Chris Morris special | The Observer

The Observer’s Chris Morris index has links to his 9/11 special, the suicide columnist Richard Geefe and a bunch of article about him. I particualrly liked this review from Will Self from 1997 (remember when he did their television column?):

So why did these people fall for such fakery? The Rayners, Boysons, Mad Frankie Frasers and Worsthornes of this world? Because they aren’t real people any more they’re hyperreal. They’ve made the Faustian pact of being that oxymoronic incarnation, ‘television personalities’.

You can always spot a ‘television personality’, even when they aren’t actually on television, because they carry their ‘made-up’ persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. They are like nose-pickers for whom the wind has definitively changed.

All Morris has done is to give these unpersons an opportunity to demonstrate the fact that they’ll do anything to get a chauffeured car, a Styrofoam beaker of tea and five minutes in the green room goofing out with others of their ilk.