Why Bother?

Infobox Album
Name = Why Bother?
Type = studio
Longtype =
Artist = Chris Morris and Peter Cook


Released = 1994
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This album = Why Bother?
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"Why Bother?" was a Talkback Production for BBC Radio 3, consisting of five 10-minute long radio interviews between Chris Morris and Peter Cook's character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, recorded in late 1993 and originally broadcast from 10 January - 14 January 1994. The complete series was released on CD by the BBC in 1999. Cook received the sole writing credit whilst Morris also produced the series, although the majority of the dialogue was ad libbed between the pair, which Morris then edited.

Morris played a variation on the abrasive interviewer character he had perfected on "On the Hour" and "The Day Today", prompting Cook into some of his best work. The short pieces provide further insights into the Streeb-Greebling character that Cook had created for "Not Only... But Also" in 1965. Topics of conversation include Streeb-Greebling's experiments on eels, his role in the racial violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King trial, his military career, including his time in a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II, and his habit of strangling his business partners. The listener learns that Streeb-Greebling was put in prison by his father at the age of four, once spent a 'year and a quarter' standing on Lake Ontario with only bears for company, and hears of his next project; cloning from the fossilised remains of the infant Christ with the assistance of BMW, Honda and Sony.

When questioned on how structured the interviews were, Morris replied that the pair " 'just shoot from the hip...the preparation that existed, existed only in terms of the things we had already done' ", (alluding to the fact that both characters were familiar roles for the two). Morris summed up the process thus:

" 'I was already quite used to going and imposing bollocks interviews on people anyway from any direction so it didn't seem much different, except with him, obviously, you could keep an idea going for much longer...it's trying to keep some sort of logic going. It was a very different style of improvisation from what I'd been used to, because those On The Hour and The Day Today things were about trying to establish a character within a situation, and Peter Cook was really doing 'knight's move' and 'double knight's move' thinking to construct jokes or ridiculous scenes flipping back on themselves, and it was amazing. I mean, I held out no great hopes that he wouldn't be a boozy old sack of lard with his hair falling out and scarcely able to get a sentence out, because he hadn't given much evidence that that wouldn't be the case. But, in fact, he stumbled in with a Safeways bag full of Kestrel lager and loads of fags and then proceeded to skip about mentally with the agility of a grasshopper. Really quite extraordinary.' "

Track listing

#Eels, Love and Guns
#Bears
#Christ
#Prisoner of War
#Drugs Etc

External links

http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/spiggott/morris.htmhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3848271,00.html