Disgusting Bliss

  In their way, the monologues became as much a trademark of Blue Jam as Morris’s anchorman had been in Brass Eye and The Day Today – and went on to be the inspiration for later work for both Morris and Katz, the latter taking a show to Edinburgh where he performed alongside his wife’s sister, Sarah Parkinson. He based his segment of their Unfucked on the narrator character. Director Paul Merton was married to Parkinson, who died in 2003.

  Morris himself appeared in relatively few other Blue Jam sketches, apart from the introductions that set the tone with disorienting scenarios that embraced the humiliated, the lost, the suicidal and the abjectly confused … ‘Then welcome … in Blue Jam.’

  David Cann’s deranged doctor was one of few regular characters, subjecting his credulous patients to degrading examinations. Most other characters crept in and out just once, often in a haunted kind of mini-documentary format, like the landlord who explains how he once evicted a tenant by creeping into her room when she was asleep and, like an amalgam of figures of horror from Edgar Allan Poe to Struwwelpeter, ‘I tiptoed to the bottom of her bed and I lifted up her bedclothes and took out a scalpel – a very sharp scalpel; I used to be a medical student – and I slivered the thinnest possible layer of skin from the bottom of her foot and it just came away like a sort of silk insole and I took it out and I put it under a shrub’, without her waking. He repeats the process nightly until ‘she wasn’t there at all’. The slum landlord of nightmare.

  The lateness of the hour prompted characters to confessionals of self-inflicted suffering – the woman who brushes her teeth until the gums are so raw she faints, and the man who has deliberately amputated both his legs so his girlfriend has to do everything for him. ‘They’re trapped in a mutual loathing, but it works,’ explained Morris, ‘they’ve reached a symbiosis where they both get something from it.’112 But however visceral each set-up, the characters invariably met them with a very English equanimity – a composure not always matched by BBC management on hearing the sketches. But Matthew Bannister of all people had known from the start that a certain number of moments of unease came with Chris Morris territory. He seemed to welcome the way in which Morris’s presence caused a slight warping in the fabric of life at the BBC.

  ‘You couldn’t put your finger on it,’ he says now, laughing, ‘but almost everything in it was deeply disturbing. There was a question of whether or not you wanted to disturb people to that extent. And sometimes you couldn’t even articulate why it was you were worried about it. Almost everything had some kind of question in it.’

  For his part, Morris said that his return to Radio 1 had been greeted with some suspicion: ‘It was enshrined officially as a kind of abuse relationship.’113 There were many long discussions between Morris and Bannister over such issues as the number of times ‘fuck’ was allowed per broadcast. Bannister became managing director of BBC Radio in addition to his other work and nevertheless took the time to count all the instances from one episode. The majority were said to have contributed to the pace and rhythm, and those that seemed to be in there to offend – suspected of being deliberate Morris sacrificial fodder – came out.

  ‘I think to a certain extent if you’re a pompous BBC manager, you’re fair game,’ says Bannister. ‘Sometimes he forced me to confront some of my lazy preconceptions about what was acceptable in broadcasting. I found it rather exhilarating actually to be able to debate it with somebody who is deeply intelligent, cares passionately about it, but who could drag you into a slightly parallel universe where you suddenly found you’d gone mad. That was where it got a bit scary, when you found yourself agreeing with points that he’d made, which you knew in your saner moments were absolutely weird and you shouldn’t have agreed with them.’ Each of Morris’s managers seemed to have their own way of dealing with him, and his strategy for coping with what he called Morris’s ‘attempt to make me look like a lily-livered BBC poltroon’ was to make a creative case – to say that something was not funny rather than being against policy. But when it came to the Archbishop of Canterbury, negotiations broke down.

  Morris had re-edited the words of the Archbishop at the funeral of Princess Diana in September 1997: ‘We give thanks to God for those maimed through the evil of Mother Teresa,’ the sermon begins over a trip-hop instrumental backing track. It hardly formed the most challenging material Morris had ever come up with, and the technique itself was one he’d used to the same effect on countless occasions. The cut words were worked into the beats, and there was a sense of silliness – ‘Lord of landmines’ – which if anything was light relief in the context of a show where elsewhere, to take just one example, listeners met parents who’d always felt their daughter was a 45-year-old man trapped in the body of a 4-year-old girl and so have had her suitably fitted with the correct vintage ‘penis and testicle glands’.

  But the show was due to go out in December 1997. Prime Minister Tony Blair had only just anointed Diana the people’s princess. Mountains of flowers left by her distraught admirers outside the palaces had scarcely had the chance to rot. It wasn’t, as Matthew Bannister pointedly observes, ‘any old Archbishop of Canterbury speech’. Which only made Morris more determined to include it. No compromise was reached after lengthy phone discussions, and the two arranged a meeting with Peter Fincham at which Bannister asked what he was supposed to say if it went out and he then had to pick up the phone to a wrathful Archbishop of Canterbury. It was intended as a rhetorical question, but not only did Morris tell him, he went away and drafted a written response for the Archbishop. It was convincingly detailed, it was brilliantly argued, it was irrefutable – and quite beside the point as far as Matthew Bannister was concerned. His office had no wish to field the sort of calls that had come after the Heseltine obituary. The decision was final. Morris smuggled it in anyway.

  The studio engineer on the night duly faded the programme down at the offending point and substituted an edition of the show from earlier in the run. But as a fan of Morris he deliberately took so long to make the switch that most of the re-edited speech was broadcast. If George Carey tuned in, he made no comment. And Matthew Bannister himself, recalling the episode in interview, appears even years on to be unaware that it went out. ‘I hope not,’ he says now. ‘I think he might have put it back in, but I mean … I’m not sure … I don’t believe that the Archbishop was ever transmitted. I think we’d have heard about that. I really don’t believe that.’

  But it was easy for anyone to miss Blue Jam. The lateness of its slot made sure of that. ‘I seriously did want it to go out at three in the morning,’ Morris told the Guardian. ‘I thought that was about the latest time of day that could be late without being early. It’s a sort of autumnal, middle-of-the-night show. You need to be as far from light as possible.’114

  Radio 1 had wanted it to go out when there would be more listeners awake to hear what had been an unusually expensive and time-consuming production. It was known that listener figures went up at about 10 p.m. as people were on their way to bed, but in the end the compromise was settled on midnight, by which time the listener numbers were negligible. There was also little publicity. Morris came up with the idea of doing a photo shoot under water (even though, Rebecca Neale later learned from his partner Jo, he wasn’t actually a great fan of swimming) and was captured in startling blue on blue, his eyes suffused with an eerie glow and his hair billowing around him. The show was given a preview playback at Tom Morris’s Battersea Arts Centre. Blue Jam was placed in its natural environment as Chris played it back to an audience who lay down in a completely blacked-out auditorium. There were no preview recordings issued to the press, and the series slipped out barely noticed in mid-November while everyone’s attention was on Steve Coogan’s motel-dwelling agonies in the first series of I’m Alan Partridge. Only Radio 1’s introductory warning of strong language and material that some might find offensive gave any indication of what lay ahead.

  The anonymity that Brass Eye hadn’t achieved was part of the joy o
f 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 postproduction.

  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 postproduction 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 t
hings. 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.