-night edits in the Henry,

as it was then, the sort of the 3D suite, and just getting that title sequence to go sillier and sillier, all those kind of globes and things, because it was there. I mean, it was there in the news. Okay, so, you know, it's a simple imaginative leap. And then, yeah, of course, once you've done that, then people are going, oh, that's great. Well, let's do that. And I felt that basically even then the news was starting to become like a kind of pathetically eager school teacher that didn't want to fall out with the class it was falling over itself to be kind of amusing and zany and it was terrible it was just like all right guys you've just really that is not the

thing that you need to do you just need to be good at your job you don't need to start being pathetic it's sort of like when you discover that people who write for the daily mail are liberals oh yeah no it's just what we write same Same with the Express. Yeah, I know. Terrible, isn't it? I mean, people have sort of encapsulated a contradiction and it's carried on. And yeah, I don't know what the crisis, I mean, I remember having conversations in the early 90s saying, you know, iron is finished. It's just done, it's dull, it's boring. Don't kind of, you know, commit. Launch an attack or not, but don't kind of come in going, I'm not really what I am,

because that's just pathetic. I mean, it just filled me with contempt. It still is when I see people just do it. It's like, no, you are what you are. But, you know, I have been told that there should be a sign above my front door saying no grey areas. So maybe I've got a problem. Oh, man, I loved all that stuff, though. And also, I appreciated the fact that you were into silly voices as well, I guess.

Well, they are silly, aren't they, voices? I mean, they don't have to be silly voices to be but as soon as you notice them doing things who is the your sort of posh smiley reporter is that austin tasseltine yeah where did he come from you don't really get too many reporters like that anymore they were innately daft even long before i took a professional interest in it. And then the anchors were sort of daft in a different way because they were sort of smooth. But there was a guy I worked with who essentially gave a blueprint clue because he was a sort of enterprising freelance journalist

who knew how to get paid three times for his story by, you get a story off the local police and then he'd cut it into three and then sell each one as an individual story to the bbc so he got three times 60 quid for his tip off instead of you know smart stuff but he also had a sort of charge ahead delivery and i remember doing a christmas shift with him once and he did a report about an accident on a local road saying the county's roads have served up a pre-christmas cocktail of carnage and he came out of the news studio sort of winked at me and then counted to how long till the phone rang and the news editor said look pat i don't

think a pre-christmas cocktail of carnage is really what we need. So he went, right, right, right, OK, and then winked at me again. And then at the 11 o'clock bulletin, he said, the county's police are out in force today as the pre-Christmas road served up a menu of mayhem. And then kind of winks at me through the glass. You know, and you kind of, you see this game. Yeah. You know, the inside of the game makes you, I don't know, it just goes in and you just don't know where that's coming out but it's coming out somewhere yeah did you read um steve coogan's biography did he did he read it

there was a a little section about doing the day-to-day, I think. But I guess he felt like the outsider because were you all kind of university buddies? No, I felt quite an outsider as well. But I think that was one of Armando's master strokes. You know, he's accidentally become the sort of daddy of the group. And we had a reunion recently and it was kind of like, oh, you know,

this unlikely figure. I always think that Armando's like the least likely George Clinton that ever was. Because his bands have all these kind of ridiculous characters in them. Right. But to meet him, you wouldn't go, that's the next George Clinton. Yeah. But I could see Steve was an outsider.

Because, number one, he was not in the On The Hour pilot. So we didn't have a sports reporter. And Patrick said, well, my friends do. And so we got him in to do sports reporting. So he came in and he was, I think he'd been to Manchester and the rest was, I think Dune had been somewhere. I'd have to check where, but not Oxbridge. But there was a mainly Oxbridge thing. So I felt like an outsider as well.

But I think maybe I was going to say Armando's masterstroke was kind of like getting a team of outsider-ish people because in the end everyone thinks they're an outsider yeah I guess and Steve was perhaps younger than us and I think he felt he came from a different background but I think everybody was sort of channeling the good and bad parts of their outsiderish mentality, including Armando. It was a sort of an unlikely alliance of outsiders. And to what extent were you interfered with by the channel? That was BBC Two? We did actually have a little bit. I mean, you can see it in the day-to-day that we had to put

a car horn over some swearing and various things like that but and we do also have minor interference i always used to think our man didn't go far enough in on the hour you know there were various things i was just like come on but then he was a bbc insider and i wasn't so he i guess he had to what was the on the hour thing that you did get in trouble for? Oh, didn't you do some obituary for someone who wasn't dead? Oh, that was on Radio 1. And yeah, I mean, I just started the program saying something like, what was it?

9pm. So I just started the program saying, this is BBC Radio 1. And if there's any news of the death of Michael Heseltine, we'll let you know. Right. You know, you can see the... But I'd also recorded a whole load of fake obits, which I felt were kind of good material. Everything from Jerry Hayes, who was a sort of instant soundbite MP NP who talked about this beast of the jungle,

this lion amongst men. And Bruce Foxton of The Jam. Right. Phoned up Bruce Foxton and asked him for his response. Just because it felt funny just to throw that one in. I was talking to him about a charity canoe event he was doing. And I said, what do you think about the death of Michael Heseltine? And he was like, oh said what do you think about the death of michael heseltine and he was like oh that's you know i mean it's like a terrible ambush but for me it seemed funny that we were asking bruce foxton yeah uh so they were holding up but i

mean i never actually announced it so i don't know why i was so badly treated what actually happened i do know exactly why i was badly treated to To be fair, I'd run it past Radio 1 chiefs, and they'd said, yes, that's very funny, and that's fine, so long as you don't actually announce the death of Michael Huston. And I think actually in the phone call to Bruce Foxton, he went, he's dead, and I went, yes. Right. So that was the thin strand of silk from which I dangled.

Yes. In the inquiry afterwards. But the reason there was an inquiry was because some news agency in the West Country had had Radio 1 on in the background and had heard, had fallen for this, you know. Oh, and then they reported it as a story. They phoned the BBC and said, what are you doing on the death of Michael Heseltine? And Newsnight went into full Michael Heseltine is dead mode until 20 past 10. When somebody said, you need to check out the origin of this. I may have got the times wrong, but they were on hesseltine alert for quite a long time yeah and that meant that something had to be done and as usual you can

reduce everything i've done to kind of traps and bollockings that was a trap the bollocking would have been self-examination why did we fall for that but of course i took the bollocking on the chip but actually was fine i mean i was like they were although i was suspended i wasn't fired because radio one management knew matthew bannison knew really that it had to be a cosmetic reprimand so that was that so dull no it's funny though coming back to four lions and the day shall come and other stuff you've done in the past i guess the pedophile special the brass i show there was certainly consequences from the pedophile special in your personal life wasn't there like there were there were that sort of got scary a bit afterwards.

I mean, people were genuinely outraged. The whole point of the show was to satirise the level of hysteria there was around the subject of paedophilia in the media. And then that became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, but to be absolutely honest, it was boring because there'd already been enough response to Brass Eye in 1997 that this was just yawn. It was like, oh, you know, because there was nothing new about it.

And, you know, fine, it sort of became part of the framing of the program. But really, the program was meant to be about itself. And the press response was like, yeah, OK, fine. Well, yeah, the Daily Mail's gone mad. What a surprise. But it wasn't personally in debt because people were not echoing what the newspaper said. Nobody came up to me and said anything. I mean, just there was a pain in the arse having press outside the house.

Right. Because they published your address, didn't they? No, that was in the original. David Sullivan published my address because i'd monkeyed i'd done a silly interview with him in the original brass eye so and then some yeah he published my address and phone number and so we came home from a from a weekend away and found there was sort of a hundred messages on the answer machine and didn't really know anything about why i started listening to them but actually i mean i say this this is not a humble brag or anything this was just if you if you imagine i think if you've got a young family you're sort

of you feel quite you feel your home is really quite as should be quite a safe space you've got a one-year-old you come in and there's this like oh you've been published in the your address and phone number being published i mean this is really really small beer compared to what some people get but it's enough to give you a sense of vulnerability but then the answer machine answer machine i mean literally a tape answer machine was full of people going go on mate good on you mate thanks a lot keep it up sullivan's an arsehole there wasn't a single negative comment and that actually did you know make the evening go very well because I hadn't well I mean I you know and it wasn't a celebration but it was just like okay so those because they'd sent some sort

of thugs to just sit outside the house in a car menacingly. They weren't going to do anything. But I think it was just like, don't fuck around with us. And actually, that sort of response did make you think, oh, you know what? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, these walls are solid. And I'd like to retrospectively thank those people. Because it wasn't what I expected.

I was steeled myself to a torrent of abuse. But that's not what happened. And I think that's a good sign, isn't it? I mean, the intention was for people to be nasty, but only supportive-minded people phoned. That's good, isn't it? I mean, that's what gets left out of this whole fucking shooting match about Brexit, is that basically there's good stuff here. Nobody's actually saying, we have got a good thing going on here. But I remember when I was going

around researching for Four Lions, and a lot of Muslims have a sort of very kind of a dutiful overseas service element to their practice of their religion. And so a lot of people who'd been from Huddersfield or Bradford or wherever and worked abroad came back, said, I'm living in Britain, man. This is great. And once you've seen the world, you realise how lucky we are here. But nobody's kind of giving that song. That's the missing bit. should capitalize on is what we've still got and how we can take it forward not how we can further rinse the shit out of the last of our economy and what we've got you know in some sort of extreme capitalist future which is what seems to be being proposed but you know what we've got that's good here and i think there is that it was like i was saying earlier about seven seven people don't really count that and that is without wishing to sound lacrimose and patriotic in that way that does exist and it's never tapped into i love lacrimose and patriotic well it reminds me good to go back to burkoff that he actually says in that interview the word lacrimose i think his father was inclined in later life became lacrimose um hey thanks so

much man pleasure i never use these bits at the end where i say thanks thanks man no it's been great it just seems nice to say to someone who sat in front of you thank you very much indeed and wrap it up like a real interview so that they know it's finished thanks very much for coming in thank you well they do do that on live ones, don't they? And that's always a bit odd. You can tell quite a lot from the amicability of the sign-off. Do you remember when Michael Gove said to Nick Robinson, I know what you're thinking, Nick.

You're thinking, here comes Govey, and he's got this. And Nick Robinson said, I am not thinking that. I am not thinking anything like, here comes Govee. Govee? Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes it looks very professional I love browsing your videos

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Thing's a little bit lacrimosa. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Chris Morris there. And that conversation was recorded earlier this year September 2019 in London in a house belonging to my friends Mark and Zivi thank you to them for kindly letting us record there and thank you to Chris as well for his patience and generosity and making the time to sit down with me for a second time in just a couple of weeks. As I mentioned in the intro, my first attempt at recording a podcast with Chris was frustrated by some bad button pushing by buckles. What I ended up with was a rather roomy recording on my backup recorder, better than nothing certainly, but not up to the technical standards that I like to impose

on this podcast whenever possible. Regular listeners will know that from time to time things do go wrong, but they believe, as as i do that it's the quality of the conversation not the quality of the actual audio that's important but that doesn't stop some people getting in touch with me whenever there's a bit of shitty audio and saying well i was very disappointed to find that uh the conversation i wanted to listen to with the interesting person on your podcast was ruined by sounding as if it was recorded in a wind tunnel with excessive reverb bouncing off the I've only ever received about I would say two tweets of that kind but as you can tell they're lodged so anyway the reverb heavy conversation Chris, which took place in a different venue.

It took place at 2 North Down, the comedy club where I've recorded a few of the podcasts now. Will, I hope, go out later this week. That one was even more rambly, I think, than this one. Rosie, don't go miles away. We're going to head back. It's very windy and non-clement. Sorry, dog. Come on. It's very windy and non-clement.

Sorry, dog. Come on. Yes, I was saying that the other conversation with Chris is perhaps more rambly than the one you just heard. Quite a lot of music chat. We're both big Bowie fans and fans of the Pixies. So we talked about them. We talked about the film the day shall come although i will edit out the parts that we covered in this episode but we did talk about why chris finds

it important to do so much research for his films you know he spent several years doing research not only for four lions, but for The Day Shall Come. We talked about, oh yeah, and we had quite a long conversation about Quentin Tarantino and going to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Anyway, that's in part two or the bonus episode, however you want to think of it. I've included a load of links in the description of this podcast for things that we talked about. A trailer for The Day Shall Come. So obviously I would urge you to go out and see that. Chris's films are some of my favourite things that he's done. All two of them. I loved Four Lions and I've seen it several times and every time time I see it, I like it more and find new things to enjoy.

Kay Van Novak was so brilliant in that, and he's brilliant in The Day Shall Come as well. The whole cast is great in The Day Shall Come. I like the fact that the feature films seem to give Chris the opportunity to show his passionate, maybe even sentimental side. You got a taste of it in the conversation we just had. Perhaps the people who really loved the edginess of some of the day-to-day and a lot of brass eye would appreciate those things less. I don't know. Maybe it's a factor of me just getting older. What else? Oh yeah, Lynx.

Bonzo Dog Band shirt. The book about the FBI that Chris mentioned, Disrupt, Discredit and Divide. The book about filmmaking by Sandy McKendrick that he mentioned, I've got a link to. Stuff about the Newberg or the Nubra 4. Cointelpro. Mutually Assured Destruction by Gillen. The episode of In the Psychiatrist's Chair with Stephen Berkoff that Chris was talking about. I do recommend that.

I went and listened to it after he was talking about it. It's good value. And other bits and pieces. Compilations of the day-to-day and brass eye on youtube and the pedo geddon special etc in case you haven't seen those before and would like to explore rosie come on let's head back come on it's cold sorry rose it's just a bit too parky sometimes this time of year is the absolute tits but recently it's been a bit dreary non-stop rain good for the ground good for the soil but

not so fun to cycle in thanks very much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell in production support mode and Matt Lamont in edit mode for their work on this episode. Thanks very much to you for listening right the way to the end. That's nice of you. Come on, Rosie. This way. I don't want to go that way. I want to go the other way and have a frolic.

It's too cold for frolicking. Oh, this is boring. I hate this time of year. Come on. You curl up by the boring. I hate this time of year. Come on. You curl up by the fire. Don't drink the puddle. Till next time. Take care.

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