First Published APRIL 2000
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Okay, so how are we gonna cover this one, we asked ourselves? Chris Morris has never actually produced a 'failure' before.
Blue Jam, the Radio One show which spawned the Channel 4 show was a debating point in itself, albeit one which nobody actually bothered debating over. People preferred instead to simply blether on about its 'God-like genius' or its 'dark', 'disturbing' dialogue rather than quibble over why anyone would actually enjoy listening to it.
It split your humble Corpses team down the middle - with half of us thinking it was fundamentally a worthwhile and exciting project, the other half having grave reservations yet not actually able to pinpoint its faults in mere words. There was something very (insert sound-effect) about the whole thing. Was it just disappointment that Morris' new Radio One show wasn't the chummy psychosis of his previous outing? Was it a general reaction against the 'ambient comedy' foisted upon Radio One comedy (of which Simon Munnery's The League Against Tedium shows - an obvious influence on the style of Blue Jam - were part)? Was it just the simple fact that we were no longer surprised or taken aback by anything Morris does?
It suddenly struck us while in conversation with one of the Blue Jam cast one night. We'd been asked whether we love the show and expressed reservations. The reaction from the cast member was one of eyebrow-raising astonishment, that we didn't suddenly fall to our knees and proclaim it the most incredible thing ever broadcast.
Okay, so we were used to this sort of behaviour by now - the hype surrounding I'm Alan Partridge had pretty much convinced us that even frowning sideways at stuff everyone else had proclaimed to be brilliant wasn't something you could get away with in public anymore.
Said cast member continued that he reckoned Blue Jam was the most amazing thing he'd ever been involved in, and that the cast and co-writers were really proud to be part of Chris Morris' visionary masterpiece.
And it suddenly struck us - this was the reason. The cast are really 'proud' to be part of it. Proud to be involved in a project with the God-like genius Morris (the guvnor). Proud to be part of something which, by its very definition, will have no detractors. As such, how natural can their performances be, if they're constantly looking over their shoulder at Morris' face to check whether his all-seeing eye is twinkling? How natural can the scripts be, as comedy, if they're specifically tailored to impress Morris the Mighty, rather than the audience?
Okay, this might be a highly selective worry. Not all the team were new to Morris' work. But whereas you can imagine Morris and Baynham being on the same level, giggling over their childish scripts (as had been the case with the 1994 Radio One shows), can you imagine anybody else from the team actually daring to stand up to Morris and say 'well...this script is a bit crap, can we change it?'? There's a worrying office politic which threatens the flow of the project by casting Morris as the boss, in his main office, and everyone else as backroom lackeys, trying desperately to impress.
None of this matters to the fans of course - the people who try to enforce the myth of its presence in the media. The sort of dicks who moan when they've missed a show and then, when you offer to tape it for them, refuse, claiming that unless they listen to it live, really tired at four in the morning (and in a vaguely alternative state, yeah, I smoke weed, man) then there's really no point in hearing it. Grafting miserable underground wank onto a comedy show. Dear me.
Despite all this, the Radio One shows were okay. There were some great moments of Baynham whimsy, David Cann's doctor character was fantastic, the monologues were hit-and-miss amusing, and the music? Well, sometimes (as with the 'Tedious Penis' and Imagination's 'Body Talk') that worked too. The third series showed very obvious signs of repeating itself, but whatever... Tucked away in that little slot, it didn't scare anyone and - aside from all that business with the Archbishop - was allowed to do what it liked amidst the Mary-Ann blandness of night-time Radio One.
And so, it goes to TV. And it doesn't deliver. And suddenly all its fans are drawn into a debate about what's wrong with it. And this is difficult as it requires them to actually pinpoint exactly what it was that they adored about the radio series when they spent all that time substituting three-dimensional opinions with hyperbolic enthusing about its 'surreality' and (again) 'God-like genius'. So we're left with a lot of vaguely-worded moans about how it was 'better on the radio', which is usually a great argument (because it winds up Richard Herring something rotten), but it seems banal here. It actually runs much deeper.
It's to do with a definition of 'innovation' which is sweeping through the comedy world. A sea of egos, seemingly embarrassed by the mere idea of being involved in the 'comedy' world, are attempting to 're-define' the look of their work, peppering everything they do with the ridiculously self-serving argument that what they're creating is more than just 'comedy'. Mainly, it appears, to disguise a bad script. We've seen otherwise intelligent people (including people within the business itself) totally fooled by gimmickry and excuses.
Such gimmickry is manifold - anything from field-removed video (making videotaped comedy seem more 'serious' by adjusting the frame-rate, rendering it vaguely film-like), shaky camerawork (allowing dick-brained journos to invent phrases like 'docu-comedy'), and naturalistic acting (disguising tedious scripts with serious delivery) to this over-hyped non-opinion about how 'dark' a show is (again, allowing people to skirt around the merits of the comedy by claiming something is part of a non-existent genre).
'Oh, that show is fantastic - it's so dark!'. Fuck dark. What's so bloody clever about being dark? Anybody can fool an audience into thinking something is fantastic by adding supposed downbeat half-arsed graphic crudity instead of whimsical wordplay or original ideas.
In the few short years since Brass Eye was broadcast we've come a long way but achieved very little. The media is probably damaged beyond repair, so much so that inflicting a Morris project on it isn't really going to do much. With stuff like The 11 O'Clock Show debasing the currency of 'offensive' material (by making it irrelevant and useless), Channel 4 in general debasing the currency of VT effects by using them all over the place, and Channel 5 debasing the currency of sex itself by making it really boring, a sketch like 'The Gush' (Jam, Show 2), which would have been genuinely eye-popping back in 1997, nowadays is simply shown up for what it is. A rather dull and pointless parody of nothing.
It's actually gotten to the point where the reverse effect occurs - the genial sketches which don't try to be clever visually, or live up to the media fad of being 'dark' (e.g., 'The man who married himself'), are the ones which work the best. As such, the over-the-top bits (with 'prosthetic body parts' gushing theatrical cum) become the 'filler' material. We'd like to think that maybe this was Morris' intention, but somehow we doubt it.
The show relies on lots of the original radio material. Again, this is an argument that is often stalled by comedians who claim that people who moan about it are 'just trying to be clever'. Sadly, this view strangles at birth a lot of necessary arguments about the problems of doing radio material visually. So many sketches which work well in sound only are killed on TV by visualising ideas in such a way as to simply allow its audience to bleat a unified, delighted 'Euurghh' as a shared experience. We've seen The League Of Gentlemen turn from a fantastic, whimsical radio show (which wore its 'dark'ness very much on its sleeve) into a boring pleb-pleasing mugging bunch of self-satisfied cunts, spraying non-jokes with blood and guts to ensure a reaction.
The visuals of Jam aren't exciting. They are pedestrian and plodding and seem to have an air of oh-look-we've-found-the-button-that-does-this about them. They resemble a demonstration-package for a VT editing machine. Everything is made to look 'scary' and 'unnerving', a step-by-step guide to enjoying Chris Morris' 'dark' humour. Fuck that too. We cringed at the word-for-word, image-for-image title sequence to Jam Show 1 because it reminded us of the 'click ting stamps' literalism (a characteristic of bland student films as well as newsroom editors) which had been parodied so brilliantly in The Day Today. Similarly, the routines about Robert Kilroy Silk and Richard Madeley losing their minds (which, in another life, would be throwaway Morris one-liners, reliant on a genuinely unexpected final line - "...my faith left me completely when He shoved the sun up his arse" for example) pander to the lowest form of kitsch, studenty, no-joke, 'TV Cream' humour. It's embarrassing.
There is also a general lack of identity. Jam's PR was deliberately kept low-key, possibly to avoid stirring up the automatic Daily Mail-journalist scare-mongering that fucked up Brass Eye. The initial preview tapes apparently had confusing 'scene missing' type gaps which suggested that bits had been censored so that journos couldn't jump on its more graphic scenes and create a fuss. It would appear that this paranoia is no longer justified - The Daily Mail actually made Jam their 'Pick Of The Week', giving it a glowing review. The rules have all changed.
The radio broadcasts were an hour long. For TV, the shows clock up little over 24 minutes apiece. Moreover, the commercial break has been removed which must have taken some bargaining. This is an interesting idea but has actually worked against them. Their argument was probably something along the lines of 'oh, we wanted it to be a continuous stretch of weirdness which would otherwise be hampered by an ad break' which is fair enough, but falls down flat in practice because a) it makes the show seem deceptively short; b) the weirdness within the show is unevenly paced anyway; and c) It's stuck between a repeat of Drop the Dead Donkey and The 11 O'Clock Show and so, however much it tries, it can't escape the Michael Jackson-bestowed Comedy-On-Channel 4 tag anyway.
When that little credit sign comes on the screen, the viewer is just getting settled, hoping that a good meaty wonderful sequence is about to leap at them. Instead there's the impending horror that Iain Lee's about to come on.
Maybe we're just expecting too much. Who knows. Hands up all of you who watched the whole episode of Drop the Dead Donkey the first week, hoping that Morris would burst in half way through. Hands up all of you who assumed that the overlong trailer for a hidden camera show called Big Brother was an elaborate Morris set-up which would be paid off at the end of the series. Hands up everyone who wondered whether the last four series of The 11 O'Clock Show were made deliberately vile so that Morris could use the final show as a launching point for something truly wonderful...
Yes, we're expecting too much. We wanted Jam to be something so amazing that it would blow everything else off the face of the media. Instead it would appear that Morris has, for the first time, totally misjudged that media, perhaps confused by the furious backslapping of his cast, crew, writers and fans who have all raised him up on high as a Comedy God.
Never mind. It's still 'dark'. Can't take that from him...
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