Jam (TV series, first aired in 2000)

 

Channel 4’s “100 Scariest Moments” list, #26:

 

 

Jam

(TV series, first aired in 2000)

 

One of the pleasures of working from other people’s lists to guide these essays is that I discover a few TV shows/films that I had never seen or even heard of. “Jam” is one of these, and my reaction to it is, well, ummm ….

 

A Skit-Comedy show, but expect no guffaws or solace here, only jaw-dropping weirdness and darker than the darkest tar-ball ever dumped on a nature preserve by an oil spill. Created by British Bad Boy Chris Morris, and its two clearest goals were to disorientate and offend.

 

Done on a micro-budget, it still featured not only high production values, but much visual and, especially, sound inventiveness. Based on an equally weird radio-show, “Blue Jam” (first aired in 1997) it kept it kept its skits remarkably short, setting up a situation, then shocking you by demonstrating all Reality and Morality was violated, then moving on to the next. The episodes were about 20-minutes-long, had no commercial breaks, nor were there opening and closing credits. I guess that means it was “experimental.”

 

Maybe I should describe part of the first episode.

 

It opens with a morbid stream-of-consciousness monologue by Morris that demands you strain to listen, played against staged images of a pediatric ward, a deadly car crash, a morgue, etc.

 

This was followed by:

 

Two concerned parents talking to their child’s godfather. Worried that the son might turn out gay, to dissuade the boy, the father’s been having sex with the son’s male admirer, while the mother has been having sex with the son. Both exhausted by this, the parents want the godfather to step in.

 

This was followed by:

 

Snippets from a TV Talk Show hosted by Robert Kilroy-Silk (an embarrassing English Pundit and Politician whose name I had to look up for the purposes of this essay) intercut with a look-a-like actor running naked through a shopping-mall committing lude acts including a few-second close-up on his penis as he urinates on a store-window. (FULL STOP! English censorship of film and TV has a long history, and was generally stricter than in the USA. It only started to ease, seemingly permanently, in 1998. Two years later, they put THAT on TV? Pro-censorship crusader Mary Whitehouse wasn’t even dead yet!)

 

This was followed by:

 

An insane Doctor who built his reputation on the phony diagnosis or “symptomless coma” and murdering his patients to support his contention. Even children.

 

We’re now about half into the twenty-minute episode. There’s lots more before it’s over, but two of the coming skits that are especially note-worthy:

 

A man describing in either shock or apathy how he watched another man trying to kill himself by jumping off a tall building, but from a first-floor balcony, over-and-over again. We see the suicider get progressively more bloodied and uncoordinated while the growing crowd of onlookers does nothing to stop him.

 

And a girlfriend enraged because her boyfriend is cheating on her, but then relieved to find out, the sex with other women really “didn’t mean anything,” because he’s a serial rapist.

 

And episode two proved even more controversial. The British Board of Film Classification came down especially hard on two skits as going "beyond acceptable boundaries in their treatment of issues of particular sensitivity which required greater respect for the vulnerability of those depicted":

 

A woman called upon on a plumber to fix her dead baby. Since she’s offering a lot of money, he installs steam pipes that simulate breathing in the corpse.

 

Male porn stars start dying of a work-related affliction called "the gush" which causes them to ejaculate to death. This is graphically depicted.

 

The complaints mounted with each following episode (there were a total of six) but I watched nothing following number two.

 

Morris said that the radio and TV show were designed to be aired at 3am, because it "was about how your mind works in the middle of the night." The TV show was actually aired at 11pm.

 

Critic Ian Jones wrote that, “you were expected, almost, to take either a fiercely defensive or resolutely negative stance. It was virtually given that you could not think the series was simply ‘OK’ or that your thoughts on ‘jam’ came down to mere mild indifference … any serious viewer was meant to surely either ‘get’ ‘jam’- and embrace it 100% - or trash it completely. This was Chris Morris after all: you had to react, you had to have a strong opinion - that was the whole point. Casual disdain was not a legitimate emotion.”

 

Sound good? Well, I didn’t like it. I admired its audacity, but disliked its contempt for the whole human race. Nor was Jones a fan; in a separate article he wrote, “Come ‘jam,’ and we find Chris Morris dangling in the wind, creating moments of unforgettable shock alongside exercises in tawdry tedium.”

 

The series did earn a cult following, and Morris’ other programs (which I haven’t seen) were generally better received, but still pissed people off all over the place.

 

First episode:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpn7C6r-WEM