KIND OF BLUE

The Guardian 27 March 1998

Last week's Radio Times billing for Chris Morris's late night/early morning programme, Blue Jam, on Radio 1 read, `Late night ambient vibes with the talent that is Chris Morris'. As a parody, it almost works. As an attempt to sketch out the mysterious world of Blue Jam, it's stupefyingly, embarrassingly, wide of the mark. The talent that is Chris Morris. Is Alan Partridge working for the Radio Times? Morris reads it. ` Can they be serious? It sounds like Radio 2 - `tonight we've got some ambient vibes for you. Picture some waves and lie back there, put your feet up, let your cares drift away ... ' Which is precisely what won't happen. Blue Jam is, by turns, a menacing, mischievous, nonsensical, brutally funny stew of sketches, monologues and music, stitched together to create this melancholic wash. You won't have heard anything like it on radio. It inhabits a very different universe to anything else. It's hardly satire, it's sort of comedy, but its humour is pitch black.

The chilled humour comes from a mad disjunction: people being entirely normal but saying quite extraordinary things. Like the parents who are told by the police that their young son's body has just been discovered. Normal responses are suspended and they react, in the words of one of the actors, `as though a lost purse has been discovered.' Asked by the police if they can come round to identify the body, the father replies with a mixture of boredom and detachedness, `Oh, really, can't you just drop him around' - as though the police request was a nuisance and an inconvenience.

As Kevin Eldon, one of the actors, says, `We react truthfully to these situations. It's a completely unnatural situation but you act as though these are the parameters of their world. This is their real world and you react naturally within it.' And the quality of the voices are sublime. They're characterised by a remarkably eerie, ghostly timbre. As actor Amelia Bullmore says, `Until the pilot I didn't know what it was going to be like. Then it all made sense. During the recording he was telling us to become more detached, more stoned, slower, dreamier. He obviously had a rhythm in his mind. He had a pulse. After that it made sense. It was thrilling to hear it. I had never heard anything like it on radio. I had never been in a mood for an hour. Clearly in his head he was mixing it.' Morris is not the sole creator of this slice of unreal life. He writes the bulk of it but he collaborates, through regular fortnightly meetings with Father Ted duo Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, and regular sessions with Peter Baynham and Robert Katz. All help `evolve things casually. It proceeds almost like a conversation,' says Morris.

The result is a kind of lo-fi anti-comedy. And one of the best-realised, technically-accomplished, brilliantly-written programmes on radio. By a stretch.

But it's not the easiest programme to describe. Will Self called Morris's sound-world `a perverse sound garden, out of which grotesquely comic flowers grow ... There is no contextualising: just the music swirling in and out and then the inimitably weird Morris sketches.' The Telegraph's Gillian Reynolds weighed in with a remarkable, and surprising, hymn of praise: `An underworld, a sense of being in the night among the nightmares, a mixture of music and sketches that felt freeform but had been planned and produced with precision, a vision of life that is deep, deep, deepest Blue, rage in a bottle corked with savage melancholy, bobbing on sound waves.' Hmmm.

Maybe Morris himself got closest. In a letter to one of the actors asking if she wanted to get involved he wrote, `It's going to be a spooky-woosy kind of thing.' Ahh, that old `spooky-woosy' kind of thing.

`I seriously did want it to go out at three in the morning,' he says. `I thought that was about the latest time of day that could be late without being early. It's a sort of - really it's an autumnal, middle of the night show. You need to be as far from light as possible. In the winter, 11 o'clock is okay, but in the summer when it's only just got dark, I don't think so.' Blue Jam is as much a mood as a programme. The vacant, lobotomised voices, the foggy music, and Morris's sense of the ridiculous all help create a rhythm.

But where could he have cooked this one up? `It was so singular, and it came from a mood, quite a desolate mood. I had this misty, autumnal, boggy mood anyway, so I just went with that. But no doubt getting to the end of something like Brass Eye, where you've been forced to be a sort of surrogate lawyer, well, that's the most creatively stifling thing you could possibly do.' Morris is referring to his TV series of last year which was tortuous from the outset. Michael Jackson turned down a pilot when he was still at the BBC, Channel 4 picked it up, commissioned a series and then ... `[Michael] Grade said it simply couldn't go out and he had me into his office for five minutes and said, `Look mate, it's a fantastic programme, I really think it's one of the best programmes I've ever seen ... obviously can't put it out, but I just thought I'd have you up here just to explain why.' ' Morris had worked on the series for 18 months. `But then in the end you're doing that for someone just blithely to say, with their cigar and braces, offering you a whisky at 11 o'clock in the morning, `It's not going to happen, but it's a great show.' ' The fact that Morris recalls the date - November 11 - tells you something about how fixed this episode is in his mind. His reaction tells you a little more: `I really spent three days thinking about very little, other than what great pleasure, what absolutely total pleasure it would give me really to kill somebody. I've never felt that before. But I could imagine every aspect of killing somebody and but for the fact that the opportunity didn't quite present itself ... ' Months later Grade, pressured by the combined weight of C4's commissioning body, reversed his decision and allowed it to be screened. But Chris Morris's problems were just beginning. It ran into a hail of media hysteria when some celebrities, politicians and pundits, canvassed in Brass Eye for their views on such pressing current issues as the drug `cake', cried foul when it turned out that, amazingly, no drug of that name - or indeed shape, like a whole slab of Edam - existed. Nor was `heavy electricity' shrinking 15-year-old girls to a height of just eight inches. Phew.

The screeches of protest from MPs and media rent-a-quotes who had willingly offered their nonsense views on Morris's wild imaginary scourges was easily the highlight of last year. But the ITC didn't quite agree. They censured C4 over the broadcast of the `cake' episode and it will be interesting to see if C4 include that episode in the soon-to-be repeated series. The fact that no one criticised the MP, David Amess, for failing to do his homework before obligingly offering to spout any old cobblers on the latest `drug craze' struck some as odd. That Morris got censured and Amess ends up in Hague's inner circle seems perverse.

And the whole sorry mess was topped off with the celebrated row over Grade's refusal to sanction a screening of a Yorkshire Ripper: The Musical sketch in a programme attempting to ridicule our fetishising of crime. This was deemed in bad taste - though Frankie Fraser, a master craftsman with a seven-inch blade, can advertise Campari.

By the end of Brass Eye, Morris's blue mood was taking shape. And the series brought a halt, for now, to a body of work where news conventions were ridiculed - from GLR radio, through On The Hour, The Day Today and ending with Brass Eye. `It's exhausted my appetite for discovering people's tolerance for talking nonsense. I can't imagine doing another Brass Eye. I dare say if I did another series you'd very rapidly get people going along with it, but then you'd get pressure from the production company and the money saying, `Well, it's funny in a sort of Jonathan Ross kind of way, so let's put it out anyway,' and it would degrade itself.' For Morris, `there's nothing on any channel on TV at the moment that makes you feel `Wow! I'd better watch that'. ' Comedy, even when closest to satire, is no exception. Mrs Merton is `so easily assimilated - people know how to play her, they just get their best grin on and come out stinking of roses. That's why I think you can only really get underneath by deception.' And Have I Got News For You? `It's the biggest warm handshake, glass of sherry, pat on the back, pair of fluffy slippers to the establishment you could possibly dream up. It becomes mere court jester tittle-tattle which has no bite whatsoever. And that's what the BBC are flagging as `the bad boys are back." So what next for Morris? Before embarking on another TV series, he'd `want to know I was going to get decent editorial backing.' A third series of Blue Jam has not been discussed and it is much more likely that he will spin off into as yet uncharted journeys and turn up some equally wildly imaginative project.

Morris, unlike others in broadcasting, is happy to have no firm plans. `I'll probably be staring into a void, it's a way of finding something that you want to do, because something comes out and then you go with it. I think it's the only way to go. You can become very demoralised by confronting the void, but if you know that you're treading the same ground, you can become much worse - you walk, you talk, you go to parties or whatever, but you become dead, you become a zombie. So, you know, the life's gone.' The last Blue Jam goes out on Radio 1 on Thursday at 1am.