The life of Chris

A distinct sense of déjà vu pervaded the corridors of Channel 4 towards the end of last week. Not for the first time, the broadcaster was in hot water over a boundary-pushing comedy programme.

Once again, the celebrities tricked into appearing on it had emerged from the ruptured cocoons of their complacency to threaten legal action, insisting that they could take a joke as well as anyone, but a line had to be drawn somewhere, didn't it? Last time, the Daily Mail demanded: "Has this man pushed TV comedy too far?"; this time, a moralising organisation called MediaWatch did the honours, labelling the unseen show "so inappropriate" and "bound to be offensive to lots of people".

Internet fan sites buzzed with semi-informed speculation, possibly based on inaccurate gossip deliberately leaked by the show's producers. And, as befits the centre of a hurricane, the instigator of it all - Chris Morris, both times - was an oasis of silence.

Four years ago, the spark had been the first screening of Morris's current affairs satire, Brass Eye, in which camera-hungry denizens of the C list - David Amess MP, Noel Edmonds, Bernard Manning - were persuaded to campaign against the menace of the drug cake ("that's a made-up drug, which means it comes from chemicals, not plants"), while Nick Owen and Richard Briers weighed in against the dangers of human shrinkage posed by "heavy electricity". "Can we really stand around and eat pies while people are swatted like invisible flies by the tail of some mad, invisible horse?" Briers wondered on air. "Of course not." This time, the fuse was ignited by Thursday's scheduled screening of a new, one-off Brass Eye special, satirising the recent moral panic over paedophilia.

Crusaders against media smugness will savour Phil Collins's endorsement of the fictional pressure-group Nonce Sense - "Now I'm talking Nonce Sense" - and the following revelation from Capital Radio DJ Dr Fox: "Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you or me. Now that's scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact." Collins reached for his lawyers - livid, in the Daily Star's words, at having been "duped by a TV prankster".

That label is, of course, a pitifully inadequate description of Morris, who was presumably deeply satisfied with the response. But presumably is the operative word: his sporadic consent to interviews does not seem to apply in the run-up to broadcasts - "things tend to get a bit rocky," says a C4 spokeswoman - and friends and collaborators have erected an unscalable wall of loyalty tinged with paranoia. "I have a home number," says one acquaintance, "but he's such a contrary figure that he'll dupe me into some media prank if I give it out."

By all accounts he is an amiable perfectionist, serious in his satirical intent, but that is as far as such accounts tend to go. When asked to describe what Morris is like, Peter Baynham, a regular collaborator, tends to say that he is "black, with a big, smiley face".

Thursday's broadcast - assuming it happens - will be the culmination of one of the most extraordinary tales of reverses, rumour-mongering and broadcasterly loss of nerve in television history.

A pilot show having been turned down by Michael Jackson at BBC1, C4's Michael Grade cautiously commissioned a series, only to seek to shelve the finished product until station executives persuaded him otherwise.

The eventual broadcasts, in 1997, suffered severe excisions - among them, infamously, a spoof report about a new Yorkshire Ripper stage show, Sutcliffe The Musical. (Morris retaliated in a subsequent episode, superimposing the words "Grade is a cunt" on the screen for a single frame.)

The cake episode provoked an ITC complaint from Amess, who had been prevailed upon to ask a parliamentary question about it, and the predictable newspaper splutterings. After an unprecedented four-year gap, the series is now being repeated, complete with new show and the reinstated Sutcliffe sketch which, according to C4, will be included in next week's broadcast.

The ITC upheld Amess's complaint, but went out of its way to praise the series as "amusing and innovative" - thus contributing to a pattern that has characterised Morris's professional life. Repeatedly, he has been condemned and even sacked - from local radio in Bristol and then Cambridgeshire, and from GLR, partly for the inspired editing of the Queen's Speech to include a reference to the house "in which my grandfather King George V, and my father, used to service men and women"; from Radio 1 for announcing the death of Michael Heseltine - but always leaving the unshakable sense that the people doing the sacking are reluctantly fulfilling their obligations as employers while having hysterics over the programmes.

"Chris feels he hasn't achieved what he sets out to do unless he has caused the maximum amount of difficulty - he thrives off chaos, off setting people after each other chasing round in circles and ending up where they started three weeks later," says a source close to the production.

"That chaos is there in his relationships with the people he works with, and in the way he drops these bombs into the schedule, and if it doesn't provoke a response it hasn't succeeded... but I really don't want to speak for Chris. He would probably say all that was a load of fucking bollocks."

After GLR, Armando Iannucci recruited him to the Radio 4 show On The Hour, a brilliant pastiche on increasingly meaningless news broadcasting ("Portillo's teeth removed to boost pound, exploded cardinal preaches sermon from fish tank - and where now for man raised by puffins?") which also launched Steve Coogan's character Alan Partridge.

After The Day Today, its TV counterpart, and Brass Eye, Morris returned to radio, producing Blue Jam, a late-night concoction of disturbing dialogues delivered at a lethargic pace over ambient music which is otherwise almost impossible to describe. (Buy the CD.) If the measure of Morris's success as a satirist is his capacity to inflict wounds, he has certainly succeeded.

Most of his celebrity victims will not talk, but none of those that will are minded to laugh it off as a joke. Amess, for his part, remains insistent that there was a drug that had the street nickname cake - "So in the end, you see, the joke was on Brass Eye, really." The animal rights campaigner Carla Lane is still disgusted, four years after her encounter with Morris ("Prison's not good enough" for animal abusers, she told him. Morris replied: "Prison's too good. So what about jail?") "These trendy people seem to think what they do is very funny," Lane says today, "but most of it is beyond the 40-year-olds who are looking for Only Fools And Horses or Are You Being Served."

She prefers the old-fashioned kind of hoax, she says, where news of the trickery would eventually be broken to the hoaxee. But Morris declines to defuse his comedy bombs thus. It is the reflexive response of those fleeced by Morris to declare that they do not think it funny to laugh at drug abuse, or crime, or paedophilia.

Richard Blackwood, who warns viewers on Thursday's broadcast that child abusers can make noxious fumes emerge from children's computer keyboards using the internet, spoke for them all: "Well, I guess the joke is on us - and also on every other charity working in the field of child protection. If you think that kiddie porn is funny, you should have a good laugh."

Rarely has a point been so fundamentally missed, or perhaps deliberately avoided. But while Channel 4's counter-argument is well-known - the programme is satirising not drugs, nor child abuse, but the willingness of celebrities to unthinkingly jump aboard any passing good-cause bandwagon - it still doesn't quite go to the core of the matter.

Brass Eye shows that celebrities are not just failing to check the credentials of causes they are asked to support - they are not even listening to the words coming out of their own mouths. "I'm talking Nonce-Sense," says Phil Collins - and it becomes clear that we are living with a celebrity culture not so much of bandwagon-jumping egotists than, simply, of sleepwalkers. This is not any less disturbing.

• Brass Eye Thursday, 10.35pm , Channel 4