First Published JUNE 2000
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To clear up a few points here. I'm the SOTCAA editor who wrote most of that Jam article. I don't know Jason Hazeley personally and I've not corresponded with him. As such I'm probably the best person to come back to his arguments.
Re: the general reaction from Morris fans to Blue Jam. Our personal experience of such creatures (and please never forget that this site only purports to show our personal perspective of things) did seem to reveal, for the most part at least, a vague need to cosy up any possible debate by discussing how great the show was on a scale of one to ten rather than questioning its validity in the first instance. Fair enough, there were detractors but, as you suggested, most of these seemed to abscond from the conversation rather than get involved. If you're in a pub full of comedy fans, all saying 'Blue Jam was the most amazing thing ever - true if destroyed' then it stands to reason that any views you express are going to be lost amidst the fawning, pretzels and lager pools.
Like Brass Eye before it, Blue Jam gained a kind of blokey Loaded-style following who presided over it with 'yeeaah, facking brilliant!' gurglings. Fair enough, far be it for us to attempt to dictate how people enjoy their comedy (ha-hem) but we find it awfully tiresome.
An obvious offshoot from such experiences is the flippant 'You can't slag off comedy in public anymore' argument. This comes from the same personal standpoint - sorry it didn't come across as clearly as we intended it. As we mentioned the 'Dot Dot Dot...' and 'I'm Alan Partridge' articles, we've expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm about specific comedy shows over the past few years and have received a formidable (and disproportionate) amount of disdain and criticism for doing so. And this wasn't us setting ourselves up as 'spoilers' on a grand scale - simply expressing an 'I didn't think much of it, personally' opinion. We got the impression that everyone was feeling so cosied up by the idea of declaring something fantastic that any grievances one aired in a public forum would simply be seen as an unwelcome spanner. Nobody seemed to understand that these were simply our 'opinions' - there had to be other factors at work. We still adamantly believe that opinions or criticism are unwelcome in this comedy climate unless it's a 'so just how fantastic is this' type affair. It's a comedy-capitalism where only the shit-kicking 'successes' are welcome. 'Merely great' is classed as a non-runner.
Of course you are allowed to slag things off in public - as long as it's stuff everybody expects to be slagged off. As long as it doesn't have a media / fan / industry-endowed 'sacred cow' status. Our carefully-constructed 11 O'Clock Show vitriol in Comment has been applauded by just about everybody who's read it. But so what? Everybody hated that show anyway. All the article really did was press a little button in people's minds which says 'I agree with this'. There's nothing exciting about that. But our opinions on Jam pressed a different button altogether. A button marked - for the sake of anything more erudite - 'you're pissing on our parade'.
Re: Morris' contributors/fellow actors. We never meant to imply that Morris was 'tyrannical' in his approach to those around him. He doesn't have to be - his 'guvnor' status is media-bestowed and the respect and admiration he gets from those around him is totally deserved. Our point is that this affection must surely affect critical judgement. Were the contributions of the team written as comedy they found fantastic or as comedy designed to impress Morris?
In the days of On The Hour and The Day Today there wasn't a problem. On The Hour was the sum of several disparate talents with nobody to impress but themselves as a collective group and their listening audience. Armando Iannucci, as producer, was the 'boss' but obviously gave all the contributors gallons of leeway. At this point Morris was certainly admired but never revered by his conspirators. Even through to The Day Today this didn't appear to be a problem. The show as an 'entity' was much bigger than Morris as a 'comedy genius'.
There are several instances in Blue Jam and Jam where we got the distinct impression that 'Morrisian' sketches were being written because the contributors assumed that's what he wanted. Now this is an ambiguous argument - were they doing so for the good of the show or for the good of pleasing their boss? On first ponderance, both situations might seem the same, but think about it a bit - does this allow Morris to extend his own opinions on (and ability to create) comedy properly if he's surrounded by pale, balls-less, imitations of a specific style he's created?
The most worrying aspect of the latter to us is that we've experienced this sort of thing before. As soon as The Day Today became popular there were hoardes of gutless imitators, all clamouring to ape Morris' style. You never saw any of them? No - nobody did. Their efforts were deservedly banished to the dusty shelves of their student bedsits. These were people with nice expensive 4-track machines, keen to create comedy, but who a) couldn't think of an original idea and b) evidently totally missed the point of what made OTH/TDT funny in the first place. When we first saw Iain Lee on The 11 O'Clock Show we almost died - one of those balls-less imitators had apparently escaped anonymity and was doing it for money. We got the same feeling when we first saw Noel Fielding prattling his merry way through C4's Gas - the studenty Comedy Review/Wallace Eddie-Izzard-is-great-'cos-he-just-talks-bollocks myth had, for the first time, spawned the real thing.
The current media climate appears to be priming the ersatz for stardom. Possibly because the ersatz is easier to market and control than anything truly 'innovative' (and appeals to the plebbier aspects of fandom who'll accept it as 'comedy excellence' without thinking too hard). We're not suggesting that Jam was guilty of this, just illustrating that a lot of its writing was governed by the same second-hand nature. This is what we found so depressing.
So what did we expect of Jam? Pretty much what Jason described really. There were no surprises whatsoever. We would have been surprised and impressed if Jam had dropped all ambient effects and been presented totally straight. Picture, if you will, Jam, with the same material but on normal videotape, acted in front of a live studio audience. Does that sound totally ridiculous? Well of course it does. And that's what a Morris project should be - confounding all expectations.
We once pondered on the subject. How could Blue Jam be filmed and still retain a level of unexpectedness? What if Morris chose to start the series with all the ambient VT FX-catalogue and stuff - a straight visualisation of the radio show - but, by Show 2, headed off in a totally different direction? The scripts could have remained exactly the same but each show would have presented them in a different way. One show could have been a single unedited reaction shot of an audience watching the show. Another could have been a live-studio-audience-attended, brightly-lit sketch show like the one mentioned above. How about a whole show which simply filmed a radio session-type set-up - the actors in front of the microphones. The point here is that the viewer would never know beforehand what the set-up would be, yet the material would remain the same.
Is 'Dark' easy? Yes, and it's getting easier by the second. In our view. We're not saying that dark humour is a bad thing, but it has been bestowed a media-friendly status that has debased its currency anyway. 'Dark' humour works best when it is genuinely unexpected. If everything is clearly signposted then, again, it just becomes what everyone expects. The 'whoo, spooky' style of Jam killed any 'dark'ness as such. Our assertion that 'dark' humour is easy to do is more a missile lobbed at lazy journalist opinion generally (and their perceived notion that if 'dark' fits a remit they've more or less invented then there's no need for further discussion). We believe that it's getting easier and easier to gain a cheap round of applause by doing something 'weird'.
While we're on the subject, didn't 'dark' comedy used to be referred to as 'black'? At what point did it acquire this sort of hazy off-colour, not-quite-black status? Just a thought.
Great breakdown of Morris' conceptual pecadillos in Jason's piece. With one possible exception - the 'parenthood' assumption...
We always assumed that the 'parenthood' aspect of Morris' work was originally more about the inappropriateness of making sub-paedophilic comments in a comedy show - the comedy arising from the awkwardness of hearing such a taboo subject treated flippantly. The 'children' obsession was there long before he settled down into a life of domestic bliss ('Sock Quiz', 'Big Spoon Baby Balloon', etc). We would argue that actually becoming a parent has probably left him a bit more worried about the flippancy aspect of the whole thing (as with the self-censorship of the ' buggered senseless' / 'little girl with balls to be proud of'sketches). This isn't new either - we can name a load of comedians who, though happy to take a cavalier approach to the family unit in their earlier days, now blether in a tame manner about their babies. Morris has claimed that the self-snipping was more for comedy reasons, but this betrays a sudden personal worry about people misreading his work. This has never been a problem before.
And, on the subject of 'dark'ness and paedophilia, try this for a theory. There's a sequence in one of the 1994 Radio One shows where, to a cheesy musical backing, Morris cheerfully reads out a 'letter from a listener' which asks if he can solve a family argument. The letter-writer is a man of 'strong physical urges' who often satisfies this compulsion by 'extracting a kiss of some passion' from his seven-year-old daughter. No spooky music, ethereal chants or skewed video FX could ever enhance the disturbing nature of the image Morris has just placed in the listener's mind. However, it then escalates and we learn that the seven year old is actually a corpse. 'And if anything, it's me who should be complaining as the taste is in the "acquired" category and is becoming less palatable with every snog!'. This, we believe, shows Morris at his most understanding as far as the nature of broadcasting goes. A flippant treatment of incest would have been a bit too much to take, but a subsequent flippant treatment of necrophilia somehow turns the whole thing on its head and makes it acceptable as throwaway whimsy. Why should this be? Why is the idea of snogging a decomposing corpse less worrying than snogging a child in terms of humour? Probably because, even though the latter is more vile, it's probably a more ridiculous comedy concept. The child-thing worries the listener whereas the corpse-thing settles them back into it.
Morris pretty much gives this game away during the 'Big Spoon Baby Balloon' sketch - when Baynham implores Morris to assure the listeners that he didn't just stick his tongue down a baby's throat. 'I just wanted the people who switched off just now to leave with that image in their minds', he says.
Contrast the above with the oh-so-shocking image of Robert Kilroy Silk pissing against a shop window.
Re: the intros. We may have been a bit premature with that dismissal of the 'click-ting-stamps' literalism. The later titles sequences did seem to poke fun at the idea of doing po-faced spooky intros a bit. The one with Morris sticking his head out of school desks seemed to be more on-track. The whole thing reminds me of something an academic once said about Frank Zappa's early work with the Mothers of Invention - that, on the LPs one would hear some serious, mildly anarchic political-comment lyric, often followed up by the musical equivalent of a rasberry. The subtext being 'don't take this too seriously'. We worry that maybe Jam didn't manage this often enough (something which has definitely contributed to the GCSE-essay-standard perceived view that he's some sort of 'mad genius').
The 'taking the piss' aspect was generally missing from the show. There is usually at least one sequence in all of Morris' broadcasts which separates him just-ever-so-slightly from the set-in-stone concept and allows him to be seen with his socks off, giggling at the ridiculousness of the work as much as we are. Think of the credit-sequences of The Day Today (with the various visual gags of him shooting up, revealing himself as a woman, etc). Think of the childishness of the Nicholas Parsons cut-up poem at the end of Brass Eye's 'Animals' (which steps sideways from spotless satire for a second and reveals the whole silly set-up in plain language - sort of "look at our comedy, tee hee"). Think of the various deliberate alternating between being 'in character' and simply talking about being in character in his DJ broadcasts. 'In the interest of showing my knickers in public...' , Morris once said.
There was very little of this in Blue Jam and practically none in Jam. Jason mentions that the visuals of Jam went as far as they could without disappearing up their own arse. We suggest that a bit more anal-concealment would have been a better option. Otherwise we're left with the impression that Morris wants to be considered a 'serious artist'. And that would never do.
Adding to our frowns over Jam was the aquisition of several old GLR radio broadcasts. Neither of us heard his local radio tenures as we were living elsewhere at the time. These early-90s DJ shows, like the 1994 Radio One stuff, are playful, silly and enthralling as much as Jam was po-faced, staid and inaccessible.
Oh, just to be pedantic, 'Sit in a pen and save a hen...' was a Lee & Herring sketch. So were most of the Treeb Lopez, Peter O'Hanrahahanrahan and Partridge sketches, mind you.
And we have no connection with Talkback whatsoever. Other than frowning at their office headquarters every so often on our way to Cheapo Cheapo Records in Soho to buy old Jasper Carrott LPs.
Re: Morris misjudging the media. It wasn't the potential media response we believe he'd misjudged. We knew the media would adore it. Morris knew the media would adore it. The cast knew that the media would adore it. And, yes, the media adored it. Everybody's playing that little game - the same game we attribute to the I'm Alan Partridge set-up. Coogan's doing a TV show. It must be fantastic. Let us adore it. Morris is doing a new project. It must be fantastic. Let us adore it. Given his hitherto faultless track record we would assume that Chris Morris would understand all this and fight against it - at least do a project which would piss off his gushing admirers as much as his detractors.
Or maybe he did. And that's why we didn't like it.
[NOTE: Here's something interesting. About a week and a half before Jam went out, Chris Morris told two friends of ours that Channel 4 was refusing to broadcast the show. Given that a) Kevin Eldon, on the same evening, didn't mention any eleventh-hour cancellations, and b) Morris was smirking thoughout, it's possible that this was a little Morris-jape at our mates' expense. Not quite on the same level as the 'Cake' scam but it still makes us laugh.]
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