The original radio version Blue Jam is fantastic as well. It blends surrealist, unsettling sketches with late-90s/early-2000s downtempo
Yeah, they’re really well produced and I love them - the monologues were always the highlight for me!
I felt like the TV version was an experiment which didn’t quite work - it didn’t help that there wasn’t much new material. But for people not familiar with the radio show of course that wouldn’t matter so much.
It seemed at the time that they slapped a lot of effects all over the place to try to create an atmosphere, instead of letting the material create the atmosphere by itself. But I’ve not watched it probably more than once or twice since broadcast, I usually listen to Blue Jam instead
Morris introduced each episode in the style of a surreal compère, reading free form poetry over a nightmarish montage, often depicting someone as their life spirals out of control (for instance, one montage sees an unkempt man drinking from a bottle in a bag as he walks down the street, before being kidnapped by “dung-breathed men” and forced to wrestle pigs in the Fens).
Chris Morris is on cake!
“Crime git”, “twunted by”, “lovely pipes” and “fuss-fuss-fussfussfussfuss” have been stuck in the front row of my vocabulary for over twenty years.
