CHRIS MORRIS, the satirist whose television act features jokes about paedophilia, drugs, incest and rape, is to make a movie intended to show the funny side of terrorism.

He says the film will seek to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad’s Army, the classic BBC comedy, did for the Nazis by showing them as “scary but also ridiculous”.

Morris said: “Most of us would dearly love to laugh in the face of our worst fears. Why aren’t we laughing at terrorists? Because we don’t know how to, until now.”

Though the film is a work of fiction, Morris has researched it over the past two years by visiting places in Britain associated with terrorist plots, including Leeds, Bradford and Luton.

“I don’t plan for this film to be offensive, but I do want it to be very funny,” Morris said. “I accept, though, that some may find poking fun at terrorists is offensive.

“There is this Dad’s Army side of terrorism and that’s what this film is exploring,” said Morris, who once, while hosting a Radio 1 show, made a hoax announcement about the death of Michael Heseltine, the former Conservative deputy prime minister.

The film, to be shot in the spring, takes as its premise that terrorists are “scary but also ridiculous”, according to the synopsis.

It will use some real absurdities around Islamist terrorism as its basis. It cites Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks, who, after inviting a journalist to a secret location in Pakistan to record a tell-all interview about 9/11, spent two hours trying to select clothes that would avoid making him looking fat.

At terror training camps, young jihadists argue about honey, accidentally shoot off one another’s feet or get thrown out for smoking. Back in Britain, they spend evenings having rows over whose turn it is to do the washing-up.

In Hamburg the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta ran discussion groups that were so strict that everybody left them. “Terrorism isn’t about religion, it is about berks,” says the summary of the film.

The leader of a British terrorist cell mistakes a gram of triace-tone triperoxide (TATP), used in the 2005 London bombings, for a line of cocaine, and snorts it.

According to Morris, terrorists have all-too human foibles and weaknesses, and for much of the time live what passes for normal life. “This film will hopefully get over that terrorists do what we all do,” said Morris, whose Brass Eye show, broadcast in 2001 on Channel 4, made jokes about paedophilia and lampooned celebrities who want to help child abuse victims.

“They discuss the mundane, and plan things that sometimes then go wrong. People, that is viewers, are longing to laugh at terrorism.”

Few British comedians have dared to poke fun at Islamic terrorism, and if it backfires, Morris faces greater risk than when he attacked show business stars and politicians. However, in a recent article he likened Martin Amis, the novelist, to Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Muslim cleric, for “forging an incoherent creed of hate” against Muslims.

It will be Morris’s first feature film, and the £4m budget will be met partly by Channel 4 as well as by Warp Films, which last year released the acclaimed film This Is England.

Morris, whose early career included a stint as a pompous anchor on a BBC news spoof, got the idea for the film after reading details of Operation Crevice. This was the name given to the raids launched by the police in 2004 on terrorist suspects in the south of England.

The police found a biscuit tin filled with aluminium powder, ammonium nitrate in bags of dried fruit and other bomb ingredients behind a garden shed. “It was almost unbelievable,” said Morris. “But it all happened. Terrorists will also discuss the most ordinary of things. I found out, for example, that jihadists like reading the views of Jeremy Clarkson but not those of Richard Littlejohn [a tabloid newspaper columnist].”

Morris used two scriptwriters from the BBC television satire, The Thick of It, to help write the movie. Morris himself will direct it, though he will not act in it.

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