Jam (TV series)
From Academic Kids
Jam is a British comedy television series created by Chris Morris. It was based on the earlier BBC Radio 1 show, Blue Jam, and consisted of a series of unsettling sketches unfolding over an ambient soundtrack.
Many of the sketches re-used the original radio soundtracks with the actors lip-synching their lines, an unusual technique which added to the programme's unsettling atmosphere.
The show was brodcast on Channel 4 during March and April 2000.
The cast included Amelia Bullmore, David Cann, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon and Mark Heap. It was written by Chris Morris and Peter Baynham, with Jane Bussman, David Quantick, Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews and the cast. Chris Morris also stars in some sketches, although not as many as his co-stars.
The series consisted of six twenty-minute episodes, and, unusually for a TV show on a commercial channel, had no advert break in the middle. Some reports claim this was because no company would want their products associated with the show although others say Morris insisted on there being no advertisement break as it would ruin the show. The closing credits were also missing, replaced by a brief link to a website [1] (http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/J/jam/credits_ns6.html). The website also offers a link to a twenty-minute long music file containing the thumping sound of heavy artillery, which it is suggested is played whilst watching the programme.
Jam is sometimes referred to as being "controversial", but in spite of containing scenes many would find quite disturbing (and prompting at least one article in the Daily Mail), it nonetheless did not receive the same outraged headlines as the Brass Eye episode on paedophilia Chris Morris produced the following year. This was probably because Jam was aired late at night — long after after midnight — and had no promotional trailers and so many people were unaware of it.
Jaaaaam was a late-night remix of Jam. Its audiovisual distortions of the original series introduced the musical remix concept to British television.
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Opening Scenes
There were no opening titles to the show. Instead, they would begin with a strange and often disturbing monologue by Morris along with appropriate images. They usually concerned someone finding their paranoid fears being made real or some other bizarre happenings, such as a man waking up to find his body is that of a bizarre maggot creature (with Morris's dispassionate dialogue reading "...and when you wake up, wondering where you are, only to find that the rest of you is wondering where you've gone.")
Morris would then declare "Then welcome", followed by a nonsensical sentence (e.g. "Ooh, astonishing sod ape") before finally announcing "Welcome...in Jam." The word "Jam" would never be said normally; it would either be heavily distorted, said in a silly fashion or just screamed at the viewer, usually repeatedly.
Sketches often had a documentary feel to them, with the character(s) acting as if they were being interviewed about recent events.
Episode Details
Episode One
- Sketch 1
Two parents explain to a friend that they are worried their son will become homosexual because he has a friend who is apparantly gay. The father has been having sex with his son's friend to keep him distracted, whilst the mother has been keeping her son "interested in ladies" by having sex with him. The friend is encouraged to pitch in and help.
- Sketch 2
Chris Morris announces it's "The day Kilroy lost his mind." There is then a serious of manic shots of a lookalike of television presenter Robert Kilroy Silk going mad in a shopping mall, running around naked, shouting at passers-by, urinating on a shop window then falling asleep in a supermarket's freezer.
- Sketch 3
A doctor insists that one of his patients - who is obviously perfectly healthy - is in a coma, one that apparantly has no symptoms. He then carries out a mercy killing on the heavily drugged patient. The concept of a lethal doctor may have been inspired by Harold Shipman, who killed hundreds of his own patients.
- Sketch 4
An angry man walks down a street complaining that he recently took his car to a garage and, when he went to pick it up, the car was only four-foot-long, the mechanic insisting that that was how it was when it came in. The complaining man gets angrier and angrier as he explains this anecdote, swearing frequently and eventually attacking the pavement.
- Sketch 5
A forty-six-year-old man explains how he married himself out of fear of being a life-long bachelor. We see a shot of the wedding with the solitary newly-wed driving off on a honeymoon with himself.
- Sketch 6
A brief scene shows one man beating up another over a poppadom, the violent assault accompanied by very relaxing music.
- Sketch 7
An agency provides thick people for jobs they are good at, such as arguments, which they are apparantly very good at winning "because they are too thick to realise they've lost."
- Sketch 8
A suicidal man wants to kill himself but, instead of leaping from the top of the building, he opts to throw himself from the first-floor repeatedly in case he changed his mind half-way through.
- Sketch 9
Whilst standing in a tree, a man spanks a woman with a spacehopper whilst she is singing "Loving You" by Minnie Riperton.
- Sketch 10
A wife's fury at her husband having been caught apparantly having sex with another woman is tempered when her husband tells her he was merely raping the woman.
- Sketch 11
In the first of many sketches set in a general practitioner's office, a woman comes in to complain about her sore leg. The doctor goes to rub it and asks "Does this hurt" when in fact he's rubbing his own leg. He loses himself in the pleasure of stroking his thigh and asks the woman to leave. The visuals and audio of the sketch are slowed down, creating a very dreamy and even hypnotic effect. It is accompanied by An Ending/Ascent by Brian Eno.
Episode Two
- Sketch 1
A man is seduced by his wife's midwife and has sex with her in the next room whilst his own wife is in the middle of giving birth.
- Sketch 2
A doctor insists on going to the next room to listen to his patient list his symptoms. The doctor has a very bad memory and ends up forgetting what he's doing.
- Sketch 3
A recurring character is introduced, a man named Mr Bentham. In each sketch he enters a plush office for a meeting with a middle-aged man to whom he goes with his minor problems. In this one, Mr Bentham doesn't know what to do on Saturday evening. He is advised to go and see a show with some friends. Everyone involved in the Mr Bentham sketch is incredibly polite and formal with each other, although Mr Bentham always gets strangely nervous when making small-talk with the secretary outside.
- Sketch 4
A Swedish porn star (played by Chris Morris) explains his fear of getting "The Gush", which is apparantly a terrible affliction male pornographic movie stars can sometimes get. It involves being unable to stop shooting sperm, resulting in the victim ejaculating themselves to death over a period of several days.
- Sketch 5
A man throws himself into an industrial shredder that is set-up to spray his bloody remains over his ex-wife's house. He calls out to her before jumping into the shredder so that the horrified woman leans out the window just in time to get a face full of gore.
- Sketch 6
Faked CCTV footage shows television presenter Richard Madely beating up a cleaner and having sex with a vending machine.
- Sketch 7
One of the most controversial sketches of the series shows a woman begging a plumber to "fix" her dead baby. After being offered £1,000 he takes the job and fixes the baby up with steam-ejecting pipes and various other things. We do not see the results of his work, it is merely implied. The mother - who is obviously quite deranged - is very happy with the plumber's work.
- Sketch 8
A man holds up a shop, demanding a packet of cigarettes whilst thrusting a gun into the terrified cashier's face. The armed-robber then insists on actually paying for the cigarettes.
- Sketch 9
A brief scene shows a crying woman complaing "I can't feel my cock" when her mother asks her what's up. A possible reference to Futanari.
- Sketch 10
A middle-aged man declares how is doesn't like the idea of dying in his old age and so has himself buried (alive) "whilst I'm in my prime." He sits up in the coffin during the funeral service, listening to his own eulogy.
Episode Three
- Sketch 1
A woman, with her grinning husband beside her, explains her preferred method of foreplay. It involves her husband coming home crying and claiming he has just been homosexually raped "by some street puffs."
- Sketch 2
A doctor asks to see a patient's penis, which he then expresses great admiration for, much to the concern of the patient who actually only came in with a headache. The doctor then shows off his own penis. His secretary catches him and tells him off, making it apparant the doctor does this regularly.
- Sketch 3
A woman whose housing rent has recently gone up decides to take action by lowering the house prices in the area by spreading grease on shop windows and frying excrement on a grill by the side of the road.
- Sketch 4
An angry couple complain to a repairman that their new television has lizards coming out of it. The repairman offers some hopeless solutions ("Sweep them up") before taunting the couple and then making his escape, driving the husband mad with rage.
- Sketch 5
A manageress cannot afford to give a member of staff a pay-rise so, as an alternative, she offers to fart on her secretary's head. The employee is quite satisfied with this although the secretary is understandably rather distressed.
- Sketch 6
A man tries to hold up a shop by insisting he has a gun in his stomach. When he fires it at the unimpressed cashier, the gun shoots the wrong way and blows the would-be robber's spine out.
- Sketch 7
A scene without dialogue shows happy couples strolling around near a clinic all holding tiny coffins.
- Sketch 8
Mr Bentham goes to see his mysterious advisor, to whom he complains he can't find his wallet. The advice-dispensing man suggests he looks around the kitchen for it.
- Sketch 9
During a press-conference, a couple sing a tearful song, accompanied by a synthesizer, begging for their young son to be returned safely to them by his captor.
- Sketch 10
In order to help get their son into a very competetive local school, a couple have been sabotaging the competition. This involves getting other people's children drunk and encouraging them to smoke and take up an interest in pornography.
Episode Four
- Sketch 1
A doctor, allegedly to raise money for a little girl with head cancer, offers telephone sex, even when he is with patients. One patient is horrified when, in between asking him about his symptoms, the doctor keeps picking up the phone and saying things like "I've cum on my knee", always in a very formal voice.
- Sketch 2
A maid gets very upset when her employee tells her off for taking so long to vacuum the house because she uses a tiny vacuum cleaner that is only a few inches in height.
- Sketch 3
In a scene reminiscent of the final tale in Pulp Fiction, a man has a fight with a friend and waits for someone to come round and dispose of the body. The person who arrives is a six-year-old girl, who, despite her tender age, turns out to be very proficient at chopping up corpses. She is also very foul-mouthed and carries a gun. The body turns out not to be dead, but she kills him so that she can finish the job. The police arrest the surviving man.
- Sketch 4
Mr Bentham goes to see his advisor with the dreadful problem that his chin is a bit hot. He is advised to lick his chin and stand on a tall building on a windy day.
- Sketch 5
A couple grieving for a miscarried baby are horrified when their cheerful neighbour comes round with a present in the form of a minature coffin. The neighbour lets it slip that the baby was his.
- Sketch 6
Seen through a window, two men shoot one another in their rectums with automatic pistols then roll around in agony
- Sketch 7
A very lonely woman with a dull voice goes to great lengths to meet people, such as by setting up traps to injure them so she can come to the rescue, or in one instance dressing up as a policewoman and telling a woman her son is dead then immediately asking the sobbing mother if she wants to see "Cats" at the theatre that evening.
Episode Five
- Sketch 1
A woman employs enormous nails for acupuncture, impaling her squealing clients to wooden boards.
- Sketch 2
When he is accused of prescribing heroin to a girl, a doctor blinds himself by flashing a spotlight into his face and thus enabling him to go home sick (he intends on driving) and avoid having to give an explanation for his actions.
- Sketch 3
A couple reluctantly agree to buy a house after the vendor insists that, on top of the asking price, he wants to have sex with the intended purchasers. The couple eventually grow tired of it and the husband lets his mentally handicapped sister take his place for the sex session.
- Sketch 4
Featuring CCTV footage of his actions, an inept armed robber admits that his plan of holding up a shop with an axe went a bit wrong when he forgot the axe.
- Sketch 5
Standing in a rainy field, a man explains how he survives by living outside. He ignores his wife who keeps suggesting he move back in to the house. It is obvious the husband just doesn't want to be anywhere near his spouse.
- Sketch 6
Whilst giving directions, a man urinates on the side of the car belonging to the man asking for the directions. Bizarrely, the car has urinals all round it.
- Sketch 7
Two parents seem totally unconcerned when their young son does not come home from school. It is some time before they bother trying to find out what happened to him. When the police telephone them and say they have found the boy's raped and strangled corpse, the parents are rather annoyed that they are obliged to bury him, and the father vows to "Have a word" with the man suspected of carrying out the murder.
Episode Six
- Sketch 1
A woman invites the man from next door into her flat and asks him to sexually assault her, after which she calls the police.
- Sketch 2
CCTV footage shows a children's game of musical chairs which turns nasty when some over-competetive parents start attacking each other's children and then each other.
- Sketch 3
To his horror, a security guard in an office witnesses several people step into a lift shaft and, thanks to the lift not actually being there, they plunge, screaming, to the bottom. He tries to warn others but they all ignore him and continue to stroll into the empty lift shaft and fall to their deaths.
- Sketch 4
A couple explain that they are convinced their five-year-old daughter is actually a forty-six-year-old man trapped inside a child's body. They give her an operation to fit her with a penis and testicles.
- Sketch 5
Two male friends start kissing whilst in a pub, despite evidently having no previous homosexual urges. They try to tell their wives when they arrive but the women think it's a joke.
- Sketch 6
A couple go to see a doctor and refuse to believe the diagnosis that the wife is pregnant. She believes her swollen belly is just a "spot".
- Sketch 7
In a veterinary surgery, a man requests that he is allowed to have sex with his dog whilst it is in the process of being put to sleep. The veterinary refuses, so the man contents himself by just pulling down his trousers whilst he watches his dog die.
- Sketch 8
Police hunt for a corpse in the woods whilst two rather bizarre figures leap and covort around them, singing.
- Sketch 9
A couple have an incredibly bizarre session of sex, involving such antics as the man fulfilling the woman's request to "shit your leg off" before he begs the woman: "Whack my bonobo!! Whack my bonobo!!". The woman eventually demands that the man makes his sperm come out green. We see very little of this, merely a shot from a camcorder half-buried under a pillow.
- Sketch 10
A woman goes to a doctor with her son, who can't help wetting himself. The doctor insists that there is nothing wrong with wetting oneself, and proves it by doing exactly that in front of his horrified patients.
See also
External links
- Cook'd & Bomb'd (http://chilled.cream.org/forums/portal.php) - Chris Morris fan site. Contains a guide to the soundtrack to Jam.
- Glebe's Thrift Funnel (http://www.koekie.org.uk/funnel/) - Another Chris Morris fan site.
