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| Music,
David Dear,
15 January 2001 |
Rating: F4
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When Blue Jam was first released onto the public a few years back, Chris Morris stated that he wanted it aired in the early hours of the morning so that people would be half-conscious when they heard it. That must have been a great relief to Radio 1 when they realised what they had on their hands. Its monotone, dreamlike quality must have seemed about as far from Chris Morris’ previous vehicle, the needle-sharp media parody of Brass Eye, as it was possible to get. One of the early sketches, reproduced on this CD, features a middle-class couple bemoaning the fact they’ll have to indentify the corpse of their dead son who’s been buggered and dumped in the woods - so a bit more challenging than the comedy-lite radio fodder of say, Chris Moyles then.
Truth is Blue Jam always seemed as sinister as it was funny (and it could be very funny). There’s fertile ground to be found between hysteria and the hysterical.
And if the world Chris Morris creates is pretty twisted, it isn’t simply shock for shock’s sake, as all the sketches about death and genitalia might suggest. It would be unfortunate if he was remembered simply as the man who took the knob gag into the Twenty-first Century when his warped imagination is also underpinned by such a satirical edge. Imagine the shock value of the most excessive of the Brit Pack artists, but created by someone who’s actually clever. Alright, some of it does descend to simple aren’t-I-naughtiness - but the best, such as the Suicide Journalist sketch, manage to be both surreal and savage. And of course, funny too.
The radio show’s musical interludes, which through an astute choice of artsists (Aphex Twin, Propellorheads) and clever mixing, added to the script’s disorientating effects, are relegated here to atmospherics. These ambient beats provide the perfect environment for the nightmare humour - making this one of the few comedy shows to successfully combine music and comedy (note I said ‘successfully’ which excludes all those dismal pop song parodies as seen in, er well, pretty much any comedy sketch show ever).
The biggest criticism of this compilation is that they could have stretched it to a second CD - the three series of Blue Jam threw up enough moments of weird genius to fill another sixty minutes.
Warp
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