http://www.koekie.org.uk/funnel/
(for anyone yet to experience the great man)
Is this guy the best thing to come out of Britain for years or what?
(Sample article)
FEUDING is a favourite pastime for men of a certain age. There are, however, isolated examples of the angry youngster, notably radio satirists and telephone hoax kings Victor Lewis-Smith (33) and Chris Morris (29).
They met in September 1988, when Morris interviewed Lewis-Smith for his regular Radio Bristol show. They didn’t get along. Lewis-Smith says he gave a ‘non-interview’; Morris didn’t find him at all amusing and ‘trashed the interview because it was useless’. When it wasn’t aired, Lewis-Smith began to stew. Unconsoled by the fact that Morris was subsequently sacked by Radio Bristol for doing running commentaries over live news bulletins, he became increasingly concerned by the thought that Morris was ‘stealing’ his comic persona. ‘Basically,’ said Morris ‘he got it into his head that I was somehow nicking his jokes, recasting them and chucking them out myself, which, as far as I’m concerned, would be a suicidal thing to do. He reserves the sole right to recycle his own material so frequently - I don’t know why anyone else would bother.’
Later, Private Eye ran a piece which described Morris’s Radio 4 show, On The Hour, as ‘Citizens without the jokes’. Lewis-Smith, who writes for Private Eye, says he wasn’t the author. He did however write to Radio 4 controller Michael Green, in April this year, complaining that Morris was being given far more freedom in his telephone hoaxing than he ever was.
Then, two weeks ago Lewis-Smith wrote to Time Out, after another flurry of letters about plagiarism and whether Lewis-Smith was writing fake letters of complaint about the show to the BBC: ‘I have not heard any of the present series of On The Hour,’ he wrote, ‘. . . now fuck off and leave me alone.’ Even Lewis-Smith admits things may be getting out of hand. ‘What’s the point? You take a tape into somebody’s office and say listen to this - that man’s a thief! And they look at you and think this is somebody with an obsession.’ Morris is more relaxed about it. ‘He’s like an unofficial publicity agent who takes great pains to put my name in print whenever he can.’ Listeners can judge for themselves next month. Morris’s On The Hour is going out on Saturday mornings on Radio 4, and Lewis-Smith’s new evening show is on Radio 1.
Meanwhile, the feud goes on: ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of being an unoriginal thieving bastard,’ says Lewis-Smith. ‘It will run and run,’ says Morris, ‘until he has a heart attack and falls flat on his fat face.’