Television - Andrew Billen on comedy - or is it?
For all I know, from the vantage point of my deadline, hell itself may have broken out by now over Jam (Thursday, 10.30pm, Channel 4). Chris Morris's freakish comedy contained erect penises, the corpse of a three-week-old baby being repiped into a simulacrum of life by a plumber, and Richard Madeley "fucking" a coffee machine.
Yet somehow I doubt that Morris is about to find himself anything like as notorious as on the day in 1995 when he announced Michael Heseltine's death on Radio 1. For one thing, Channel 4's press office has gone to some trouble not to advertise this series, presumably reasoning that one way to avert a tabloid storm is not to alert Mary Whitehouse via the TV Times. For another, as society wises up to its tricks, television's power to shock is in long-term decline. For a third, with this programme, it is hard to be sure quite what you have just seen.
Most of us first cottoned on to Morris when he appeared as the Paxman-style newscaster on BBC2's The Day Today in 1994. His talent was confirmed in 1997 by Channel 4's Brass Eye. A critique of the tricksy, personality-led pomposity of television current affairs, it also exposed TV's useful idiots - rent-a-quotes such as the Tory MP David Amess, the fearless denouncer of the non-existent drug, Cake. Unfortunately, its morbid fixations on sex and death disagreed with Morris's more squeamish critics, one of whom was C4's then chief executive, Michael Grade.
Jam, for which we have to thank his successor, Paul Jackson, is an easier sell to sceptics. For one thing, we fans no longer have to insist that those who dislike it have no sense of humour (always a pointless line of attack, as everyone ticks the GSOH for himself). Rather than being laughter-track funny, Jam is seriously surreal: Un Chien Andalou, not Monty Python. It does not casually stray into the offence, but sets its camp up in the taboo territory of the subconscious. Down here, violent images retain the power to dismay but not to shock. Indeed some offer subversive Idish pleasure. The key phrase from the opening episode was the mad doctor's diagnosis of "symptomless coma". It is this state that Morris intends to induce in us, his victims.
We are taken under each week by a necromancer's chant: "When the midnight sirens bleed to blue-flash road smash, stretchers, covered heads and slippery red macadam; find you creep beneath the blankets to snuggle close a mangle-bird, wishing you be freezer drawered." I remember hearing this cabalism on the Radio 1 version and what vivid images were thrown up in my mind. Remarkably, watching last Thursday, I realised that Morris had found the exact visual correlatives to each of them.
Once under, Morris keeps us there. If we were to laugh out loud, we would jolt out of it, so there are no punchlines. The sequences are shot in variations of degraded, fuzzy or slowed-down film - those TV shorthands for the dream state that have replaced liquid ice. The performances have a quality of deadened rather than heightened naturalism. It is as of Nite-all we have drunk.
It's only when the programme is over that our collective dream becomes analysable as satire and begins to look more conventional. As for most satirists, Morris's targets are authority figures: most obviously, his selection of mad, charlatan doctors, but also others whom we blindly trust with our welfare, such as plumbers and car mechanics. ("What the fuck have you done with it?" asks a furious working-class man who comes to collect his car and discovers it has shrunk to four-foot long. "What am I, fucking Noddy?") In a repeating motif, a timid, socially paralysed middle-class figure visits a professional for advice on how to spend his Saturday night or how to find the wallet he has mislaid.
But some more private grudges emerge with this series. Morris resents middle age, church ritual, the stigma around death. Morris, somewhat unoriginally, suggests that society is a paper-thin veneer overlaying chaos, liable at any moment to be punctured; he sneers at the stupid and the weak; not so secretly, he's on the bully's side.
Jam is at its weakest when, in conventional terms, it is nearest to comedy. I could have done without the 46-year-old who staged his own funeral, and the armed robber who demanded a packet of cigarettes at gunpoint and then attempted to pay for it - too Marty Feldman. As soon as something begins to look like a sketch, you know that it is about to fail. But most of Jam is disturbingly original. Like the suicide in the first episode who jumped 41 times from his first floor window, Morris is a man "locked in a very private act". Autistic is not a word to be used lightly, but in this series Chris Morris is revealed to be one of television's great auteurs.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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