Disgusting Bliss (28 page)

The anonymity that
Brass Eye
hadn’t achieved was part of the joy of
Blue Jam
, the potential for it to be discovered accidentally by the sleepless looking for something soothing. Which might have been the best way to encounter it. If you were looking for the thing that Chris Morris did next after
Brass Eye
, you might be trying to work out the whys of the show and where it fitted in too much to let it wash over you in its peculiar way. But when it permeated a fitful consciousness, it could be a genuine and joyful surprise.

It was something entirely of itself, an extraordinarily original achievement. And Morris’s obvious love of radio allowed
Blue Jam
to reach some surprisingly warm places. The freedom of the humour credited the audience with intelligence, dispensing with self-censoring and trusting they would instinctively feel a structure to the show and follow
Blue Jam
as it led with the loping rhythms of Morris’s musical set, matched by the hushed voices of the cast, into the wilder territories of late-night emotional wonkiness. Matthew Bannister says, ‘It was a leap forward in the use of radio as a medium.’ He felt it was a world that was almost palpable, ‘a deeply disturbing and upsetting world. It was a very exciting thing to hear.’ In the press, the
Daily Telegraph
heard the sound of ‘rage in a bottle corked with savage melancholy, bobbing on sound waves’. While for Tracey Macleod in the
Mail on Sunday
, ‘“Sketches” seems an inadequate word for what fell somewhere between comedy, art and audience abuse’. Discussing Morris’s description of the show as ‘ambient stupid’, she wrote: ‘that only goes some way towards conveying the richness of the world he has created, as imaginatively complete and distinctive as Viv Stanshall’s
Rawlinson End
’.
¹¹⁵

There were to be two further series of Sony Award-winning
Blue Jam
and each had six episodes. The second series started in March 1998, just three months after the first, and John Peel was among those who played trailers for it in his own programme. ‘Twice I have been so startled by what I have heard,’ he wrote, ‘that I failed to start the following record on time.’
¹¹⁶
Towards the end of the run, Sally Phillips joined the cast which was augmented by Phil Cornwell and Lewis Macleod when the third series broadcast the following January. The concept of the show itself lived on and would prove appropriately conducive to mutating – into print, CD and much later film. It also transferred to television for one series on Channel 4.

Having forgiven him for his Grade-bothering incident, the station had been hoping that Morris would do a second series of
Brass Eye
, though he never seriously entertained that possibility himself. He was, however, already thinking about doing a one-off special, which was still two years away when work started on
Jam
in early 1999. Morris had a much easier working relationship over the course of the series with Channel 4’s new boss, Michael Jackson – the man who had turned down
Brass Eye
for BBC2 – than he’d ever had with Michael Grade. The station had become the natural home for Morris that the BBC had once been, with other allies including Caroline Leddy and
Brass Eye
researcher Andrew Newman, who, like Leddy, had also moved into commissioning and would later become head of comedy and entertainment.

Many existing
Blue Jam
sketches were transferred with the new material supplied by the same pool of writers. The principal cast was largely unchanged and looked as deceptively ordinary as they had sounded on the radio. David Cann inhabited his characters with the cardigan-cosy plausibility of his
Brass Eye
performances. And Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap performed a weirdly symbiotic routine in many of their joint sketches, as if they were sharing a yet more unsavoury joke that they kept from the audience. The female roles were just as strong, giving Julia Davis and Amelia Bullmore a rare opportunity in comedy for women to do as much weird as the men and to join in with that trademark
Jam
smile that spoke of perverse secretiveness.

Morris himself again made relatively few appearances, and the monologues didn’t make the transition, though co-author Robert Katz could be glimpsed in one of the introductory sequences, waking in a playground with a mouth full of (live) flies to the sound of children chanting ‘maggot mouth’. It was those ‘Welcome in
Jam
’ segments in which Morris’s presence was most commanding and unnerving. Otherwise, lacking the DJ element of the Radio 1 incarnation,
Jam
was more of a recognizable sketch show, at least in its basic elements, if not in the way they were put together.

The relatively brisk gestation of the
Big Train
pilot was a distant memory, as it was back to a
Brass Eye
standard of schedule that stretched over a year, with attendant fraught phone calls between Talkback and Morris over budget, time and what could be included. He made ambitious use of varied shooting techniques rather than settling with giving
Jam
a conventional sketch-show identity: cameras swept in from the side and then stood up in one scene, and in the next the cast might be made to look small and isolated through long tracking shots, static cameras mounted as if recording CCTV footage, reversed negatives and silhouettes. That marked the show out as different from other comedies to start with, but the true character of
Jam
, like that of the radio version, was established only in post-production.

Adrian Sutton came in about two-thirds of the way through the schedule for the soundtrack: ‘I wasn’t entirely convinced at the start of it that
Jam
would work,’ he says, ‘specifically because the reason that
Blue Jam
works so well is that there aren’t any pictures.’ Like everyone else, he had to wait for the show to come out of the digital post-production environment, where scenes were fractured, rendered in night vision, distorted, jerkily animated, saturated with colour and actors given ghostly trails as they moved, pulling the hallucinatory vision of the show out of Morris’s head. ‘It’s designed to be hypnotic, so that it weaves itself in, and compelling, so that you stay with it,’ explained Morris. ‘And quite often the jokes are going off under ground – normally you’re given a cue to laugh at things and here there aren’t any cues.’
¹¹⁷

Cramming visual detail into each scene remained important, even though much of it would eventually be obscured by the digital processing. A prop buyer panicked over Morris’s request for a shark destined for an introductory sequence in which a musician in a band of grotesques in a barn was to mime playing it with a small reed. Unable to find anything suitable in London, the buyer was about to get a 200-pound specimen from a fisherman they had tracked down in Cornwall, before another member of the production crew pointed out that in the desperation to get the right species they’d missed the impracticality of the size. The actor ended up with a skinned rabbit stitched into an oboe, which worked fine – you wouldn’t really have been able to tell the species in the final broadcast, what with the low lighting, the scene playing back at a varying speed and David Cann kneeling distractingly in the foreground, virtually naked, dripping with protoplasm and screaming in terror. But it was a mark of how diligent the crew were in trying to achieve Morris’s effects in full.

Even though the greater part of their efforts was glimpsed only fleetingly, the fetid atmosphere of
Jam
lingered in the mind longer than individual scenes or jokes. They had to construct a world that was only heard in
Blue Jam
. On occasion, even some of the crew were unconvinced about the viability of creating certain images. Spurting penises were one memorable example. They were to be fitted to actors playing unfortunate porn stars with a fatal disorder called the ‘gush’ that doomed them to ejaculate until all the protein drained from their bodies. Art director Dick Lunn, the son of children’s TV legend Wilf Lunn of
Vision On
– who as an inventor working with Tony Hart surely had to deal with far fewer requests to make actors look as if they were orgasming to death – pointed out the restrictions on broadcasting erections. Morris’s immediate response, that the rule shouldn’t apply to fakes, was an example of what Charlie Brooker describes as a standard Chris Morris technique for overcoming doubts and technical challenges. He just ignored them: ‘And then somehow reality seems to shift around to reflect what he wants to achieve,’ says Brooker. ‘One thing I’ve learned from him is that if someone’s telling you you can’t do something and it’s not for a creative reason, just ignore them as much as you can and keep driving forward. Chris always wants to find a way of doing things. That’s probably why if most TV is quite bland there is a lot of flavour in his stuff. It’s alive and vibrant in a way that most shows haven’t been for a very long time.’

For the gush, casts were taken from a jumbo-sized dildo for the prosthetic penis, the actors’ pubic hair was shaved and their genuine genitals were stowed in the hollow of the model scrotum. Synthetic semen was supplied via a pipe taped to the actor’s leg and, after tests in the Talkback basement, the power of the pump at the other end of the pipe had to be lowered when it delivered a jet strong enough to take someone’s eye out. The actors playing the agonized stars were attended to by real porn actresses, and yet, in the end, the careful penis construction was shown only in the briefest of cutaways. Morris contributed his scenes after a long and fraught day on set, but immediately settled into a relaxed Euro-porn-star accent. ‘It took him three days to die,’ he says of an afflicted star. ‘All the while he was firing the fuck juice. And when they weighed his body he was maybe twenty kilos, which is no more than two or three squirrels.’

The disconcerting atmosphere of
Jam
also partly came through its locations, such as the eerie surroundings of former asylum Horton Hospital near Epsom. One-time patients occasionally wandered into the grounds, feeling compelled, the crew learned, to return to a place where they’d spent so much of their lives. The ‘Welcome in
Jam
’ of the first episode, where Morris is ‘freezer-drawered’ in and out of a cadaver storage unit, was filmed in the asylum’s old morgue. Along with discarded medical equipment lay a crumpled book containing details of deceased patients. One of the old wards had walls that were padded, but only to the height of four feet – it had been the children’s ward. Later, a young actor heard about this and said they weren’t surprised as they’d heard their screams. Nobody else had.

Jam
went out between the end of March and April 2000 without an advert break or credits to interrupt the mood and the mad jumble of visuals and jokes. It didn’t go out quite as late as the Radio 1 version, though it similarly escaped the attentions of those who had criticized
Brass Eye
, despite playing with notions far more horrifying than even those that would be explored in the
Special
. But the languid pace and the stylized look of the programme provided an effective cover for the humour as art, so that the subject matter went unremarked. And the lack of celebrity-baiting made it even less of a candidate for the headlines. All of which seemed only to contribute to the sense of unreality in watching the shows, as if what you were witnessing sliding out dream-like on a major broadcaster somehow couldn’t really be happening.

Not all of the sketches transferred convincingly from the radio. The one in which a dead baby is ‘fixed’ by a plumber had long shadows in the child’s bedroom and an ominous tangle of steaming pipes in the cot. But nothing could look as horrific as the vision you would have yourself to accompany the noises of a decaying baby plumbed into the central heating so he’s ‘nice and warm’, with a tap in his head which can be turned to make him give a watery gurgle. Rather than compare the two versions, though, it was better to come to the TV series fresh and absorb the reused sketches as part of the overall and distinct mood of
Jam
, where even the ones that worked better on the radio were carried by the performances of the cast. They were understated throughout and never mugged for easy laughs. David Cann as a doctor had an ability to visibly radiate sincere concern which added another dimension to the sketches.

If the visual version of
Blue Jam
was a success, Chris Morris had less luck creating a remix album. The idea was that musicians signed to his friends at Warp were to be supplied with his original sketches which they would then work into their own pieces of music. But despite the intriguing reports of Chris Morris in discussion with Aphex Twin and his long-time video collaborator Chris Cunningham, two artists whose output was as hallucinogenic as anything from
Blue Jam
, the project foundered. Only two tracks were completed and released, Matt Elliott’s ‘Push off My Wire’ and Amon Tobin’s ‘Bad Sex’, featuring the ‘Cackle my Gladys’ing of the
Blue Jam
lovers. In the end, Morris settled for releasing a straight collection of the broadcast sketches through Warp towards the end of 2000. As a small company, they fitted in with the way he did things, resulting in a minimal look for the CD cover, in the face of requests from retailers who wanted the title and his name prominently displayed. Even with relatively little promotion
Blue Jam
still went on to sell more than 25,000 copies.

Warp hosted the BBC-banned Archbishop speech cut-up on their website to coincide with the launch of the CD, and President Bush was later given an Archbishop-onceover with a take on his war on terror called ‘Bushwhacked’. It was released as a 12-inch single to a certain amount of unease in the company. Greg Eden says, ‘There was definitely a feeling that it might result in either MI5 or Al-Qaeda crashing through the Warp office doors, but of course these things go completely unnoticed unless somebody in the media picks up on it.’

Morris made a brief guest return to Radio 1 the month after the release of the
Blue Jam
CD to DJ on Mary Anne Hobbs’s
Breezeblock
show. The selection over two sets ranged from underground club tracks to ambient music closer in spirit to
Blue Jam
, interspersed with electronic squalls and samples and a couple of celebrity hits. It was the last time he appeared on radio. But even having thoroughly deconstructed the medium he loved with
Blue Jam
, he told friends from the show that he retains a great affection for it. He has, he said to them, never ruled out making a return.