First on this tape, from Channel 4, some episodes of Jam. This is the TV version of Chris Morris’s late night ambient ‘comedy’ Blue Jam. Which, I have to admit, I find hard going. Is it even a comedy? Is it intended to be? Is it actually just being ‘edgy’? It’s certainly that.
It’s definitely full of recognisable comedy faces. The first item features Amelia Bullmore, Mark Heap (returning from yesterday) and the Actor Kevin Eldon. But the alienation starts immediately with the strange colour grade, the picture stretched up from the source 16:9 picture (where the show started), the ‘ambient’ music bed. All these serve to disorient the viewer. And that’s before you consider what the item is about – gay panic, homophobia, fear of paedophiles, and incest.
The second item doesn’t help things. “The Day Kilroy Lost His Mind” features a lookalike of Robert Kilroy Silk rampaging naked through a shopping centre, including the rather unpleasant image of him pissing on a shop window. Perhaps this was supposed to be like the item in Brass Eye where Noel Edmonds had killed Clive Anderson, but at least that had jokes in it. This is just unpleasant. I fear this will be a frequent reaction from me.
Also not helping, brief inserts like this.
In the next item, David Cann plays a doctor who has diagnosed ‘symptomless coma’ in patient Kevin Eldon. Which is just an excuse to keep him drugged in hospital where he can abuse him.
The next piece features Eldon talking about how he picked his car up from the garage, and it’s only four feet long. In case there’s a danger that this might be funny, it’s presented at a frame rate of about one frame every two seconds. Chris Morris hates comedy.
The man who married himself is the germ of a funny idea, but without anything else it does just sit there.
So far, the closest thing to a proper comedy bit is this one in an Indian restaurant, when Kevin Eldon breaks the poppadoms by hitting the whole pile, and Mark Heap hurls the table aside and starts beating him up. This, at least, feels like it has its roots in a real observation of behaviour.
Julia Davis appears in a bit about ‘thick people’. This one even almost has a punchline.
Chris Morris himself describes watching a man throw himself off a first floor balcony over and over again. Much like the experience of watching this show.
I have literally no idea. This one’s performed to Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’.
Oh good, now there’s a rape joke.
Another creepy doctor. This is a theme.
The show also eschews credits for a website – which of course no longer exists (although it’s on the wayback machine).
The next episode starts with a warning that I’m willing to bet had never been used before. “This programme contains strong language and sexually explicit images using prosthetic body parts. You may find some scenes disturbing.”
Julia Davis plays an inappropriate Midwife, Kevin Eldon playing the unfaithful husband.
The weird transitions have some merit. The creepy doctor is back.
“Help yourself to a fingerbell if you like.”
The scene with the prosthetic body parts is a piece about porn. Features Chris Morris doing his Harfynn Teuport accent.
This week’s celebrity meltdown is supposed to be Richard Madeley.
Amelia Bullmore persuades plumber Kevin Eldon to fix her dead baby.
Mark Heap doesn’t understand how a hold-up works.
David Cann is a happy man who decides to have his funeral when he’s at his happiest.
On to Episode 3, and another bit containing rape references and homophobia.
Another creepy doctor sketch.
After her rent was doubled, Julia Davis has been spreading filth around the area to lower property prices.
The TV which is filled with lizards.
Job negotiations, including farting on somebody’s head. At this stage, I’m feeling like I’m in an abusive relationship.
“I’ve got a gun in my stomach and it’s pointing right at you.”
Ugh.
OK, so the parents who sing a song about their kidnapped four year old son is actually funny. Still bleak as anything though.
Parents who want their kids to get into the best school are sabotaging the other children in the area.
Now it’s Episode 4. I haven’t mentioned the opening sequences, mainly because they’re all batshit. Here’s one.
More from the creepy doctor. This show hates doctors. And everybody else, admittedly.
Small Hoover
The little girl who comes in to clean up a dead body is another proper comedy idea. I’m trying to work out if the actress is now famous as she looks familiar.
“I think someone’s put superglue on the handle.”
That’s the last episode that I have here. after this episode there’s an announcement that “there’s a six part late version of Jam starting this Saturday at 12:25 on 4 Later.” Which implies, maybe, that they only showed four episodes in this timeslot. But I think it’s more likely that either I taped the other two on another tape, or that I gave up, as the two missing episodes are the last two (according to Wikipedia).
So instead of more Jam, it’s over to Sky One for an episode of The X Files – The Amazing Maleeni, and I’m immediately intrigued, as it features Ricky Jay being as Ricky Jay as possible. Slightly mixed feelings, though, as I’ve just got a YouTube copyright strike because somebody issued a takedown on a clip of Ricky on The Secret Cabaret, so I was upset about that.
The writers didn’t even have to write his material, as he performs a treatise on the cups and balls that I’ve seen him do other times. In the context here, though, performing at a seaside amusement park, it’s possibly the worst audience for his rather intellectual presentation, and there’s an idiot heckling him.
So when he talks about a mysterious magic trick involving removing a head and sewing it back, I was imagining him just letting loose with an axe, but instead he does this. It’s an effect that even the show has little faith in, because it cuts away (at this precise point) to show the bored reaction of the heckler, only returning to Jay to show the last few degrees of the 360.
But this effect has taken something out of Jay, as when he returns to his van, he comes apart.
After that pretty good opening, the story keeps up the mystery and the surprise. The Amazing Maleeni was called Herman Pinchbeck. Autopsy seems to suggest he had been dead for over a month, and he didn’t die of his head being sawn off, he died of a heart attack. But he had a twin brother (also played by Ricky Jay) called Albert, who works in a bank. Could he have been posing as his brother in order to stage the remarkable ‘last performance’? Unlikely, as he had recently suffered a severe car accident in Mexico, and had lost both his legs.
Also somehow involved is the man at the start who was heckling Maleeni during his performance. Mulder and Scully track him down, and he’s also a magician, apparently very dismissive of Maleeni’s magic.
I really liked this episode. It was a smaller version of that movie recently, Now You See Me but with fewer annoying characters. And I’m just a sucker for magic.
After this, recording continues for a few minutes with the start of American Sex. Then the recording stops, and underneath, there’s the end of an episode of Ally McBeal. I didn’t watch all of this, but the little I did watch didn’t change my largely unfavourable opinion. Especially to Peter MacNicol’s character, who comes across as a high-functioning Incel.
Then, 4 Later starts with this strange opener. The voices sound familiar. The woman’s voice sounds like Aleks Krotowski, but I’m not sure about the man’s voice. I presume this was a regular bit.
After this, there’s the start of an episode of Oz, another show I’ve never watched, but this is less surprising, as it’s a prison show, one of my least favourite genres.
The tape ends during this.
In the ad breaks, there’s a trailer for Dotcomedy, featuring a very young Chris Addison and Gail Porter, presumably doing a whole show of the kind of thing Graham Norton did with the internet for five minutes on his show.
Plus friend of the blog Paul Putner in a nice Weetabix advert.
Adverts:
- Bupa
- letsbuyit.com
- Miller Genuine Draft
- Lloyd’s TSB
- Motorola
- Renault Megane
- trail: The Usual Suspects
- trail: The 11 O’Clock Show
- trail: Da Ali G Show
- trail: Dotcomedy
- trail: We Can Rebuild You
- Citroen
- Vodafone
- Metz
- Woolworth’s – The Sixth Sense
- Aquafresh Flex Tip
- Twix
- letsbuyit.com
- trail: Suicide Kings
- trail: Football
- Ford Focus
- Baileys
- One 2 One – Zoe Ball
- Bold
- Circus in cinemas
- Benadryl
- Sunny Delight
- Smirnoff Ice
- trail: Sky News at Ten
- trail: The Simpsons
- trail: American Sex
- Rigo
- Toyota MR-2
- Barclaycard – Angus Deayton
- Lynx Phoenix
- Specsavers
- trail: Dream Team
- trail: Best
- trail: The West Wing
- Orbit
- Travel Inn
- Toyota Corolla
- Orbit
- Sky Digital
- American Psycho in cinemas
- Apple iMac
- Dulux Once
- Transitions
- Paul Weller – Heliocentric
- Homebase – Neil Morrissey Leslie Ash
- Clairol Herbal Essences
- Peugeot 406
- trail: ER
- Nationwide
- MFI
- Tia Maria
- The Story Of Us in cinemas
- Tesco – Prunella Scales
- BT – ET
- National Lottery
- Rapid Chat
- Homebase – Neil Morrissey Leslie Ash
- Guinness
- trail: Dotcomedy
- Walker’s Max
- Dr Pepper
- National Lottery
- Switched On
- MFI
- The Sun
- Rapid Chat
- Give Blood
- GayXchange
- Tesco – Prunella Scales
- BT
- Guinness
- National Lottery
- Homebase – Neil Morrissey Leslie Ash
- Weetabix – Paul Putner
- GayXchange
- Learndirect
- American Psycho in cinemas
VHiStory 
The only thing I remember about Dotcomedy was a regular item going through audience member’s search histories, and the show setting up a website for “Spicy food down your pants” to see if they could attract perverts. So I suppose that was kind of ahead of its time?
The late night Jam was called Jaaaaaaaaaaaam (or something) and was a deliberately hard to watch version of the show. I think the point was to replicate the woozy atmosphere of the original radio broadcast Blue Jam (which was really something when it went out after midnight), but fixing the weirdness into actual images rather than your imagination just proved where radio can be superior.
I would agree with that. Tim Worthington’s excellent Fun at One on the history of comedy on Radio 1 suggests that, and even quotes Gr*h*m L*n*h*n, who wrote some of Blue Jam, saying he struggled to watch Blue Jam because he found it all a bit “brutal”. I think the “ugh” up there is well-placed.
Lee and Herring did a sketch on the radio parodying high fashion about supermodels starting to get spots and warts and other deformities which was very funny on the radio, but as SOTCAA pointed out, they did it on Fist of Fun on the telly and the sketch got no laughs at all because the audience just kept on going “uurrgh” at all the make-up and effects, and they never showed it in the end, There is probably something to be said for comedy like that which is so over the top it becomes very funny, but the more realistic you make it, the less funny it gets. It’s like Barry Cryer’s old maxim that a bucket of blood is funny but a trickle of blood is horrible,
I sat through the whole of Jam because I felt I should, because I really admire Chris Morris and The Day Today is my favourite telly show ever, but I don’t recall laughing much, or indeed at all really. I do struggle with some of his darker and more unpleasant material. I also find a lot of the mystique around Morris a bit tiring, there was no reason why he couldn’t have done proper commentaries on the Day Today DVD for example instead of contributing deliberately stupid and irritating ones.
Of course, the ultimate take on Jam was the Adam and Joe Show sketch, which then appeared on the Jam DVD.
Mark Heap looks like The Terminator in that shop hold-up scene. All that’s missing is a laser sighting on that gun.
I remember Jam but never watched it. Used to know someone with that nickname because her full name was Jamsheda. Shows like Brass Eye and Jam would never get made today because of the PC brigade on alert. Everyone would be afraid of Chris Morris and Paul Kaye if he returned as Dennis Pennis.
Hello!
I’m very interested in this tape and the Jam episodes and continuity in between. Would you be able to make a digital copy available to view?
Thank you 🙂
It’s available on the Internet Archive, all 6 episodes