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of multitracking, bizarre characters and mastery of the technical aspects of radio were allied to a fierce irreverence. The Capital shows were a revelation for Morris. Everett was not only a renegade but a technical perfectionist, using his own studio so he could record chorused jingles. His shows featured improvised comedy and a barrage of ridiculous voices. He sang along with records and was an instinctively brilliant DJ.
    Equally inventive was the literary comic favourite of both Tom and Chris, a collection of hoax letters sent by Humphry Berkeley as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1948. His creation was a headmaster of fictional Selhurst School he called Rochester Sneath, whose requests to real heads affectionately poked fun at the pompous instincts of the private teaching profession and spurred many of them to respond to the most unlikely requests.
    The Master of Marlborough College was asked how he managed to ‘engineer’ a royal visit. ‘I did nothing whatever to engineer the recent royal visit,’ he wrote back crossly. ‘No doubt the fact that the King’s Private Secretary, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury are all Old Marlburians had something to do with the matter.’ 12
    The surreal nature of Sneath’s demands provided clues for those not quite so caught up in the dignity of their position. The head of Wimbledon College agreed to perform an exorcism, saying he would need a ‘Bell, Book and Candle, a gallon of holy water and a packet of salt. The latter is required for sprinkling on a certain part of the ghostly anatomy, so it should be loose and capable of being taken up in pinches.’ 13 The Cambridge college authorities were less amused when the hoax was revealed and a deluge of headmasterly complaints followed. Berkeley was sent down for two years, though it was made clear on his return that unofficially the senior fellows thought his endeavour was quite funny. An otherwise upstanding member of the Establishment, Berkeley went on to be a MP and writer and waited a respectable twenty-five years before publishing the letters as The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath in 1974.
    Morris’s early comic favourites also included the Goons and the comic musical stylings of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, whose lead singer, Vivian Stanshall, was a major influence, though in interview Morris was later reluctant to name heroes as such. ‘The temptation is to create an ideal football team of all-comers, but I don’t find it works like that,’ he said. 14 But he liked Peter Cook and at school appreciated the sweary humour of Cook and Dudley Moore’s Derek and Clive. Morris was drawn to verbal humour, though the noise and rhythm of comedy came before the words.
    Like many of his friends, Morris was into drama. He appeared in school plays, and Tom was also involved with theatricals but found it a frustrating experience. ‘I certainly had direct conflict with the authorities at the school about creating work, making theatre, which defined the experience for me,’ says Tom. He wanted to put on various shows and events but there wasn’t a system to support it. Permission had been given in the 1960s for a show that wasn’t kind to the teachers, but Tom’s headmaster turned a similar request from him down without discussion. The school promoted the academic abilities of its students but just seemed no longer geared to bringing the best out of the pupils in the way it had.
    Having kept up with his music, in the sixth form Chris joined a band with his friend Simon Armour. ‘We called the band Nosmo King,’ says Armour, ‘because I had a No Smoking sign and cut it in half. It was also a bit ironic, because in those days we all used to slip out to the woods to smoke.’ Their set included classics like Santana’s ‘Samba Pa Ti’, ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police and – a particular favourite for Morris – the Rolling Stones’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
    ‘I’m sure to hear it nowadays