Chris Morris (I)

As a younger show with an "open door" submissions policy - meaning that anyone can send in material for consideration - the topical sketch series Newsjack (Radio 4 Extra, Thursday) ought to be edgier, weirder, less formulaic than The News Quiz; but ends up, somehow, being just as complacent. Currently fronted by the comedian Nish Kumar, with assistance from a revolving cast of comics and actors, it's one of a small group of original, non-archival series on 4 Extra.

This week's half-hour instalment was dispiriting in the way that only really unfunny comedy can be. A skit about a plane that had been forced to land at Heathrow because of a broken lavatory careered out of the radio and landed with a tin clunk on the floor. The nadir was reached during a skit about politicians doing drugs, in which Nicola Sturgeon was represented by someone doing a generic Scottish accent, David Cameron by someone who sounded vaguely like Ed Miliband, Ed Miliband by someone who sounded like a young Janet Street-Porter, and Nigel Farage by a woman making no attempt to do an accent at all.

Why does BBC radio so consistently fudge this kind of thing? Neither series is doing anything that pushes a boundary, finds an edge, or ventures anywhere outside of an ideological comfort zone. Chris Morris's On the Hour, commissioned by Radio 4 nearly 25 years ago, retains more bite in a single sketch than they managed across an hour of broadcast time. Here's hoping it doesn't take another quarter-century for the BBC to try something different.

How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true

Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris's 2005 TV series was a comedy about a ludicrous 'self-facilitating media node' in east London. But 10 years on, it looks more like a documentary about the future.

Radio Times review

Back after a three-year hiatus, the cleverest stand-up on TV had refined his tantric anti-comedy about comedy still further, flipping riffs this way and that for minutes on end like some sort of hilarity jazz trumpeter. Childish vandalism of a road sign to Shilbottle; UKIP; or Lee's own feelings of utter uselessness at being a middle-aged, vasectomised father of two drinking real ale every night: he can now work any subject up into comic nirvana by remorselessly observing not the detail of a thing, but the essence. And he made his new antagonist Chris Morris corpse. Twice.

Review: The Frequency of Laughter; Raw Meat Radio

There was much to laugh at on the radio last week, not least a three-hour tribute to Chris Morris.

Unheard Chris Morris Sketch Still Unheard

The planned Chris Morris broadcast is no longer happening.

Review: Raw Meat Radio (Chris Morris retrospective)

Raw Meat Radio on Radio 4 Extra showed the Brass Eye star wasn't just pushing at boundaries, he was pole-vaulting over the top of them and gleefully legging it over the horizon.

How Chris Morris' radio comedies electrified

The Day Today creator will debut a new radio sketch on Sunday. It's welcome news: from On the Hour to Blue Jam, radio is the medium that made him.

New Chris Morris sketch to air on BBC 6Music on Sunday

A sketch written by Chris Morris, Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding will be broadcast this Sunday on Mary Anne Hobbs' BBC 6Music show, which airs between seven and 10am.

In the 1990s, I used to do a Sunday afternoon show on the late, lamented GLR (now BBC London). There would only be one person on the premises when I turned up and this was a tall, intense cove who unfailingly enquired whether I planned to play anything by the Pixies. This, I discovered, was Chris Morris, laying the foundations of a broadcasting career which would see him repeatedly fired by the very people who are now gathering to celebrate his contribution to British humour in special seasons on Radio 4 Extra and programmes such as Raw Meat Radio (Saturday, 7pm, Radio 4 Extra). The latter features collaborators, admirers and occasional firers such as Armando Iannucci, David Quantick and Matthew Bannister. There's also a repeat of his Radio 1 series Blue Jam on 4Extra at 11pm on Friday. Incidentally, if the powers that be wish to know how they can reproduce the circumstances in which Chris Morris did a lot of his best stuff, they might care to note that he was paid next to no money, given no help, and left the hell alone. I fear there's very little of that in today's BBC.

5 excellent things about Comedy Vehicle series 3

Chris Morris, context, actual jokes ... a few thoughts on this rather excellent series.