Blue Jam

From sleeve art (a weeping madwoman) to the angularly mesmeric ambience of its musical accompaniment, Blue Jam is as odd as comedy gets.

Chris Morris may be infamous for spending the past decade upsetting people as an agent provocateur par excellence (remember when he tricked Noel Edmonds into making a TV appeal about the dangers of the new drug “cake”?), but this is a step into the deep end even for him.

The gloomy, hypnotic background-music (supplied by the likes of Aphex Twin, Propellerheads and Eno) is something of an obvious signifier to tell us that Morris’ monologues are meant to be viewed as dark, bizarre stuff.

The centrepiece is the twelve-minute ‘Suicide Journalist’, a follow-on from Morris’ infamous Observer spoof of last year, when he wrote a weekly column under the guise of a hack who was preparing to commit suicide (“Hosanna Bell described how she’d been suicidal for six months after giving birth, until she decided to sue her baby for what it had done to her figure.”)

Elsewhere, royals’ biographer Andrew Morton is mercilessly stitched up by Morris’ insistently absurd questions (“Looking at the way the book works, you seem to put your finger on things. Why?”), while on ‘TV Lizards’, a couple whose television set is teeming with reptiles eventually break down in the face of the repair man’s excruciating indifference to their situation.

It’s all a far cry from Morris’ previous adventures on Brass Eye and The Day Today, where his targets (the media, the judiciary, the entertainment industry) were more obviously signposted. Here, the agenda is far more obscure. For instance, what the hell are we to make of ‘Unflustered Parents’, a conversation between a couple who are starting to get mildly disconcerted about the fact that they haven’t seen their young son Ted for over a month (“I’d better call the school and check if he hasn’t been standing outside the gates for a couple of weeks”)?

Not that you’d expect anything less from the man who once screamed “Christ’s fat cock!” at Sir Cliff Richard during a telephone interview…