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| TV,
Jeremy Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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I sat through the so-called ‘A-Z of the Nineties’ last night, one of those cut and paste shows where they go through the archives to cobble together something that’ll conjure up some easy ratings. It was blazingly BBC-entric, and the only show they culled from the enemy was Chris Morris’s ‘Brasseye’, and when they weren’t picking choice clips out of that they were raiding from ‘The Day Today’, another Morris production. Why? because comedy-wise, nothing else even came close to those two blazingly innovative show. So now the Tall man Morris is back, brace yourself Tunbridge Wells.
Few folks heard Morris’s nightmarish radio stint ‘Blue Jam’ last year. Distinctly darker than the TV stuff (as if you could get grimmer than the Drug School piece on BrassEye!) and certainly less compromising in delivering ‘gags’, ‘Blue Jam’ was 50% black comedy sketches and 50% stream-of-consciousness rant, all backed up by moody spaced out dance tunes. It passed, and apart from stint posing as columnist recording his own suicide diary for the Guardian, the Morris machine went quiet. Then just like that, without a spatula of hype, he turns up again with a TV version of the radio show called imaginatively enough, ‘Jam’.
First off, a lot of the material is directly repeated from the radio scripts, and the transition of these pieces onto TV adds little to the impact of the material. The new stuff uses the visual medium in a more eye-boggling manner, and looks more like video art than the purposely over-the-top infographic style of the earlier shows. The celebrities-going-insane thing is fantastic, and you’ll never watch Kilroy’s morning show in the same way again after you’ve seen him running rampant in a shopping mall, pissing up against the shop windows. The fuzzy, hyper-degraded video imagery and hypnotic soundtrack blurs across your senses, making the blip-verted images of spurting cocks and gunshot wounds all the more jarring. It’s grim stuff, and with no real opening title sequence or ad break the experience is 30 minutes like no other on TV.
I hate to use the word ‘bizarre’, because that phrase gets tagged to anything that isn’t ‘All in the Family’ these days, but this is the real deal. The writing has a cold, misanthropic logic all of it’s own, and a lot of people will come away from this disappointed by its unwillingness to submit popular catch-phrases and easy gags. It won’t see the same popularity as his previous work, and you won’t have kids chewing over it’s finer points in the playground the next day, but this is TV evolving, trying to do something different, and that’s never going to be a pretty sight.
Channel 4
Thurs 10.30 BST
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