Dublin Opinion

Chris Morris has always been a bit dodgy. Well, to be more precise he’s always been several types of dodgy, but most are the good type rather than the bad.

In the current lexicon of British satire I suppose he’s considered ‘edgy’, always pushing out the margins of what is acceptable, although part of satire is that its designed to offend – that is, offend the comfortable notions of those it’s trying to satirize. Everyone else is too busy laughing their chops off.

So, in one way he’s dodgy because the issues he raises manage to polarize people. Although he has the ability to cut through the crap of celebrity culture and unthinking media spin with scalpel sharp precision, the devastation by way of ‘public discourse’ afterwards looks like he wielded a wrecking ball.

In a sense that is part of his genius. He’s capable of getting liberal types in a twist. Although they’re only too happy to laugh at Phil Collins making a tit of himself, they’re not so comfortable when that mockery is part of a satire designed to challenge both how the media manipulates common fears in its representations of pedophilia and their own cozy notions on the subject.

In another sense though, he’s dodgy in that he doesn’t always get it right. Nathan Barley was a mess. There was no excuse for it, especially with Charlie Brooker on board.

Today, however, I was reminded of his Richard Geefe, Second Class Male column in The Observer some years back and I realized he, or his satire, is dodgy in another way.

If you haven’t heard about this column published over many months in 1999 it’s an interesting story.

Using the name Richard Geefe, Morris wrote the column about a man who had attempted suicide and who planned to try again. Each week, liberal readers of the Sunday broadsheet, as it was then, were treated to a diary of someone with the irrevocable determination to end his own life.

The liberal readership considered this very dodgy indeed. Even when the real author of the ‘Time to Go’ column, as he renamed it, was revealed, the sense of opprobrium remained.

The question that was being discussed was ‘is suicide a suitable subject for satire?’ although the column seems to be written in part as a reaction to John Diamond and Ruth Picardie near death diaries.

The reason it could be considered dodgy still is that the newspaper purported it to be real (The Observer had already published Picardie’s column) and that it dealt with suicide, not a terminal illness. Of course, suicidal tendencies is now considered an illness too but in the column there was no real reason given, although there is a reference to Geefe’s melancholic nature – “unlike the great melancholics - Baudelaire, Beethoven - I have no genius from which to draw consolation. I am at best a Brian Wilson, but a Brian Wilson who went to bed before making Pet Sounds”.

Of course, the reason for the column and why it uses suicide is to satirize the voyerism of their newspaper industry for the sake of copy and the vacuity and shallowness of certain types of columnists. After the final column detailed the ‘last moments of the author’ was published there was this note from the ‘editor’.

“The Editor writes: We are currently negotiating terms with Richard’s son Jake to take over Richard’s column. Depression is all too often an inheritable trait and there is a tragic likelihood that Jake will feel suicidal himself at some point. We sincerely hope this will not be the case. In the meantime, I will be writing here about the guilt-like feelings I may encounter if I conclude that I did have a role in Richard’s death after all, albeit in a way that I simply could not have foreseen when I first persuaded him to kill himself.”

But still it uses suicide as a subject for satire and after hearing today about the suicide pact between two young men, a 24-year-old from Walkinstown Park, Dublin, and a 20 year old, from Omagh, Co Tyrone, its still a bit dodgy.

However, Morris columns were brilliantly written and very funny in their own right, leaving aside the dodginess of the subject. I remember reading them at the time with extreme unease initially – I didn’t cop it at all at first – and then got sucked in as it became increasingly obvious that someone was having a laugh.

In 2006 Morris made a 7 minute film for £500 based on a short story of his, which came out of the Second Class Male column. It’s about a geezer who gets locked out his flat. Here it is. It’s funny and surprisingly, not dodgy at all.

Update:
It seems that Dublin Opinion is not the only one on about suicides today. Splintered Sunrise mentions that the issue came up on Talkback, the BBC Radio Ulster current affairs program, yesterday. The show was discussing it because apparently there was eight suicide attempts on the Shankill Road in one day. However, one Reverend Minister had a reason for why the suicide rate was so high.

It was the theory of evolution. Yes, that’s right, apparently Darwinian evolution takes away meaning from one’s life and therefore suicide is only to be expected. So, to protect our young, we need to get back to teaching creationism.