Attempt to get to the heart of the brass-necked, enigmatic 'Dark Prince of Comedy'

BOOK OF THE DAY: Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris MorrisBy Lucian Randall Simon Schuster 276pp, £12.99

JUST WHO is he? A silly prankster? A deeply moral humorist challenging

abuses in the media? A charismatic misanthrope? A conman working to an impenetrable personal agenda? A clever clogs who does it simply because he can?

Lucian Randall’s attempts to sift through the riddles, inconsistencies and contradictions that shape the enigmatic Chris Morris are heroic, but the motivations of this scary, brilliant man remain tantalisingly fuzzy.

That's how the secretive Morris undoubtedly wants it. He refused to be interviewed – he turns down almost all interview requests – but gave Randall a grudging, oblique blessing, perhaps because the book may help to publicise a feature film he has just directed, his first. Four Lions, a comedy about Jihadist suicide bombers, is released on Friday.

Morris has been called the Dark Prince of Comedy (and also, by one tabloid at the height of his notoriety, the Most Evil Man in Britain). What is beyond dispute is the vastness of his influence. Sacha Baron Cohen and many others now walk the furrow he first ploughed.

A former local radio journalist amused and disgusted by the way news can be lazy, partial, dishonest and cobbled together from cliches, Morris in the 1990s took the worn, dull threads of traditional reportage and fashioned a handful of shocking, glittering and savagely witty television shows from which there was no going back: The Day Todayand Brass Eye.

Charming, plausible and reassuringly posh (his parents were both country doctors and he studied zoology at university), Morris is best known for persuading credulous politicians and daft celebs to endorse entirely preposterous public service campaigns and charities.

Brass Eyemoments are still cherished and laughed about. There was Paul Daniels worrying about the plight of Carla, the elephant in an east German zoo who had her trunk stuck up her rectum. Or presenter Bruno Brookes warning about the new rave drug Cake: "It stimulates the part of the brain known as Shatner's Bassoon."

In the 2001 Brass Eyespecial on paedophiles, DJ Dr Fox claimed that, genetically, such men have more in common with crabs than humans: "That's scientific fact. There's no evidence for it, but it is scientific fact."

It was the paedophile show that most alarmed middle England, with Channel 4 receiving 2,000 complaints from the literal-minded and humour-deficient.

Since then Morris, now 46, has done nothing that has had the same impact, though he did appear to great comic effect as a crazy boss in the first series of Graham Linehan's The IT Crowd.

Morris fostered talent (Linehan and Arthur Mathews both wrote for The Day Todayand Brass Eye) and helped create stars (Steve Coogan invented Alan Partridge on The Day Today) but seems himself uninterested in fame or money.

Away from the camera he has no public profile – though friends describe him as a cheerful and fun-loving family man. He is fearless and energetic, editing all his own material and providing broadcast-ready sections just hours before transmission.

In this rather over-reverent biography, Randall rightly suggests that Morris gets away with so much because his background gives him authority; he is able to make the ludicrous somehow believable through the seriousness and intensity of his delivery.

He is definitely not a man to cross, though. When Michael Grade, then head of Channel 4, insisted that a musical sketch involving Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe be removed on taste grounds, Morris retaliated by inserting a subliminal, split-second message to the nation: “Grade is a c**t”.

Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist