Review of Jam

Introduction

More bold and disturbing work from “media terrorist” Chris Morris, the creator of ‘Brass Eye’ and ‘The Day Today’ (accompanied by his customary clique of incestuous comedy buddies.) Originally broadcast on Radio 1 in 1997 as a series of sketches and dead-pan monologues accompanied by moody ambient sounds; Each episode of ‘Jam’ the TV series opens with a monologue, delivered (in various obscure guises), by Morris himself, setting up the desolate anomie and gnarled aesthetics that will dominate each of the six episodes. Ostensibly, a darker, weirder, more oblique and uncompromising companion piece to ‘Big Train’, we’re presented with a series of disconnected skits (only a handful of which have any connective tissue to one another) that depicts its characters ensconced in a world of human futility and moral nullity. As with ‘Brass Eye’, Morris utilizes absurd humor and extremist conceptions to evoke the spiritual vacuity of modern man… and to try and get as many complaints from ‘sensitive viewers’ as humanly possible.

Video

The constantly mutating aspect ratios were perhaps the most subtle element of Morris’s persistent aesthetic belligerence on television, but such random visual vicissitudes somehow feel empty and amateur on DVD. More appreciable is the use of gaseous, trippy, distorting filters and constantly deformed frame-rates. The skewed visuals mimic the sketch’s warped intensity, lending the experimental multimedia synergy a restless, primitive, ‘found object’ sheen. Obviously this was never going to be a conventionally dazzling transfer, but it’s hard to imagine a lot better.

Audio

Musically, it’s a needle-dropping ambient mix-tape, full of twinkling elevator hymns, hypnotic loops and ‘Warp’-ish sonic devices, all replicated to promote the desired stoned, agitated disquiet.

Features

A brief selection designed to maintain the show’s aloof, slightly sneering deprecation of its own medium. Disc 2 is dominated by ‘Jaaaaam’, the late night version of the show, essentially the same in content, differing primarily in the increased use of visual and aural filters, giving it a decaying opium-den feel. On Disc 1 we get the six episodes of ‘Jam’, each with multiple, and almost entirely useless viewing modes, including: ‘miniaturized versions’ of episodes 1 and 2 (self-explanatory), ‘Quadrilateral Lava Lamp’ version for episode 3, (essentially an oscillating version of the miniaturized feature, only more disorientating). You can also watch episode 4 fast-forwarded into six seconds and the first 19 seconds of episode 5, if only to see how 25 seconds of your life can seem so significant when wasted so pointlessly. Episode 6 meanwhile offers the fast-forwarded version re-adjusted into full speed… for which I’ll leave to your own imagination. You can watch all the episodes at once… or rather, you can’t, being presented instead with a message saying ‘Why’? (although keep your finger on the trigger for an easter egg.)

The other extras on Disc 1 generally regurgitate the sketches in various guises: the order they were shot, a couple of sequences featuring an appropriately tasteless canned laughter track etc., with only the occasional unseen set-piece. ‘Adam and Joe’s Goitre’ is a brief, rather harmless and quite amusing spoof of ‘Jam’ and the Morris brand, showing that he does indeed have at least an iota of self-deprecation after all. The rest of the extras are either over-elaborate gags (‘Undeleted Scenes’ and ‘5.1 Simulation – with the sound of distant artillery’) or repetitive consumer-victimization (the ‘Forced Viewing’ option promises to force you to watch everything on the disc in a loop, forever.) If you start to get the feeling that you’ve just been f***ed by Morris and his crew of rasping audience-manipulators… you probably have been. Still, the credits are helpful.

Conclusion

Oddly, given Morris’s propensity towards boundary-smashing and defiance of television conventions, this shares the same flaw as pretty much every other sketch show: inconsistency. Hilariously twisted set-pieces are interrupted with monotonous obscurity and some feeble gross-out, shoved in seemingly to leaven the more elusive despondency. The sketches that have been adapted (and usually abridged) from the radio show generally don’t improve from the transition, ‘Bad Sex’ and ‘TV Lizards’ still possess a waft of their creepy disconnection, but ‘Unflustered Parents’ lacks dimension and a potent aesthetic drive in its abbreviated visual format. Also, the unrelenting madness does tend to numb the bite to some degree, with only a few sketches generating a prolonged visceral response: the look on the face of a bystander after he watches a gun go off inside a would-be thief’s stomach; the home video of a man who feeds himself into a wood-chipper, spraying his leavings over the ex-lover who rejected him.

Despite a fairly average hit and miss ratio, it’s safe to say that the resonance is considerably more troubling than the inane catchphrases of ‘The Fast Show’. ‘Jam’ presents us with characters unable to face grief and personal responsibility, incapable of digesting pleasure or absurdity, cursed with the crippling freedom of decision making into a paralyzed anarchic frenzy. Through the characters absurd interactions, there is a sense of a route through modern life being queried; the smothering inertia of contemporary emotional emptiness, the meaninglessness of language, endless rootless perversions, hyperbolic neuroses and an indeterminate purging, expressed with little time for gloaming procrastination and artful philosophizing, instead exploding in a cruel gasp of shocked listlessness. In other words, it’s our world – dominated by intractable stupidity, nihilism and post-humanism, scrawled with the accuracy and reverence of a graffiti artist on the gates of Buckingham Palace.

‘Jam’ may be Morris’s most extreme process of dehumanization so far (even his recent short ‘My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117’ conjures up the faint memory of human longing and redemptive ‘meaning’), but in doing so it captures the abandoned grasping of modern life, the lack of human anchorage. However, as an extreme process, it does little to beguile the casual viewer, and only the most hardened fan will be able to stomach so much bleak and caustic humor. An unfortunate result, one that Morris’s previous endeavors have managed to avoid, as it is exactly those who are not Morris-acolytes (fully aware of his doting concerns), that need to absorb the savagely cryptic ‘message’. As segregated 20-minute snatches of Morris’s disturbed imagination, this works perfectly as an acidic, intermittently hilarious antidote to the asinine sitcom/sketch show dirge. But as a 2 hour and 20 minute binge-session it is rather repetitive; and like a Samuel Beckett play scored by The Aphex Twin and directed by a paranoid sociopath with clinical insomnia, it can get extremely wearing.