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Blue Jam was an ambient radio comedy programme created and directed by Chris Morris. It aired on BBC Radio 1 in the early hours of the morning from 1997 to 1999.

The programme gained cult status due to its unique mix of surreal monologue, music, synthesised voices, heavily edited broadcasts and recurring sketches. It featured the vocal talents of Kevin Eldon, Julia Davis, Mark Heap, David Cann and Amelia Bullmore. Morris himself delivered disturbing monologues, one of which was revamped and made into the BAFTA-winning short film, My Wrongs #8245–8249 & 117.

Writers who contributed to the programme included Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews, Peter Baynham, David Quantick, Jane Bussmann, Robert Katz and the cast.

Chris Morris is known for pushing the limits of what is acceptable for the media, as is illustrated by an incident surrounding the sixth episode of Blue Jam, named after the sketch which precipitated it, "Bishopslips".

Format and style

Each episode opened (and closed) with a short spoken introduction (delivered by Morris) describing, in surreal, broken language, various bizarre feelings and situations, set to ambient music interspersed with short clips of other songs.

Common recurring sketches

• Doctor (played by David Cann): "The Doctor" is a seemingly "normal" physician working in a standard British medical practice. However, he has a habit of treating his patients in bizarre and often disturbing ways, such as prescribing heroin for a cold, making a man with a headache jump up and down in order to make his penis swing (while mirroring the patient's bewildered jumping himself), blinding himself with an intense light in order to avoid awkward questions and insisting on examining a patient by telephone, even though he is in the same room.
• The Monologue Man (played by Chris Morris): Morris's own short stories, often up to 10 minutes in length, were written from the perspective of a lonely and socially inept man. Invariably involving the man's acquaintance 'Susie', but in different capacities each time, Morris paints a picture of insanity with sober and reasonable clarity.
• Michael Alexander St. John: A parody of hyperbolic and pun-laden radio presenting, St. John presents items such as the top 10 singles charts and the weekend's gigs.
• Monged Sex: Short clips of two lovers making increasingly bizarre erotic requests of one another, such as "shitting your leg off" and "making your come green".
• The Interviewer (played by Chris Morris): conducting real interviews with celebrities such as Andrew Morton and Jerry Springer, Morris confuses and mocks his subjects with ambiguous and odd questions.
• Mr. Bentham (played by Mark Heap): An extremely awkward man who requires one-to-one consultations with what seems to be his psychologist for the most banal of matters.

Radio stings

Morris included a series of 'radio stings', bizarre sequences of sounds and prose as a parody of modern DJs' own soundbites and self-advertising pieces. Each one revolves around a contemporary DJ, such as Chris Moyles, Jo Whiley and Mark Goodier.

Music

Bishopslips controversy

In a sketch commencing approximately thirteen minutes into the sixth episode of the first series of Blue Jam, Morris re-edited the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech at Diana, Princess of Wales's funeral to make it appear that he was making inappropriate comments regarding AIDS and the British Royal Family. The broadcast of this episode was faded into the first episode in the middle of the edited speech, which was "broadcast almost in its entirety before being faded by a transmission engineer" [1]. It is unknown who ordered this, either a BBC employee receiving complaints (before the sketch had ended?), or Chris Morris himself as a stunt. The same episode was later rebroadcast as the first episode of the second series, with "Bishopslips" omitted.

In "The Nation's Favourite," a book by Simon Garfield chronicling the transformation of Radio 1 under Matthew Bannister, one sequence describes a meeting in which the difficulties surrounding the management of Chris Morris were made clear. Morris had begun deliberately leaving the delivery of the show masters as late as possible — often so late that there was not sufficient time to play through the show before broadcast to check for libel or obscenity. As a result it is likely that compliance was enforced in real-time and a manager was on-hand to order the fading down of the Bishopslips sketch without any complaints being received.

However this contradicts claims that Bishopslips was included as a deliberate compromise by Morris, who submitted a wildly libellous and offensive sketch called "Christ's Cock and Balls" in which a doctor prescribes Christ's genitalia to a patient suffering from a minor ailment after discovering them shat out by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This latter sketch was made available by Warp Records [2] but is no longer present on their site.

Derivative shows

Blue Jam was later made for television and broadcast on Channel 4 as Jam. It utilised unusual editing techniques to achieve an unnerving ambience in keeping with the radio show. Many of the sketches were lifted from the radio version, even to the extent of simply setting images to the radio soundtrack. A subsequent "re-mixed" airing, called Jaaaaam was even more extreme in its use of post-production gadgetry, often heavily distorting the footage.

In place of closing credits the show had the website address of jamcredits.com [3]

Blue Jam CD

A CD of some of the best Blue Jam sketches was released on 23 October 2000 on Warp Records. Although the CD claims to have 22 tracks, the last one, "www.bishopslips.com," is a reference to the "Bishopslips" sketch. Most of the sketches on the CD were remade for Jam.

CD tracks

1. Blue Jam Intro
2. Doc Phone
3. Lamacq sting
4. 4 ft Car
5. Suicide Journalist
6. Acupuncture
7. Bad Sex
8. Mayo Sting
9. Unflustered Parents
10. Moyles Sting
11. TV Lizards
12. Doc Cock
13. Hobbs Sting
14. Morton interview
15. Fix It Girl
16. Porn
17. Kids Party
18. Club News
19. Whiley Sting
20. Little Girl Balls
21. Blue Jam Outro
22. www.bishopslips.com (Not a real track)

External links

• Blue Jam Sketch Guide: details of the shows, some sound files.
• It Started In The Park: transcripts of every episode of the first two series of Blue Jam.
• The Felchspoon: transcripts of every episode of the third series of Blue Jam.
• Jam Festival: audio files of every episode of Blue Jam.
• Michael Alexander St. John: scripts and audio files of St. John's appearances on Blue Jam.
• Blue Jam on the BBC website.