"TV PICK OF THE DAY: Brass Eye Special. Any new material from Chris Morris is always welcome..." This was how the Daily Mail's Femail website announced the most controversial single television programme of the last year. Within 24 hours, they'd changed their mind somewhat. Brass Eye creator Chris Morris suddenly became public enemy number one, condemned as sick by tabloid after tabloid, doorstepped by the Mail and challenged to 'defend' his satire. But who is Morris? And how did he move from cult humorist to most hated man in Britain?

He started at BBC Radio Bristol in 1987, where he hosted a show called No Known Cure. A lot of Morris trademarks evolved over the show's two-year run - prank phone calls, bizarre 'news' stories, and the wilful mangling of the English language into a myriad baffling shapes. According to legend, Morris departed under a cloud after filling a news studio with helium, which meant that news of a fairly serious pile-up was apparently read by Mickey Mouse.

Pausing briefly to record a few shows for the long-dead satellite channel BSB, he made his way to Greater London Radio, where he quickly started to court the sort of controversy that still dogs him. He re-edited the Queen's Christmas speech so that it seemed that Her Maj was effing like a trooper. The hoax calls continued, and it seems that Morris's long-running feud with the Evening Standard's Victor Lewis-Smith dates to this period - Smith appears to feel Morris somehow ripped him off by doing prank calls.

He followed this with what remains his most consistently brilliant effort, On The Hour, a half-hour radio show that savagely and brilliantly spoofed its host network, Radio 4. On The Hour launched Morris, Steve Coogan, Patrick Marber and Armando Iannucci on an unsuspecting populace. It's a mark of the series' brilliance that it still brings a chuckle to the throat and a dewdrop of urine to the pant a decade after it was made - which isn't bad going for a notionally topical satire show. On The Hour duly mutated into The Day Today, a tourettes-de-force of TV comedy if ever there was one.

A Radio One music show followed, along with his first serious controversies. While interviewing the media-hungry Tory MP Jerry Hayes, Morris came out with the words, "And as soon as we have any news on the death of Michael Heseltine, we'll let you know." Hayes was moved to an impromptu eulogy, and wasn't pleased when he realised he'd been had. Morris subsequently pulled a similar stunt about the 'death' of Jimmy Saville.

Morris continued to build on his radio work with the masterful Why Bother?, his collaboration with the late Peter Cook. Then came Brass Eye, an apocalyptic bullet aimed at the beating heart of vapid, self-important TV current affairs. It took some of the undercurrents of The Day Today and turned them up to 11. The series has taken on the proportions of legend, with hoaxes like the fictional drug 'cake' (aka Joss Ackland's Spunky Backpack or Hattie Jacques' Pretentious Cheese Wog) and Noel Edmunds' murdering Clive Anderson. One victim of the 'cake' hoax, David Amess MP, continues to insist that there really is a drug called 'cake'. Bless him.

Like this year's special, the original 1997 series didn't get an easy ride. It was meant to go out in late 1996, but was held back to be re-edited on the orders of Channel 4. Several items fell by the wayside, although many of them were re-instated for the recent repeats, most notably a hoax dealing with a fictional Yorkshire Ripper musical called Sutcliffe! Justifiably irked by the constant interference, Morris inserted a single frame with "GRADE IS A CUNT" superimposed on it into the last show in the series. As Michael Grade was then controller of Channel 4, it was widely thought that he'd pissed on his televisual chips with this one.

But it was just as widely thought he'd never work on Radio One again. Despite this, he returned shortly after Brass Eye with Blue Jam, a radio comedy show entirely unlike any other. Distorted voices drifted in and out of chilled-out music, and the notion of 'sketches' went largely out the window to be replaced by inexplicable monologues. This in turn leapt to TV as jam and its 'remix', jaaam. Problems arose however - a sketch about a young girl with the genitals of a middle-aged man was subtly censored, and another about a nine-year-old girl called in to clean up after a murder attracted criticism.

All that the Brass Eye fallout really proved is the Mail, as a paper, has the morals of a starved wolverine on PCP. They happily misrepresented the contents of the show, and later claimed - on the back of statements from a conveniently anonymous 'Prison Officer' - that real paedophiles might already be trading copies of the show inside secure institutions. This is beyond unlikely, as paedophiles in secure units are, curiously, not allowed access to VCRs. A real prison officer would have presumably been aware of this. The Star, meanwhile, published an anti-Morris rant directly opposite a story about the breasts of singer Charlotte Church, who is under the age of consent.

Bizarre's most loathed man, pundit Richard Littlejohn, managed a vintage contribution, using the Special as a thin pretext for sounding off with his usual victim-blaming, queerbashing gibberish. The wit for which he is justly in no way famous was in full effect; at one point he speculated, "I doubt we'll see Chris Morris poking fun at the IRA... Or sending up the Yardies," presumably ignorant that The Day Today's 'bomb dog' sketch had indeed poked fun at the IRA, or that Morris had personally ventured onto Notting Hill's All Saints Road dressed in a nappy to take the piss out of crack dealers.