Chris Morris
Blue Jam (Radio 1)
What’s a funny, talented, intelligent, original fellow like Chris Morris doing writing for Radio 1? Or, to put it another way, why doesn’t Radio 1 commission more programmes from writers such as Chris Morris, thereby attracting listeners other than giggly schoolgirls requesting Blur for their boyfriends? Morris’s second Blue Jam series has the same effect on this structureless and often shambolic station as a Loch Linnhe oyster turning up in a tub of jellied eels. Blue Jam has class. I was going to say enough class to qualify it for Radio 3 except that it is too zany, too anarchic and too rude for sober Radio 3 audiences.
Take a sublimely surreal sketch which simultaneously sent up Childline, The Archers and Bugsy Malone. ‘She’s doing it again; you’d better send someone quick,’ the worried owner of Park Farm tells the helpline. A four-year-old girl is battering a cow to death; another one, the first, didn’t survive. Yes her car is still here – a green Cortina Estate – though she can’t see. ‘Try anything and you’re dead,’ pipes up the pint-sized abuser, aiming her 45. ‘Go on – tell them you made it up. Tell them it was a squirrel in a dress you saw.’
It’s impossible to describe Blue Jam in anything as conventional as print. Preposterous situations are acted out against a background of soporific music, leaving you wondering if, like Keats, you’re awake or asleep. Did you really hear a rapper advising not to cut down Zoë Ball because she’s still alive, although hanging from the ceiling with a flex around her neck. What did it all mean? Heaven only knows.
The same dysfunctional characters appear every week, including the deranged mother begging the plumber to mend her dead baby – ‘Well, he fixed her boiler, didn’t he, and the baby’s only three weeks old; surely it should last longer than that.’ Or the GP who tells his patient: ‘Yes, the finger is swollen but, tell you what, Billy Connolly will dress it for you.’ Enter Billy Connolly with Tubigrip; he dresses the wound, then exits.
Blue Jam sets out to shock and succeeds but the shock is deadened partly by the transcendental music and the fact that you are laughing so much. Every radio station in danger of being stuck in a rut needs its very own Blue Jam to kickstart it into a new direction or just kick in the seat of its complacent pants. Congratulations Radio 1 for having the balls to give it air-time.
by Sue Arnold (The Guardian)
A Revolutionary Concept in Newscasting on BBC2
"It's a programme destined to knock current affairs broadcasting off its axis, then blow a hole in its spluttering head" says Ross Edwards, the hard-headed Editor of THE DAY TODAY.
"For too long, current affairs programmes have wasted precious airtime by ' telling the story' and 'exposing the truth' in a tediously literal way" he added. "THE DAY TODAY" understands that today's viewer must be able to ' feel the reality of news' and will only do so if broadcast reality is assisted in a process called 'Ultranews'" he explained.
Ross Edwards explains that THE DAY TODAY's charter promises the following : to embrace the good news ethos of Martyn Lewis but at the same time not to fear the genuine thrill of natural and man made disasters; to make sure events live up to expectation by increasing their quality if necessary; to maintain consistently high standards by introducing the Self Funding Reporter Initiative, in which reporters bid competitively for the right to cover stories.
At 9:30pm on Wednesday 19th January 1994, some of the most respected newsman and women were assembled for the first time under one banner. Business Correspondent Collaterlie Sisters who has joined for a fee twice as large as the Chairman of Barclay's Bank, incisive sports reporter ALAN PARTRIDGE, Economics Editor Peter O'Hanraha'hanrahan who won this year's GOLDEN FIST AWARD for his coverage of the CHICAGO BLISTER, and Weathercaster Sylvester Stewart, 27 year old Computer Meteoro-prodigy who has himself been part graphic since the age of 19.
The programme was anchored by the one man news channel, Christopher Morris - supposedly fired from the BBC in 1989 for using make-up on victims at the scene of a disaster - hired by The Day Today for precisely that reason.
The Day Today was produced by Armando Iannucci and co-produced by Chris Morris. The Executive Producer was Peter Fincham and is a TALKBACK production for the BBC.
Talkback Productions press release
Some wav. files of the man at work
