Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34768 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-04-28
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 300 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
With Jam, the TV follow-up to his Radio 1 series Blue Jam, Chris Morris focuses more on unease more than the satire of Brass Eye. Indeed, it's a moot point whether Jam can actually be categorised as comedy at all. Each sketch is steeped in a heavy brine of dark, ambient music (including Bark Psychosis, David Sylvian and Brian Eno), grainy imagery, fast-cut editing and slo-motion. Its mirthless, Kafka-esque scenarios feel like an attempt to morph into some new species of post-comedy that is more like the stuff of nightmares. The credits, in which Morris stalks the moving camera, uttering Lear-esque words of foreboding immediately announce that this "sketch show" is a galaxy apart from The Two Ronnies.

The appalled look on actor Kevin Eldon's face in the opening sketch of the series, as a young couple invite him to endure being buggered by a mutual acquaintance ("I need a break"), sets the tone. Rape, chemotherapy, wanton urination--as a naked "Robert Kilroy-Silk" goes insane in a sketch full of detestation for the oleaginous TV presenter--and recurring sketches involving callously authoritarian NHS doctors, all go to make up these annals of the bizarre and perverse.

Ultimately, Jam doesn't quite work, not on TV anyway. The repetition of the same, small cast over and over, broken up too briefly by Morris' own appearances (as a "country gentleman" living outside his house, for instance), coupled with the gruelling treatment of the sketch material makes for a psyche-probing, jaw-dropping experience--but in parts also a nullifying and strangely predictable one. Morris's "failures" are far more interesting than most people's successes. --David Stubbs

Special Features
Disc 1:
All 6 episodes of the Jam TV series, plus the following extras:

• Miniaturised viewing option for programme 1
  
• Moving miniaturised viewing option for programme 2 (pong version)
  
• Programme 6 speeded up and then slowed again to original duration
  
• Lava Lamp viewing option
  
• Programme 4 FFWD version
  
• 1st 19 seconds of programme 5
  
• Original Test shoot material
  
• London/Tokyo jam exhibition competition
  
• Selected scenes retaining original audience sound
  
• Adam & Joe's Goitre
  
• Undeleted Scenes
  
• View all six programmes at once.....and many many more, plus hidden extras

Disc 2:

• All 6 episodes of the Jam TV series

Synopsis
JAM is yet another disturbing dark comedy series from Chris Morris, the twisted genius behind the BRASSEYE and THE DAY TODAY. Spread over two discs, JAM avoids Morris's trademark satire in favour of a disorientating mixture of bizarre sketches and electronic music which probe the darker regions of the soul.

Customer Reviews

Unique, hard to describe, arguably brilliant
If you're a typical BritCom fan this would likely come as something of a shock, both interms of the material and visually. As far out on the edge as anything I've seen in terms of 'comedy', I found it very satisfying myself, but I enjoy the unusual, edgy stuff; this is 180 degrres removed from As Time Goes By in the lexicon of British comedy. I found the skit in which prospective homeowners must perform numerous acts with the seller before buying the home to be hysterical, but the lack of canned laughter would probably leave many wondering when, or if, to laugh. Definately a love it or hate it kind of thing. Highly recommended for the adventurous. I simply wish that there were more episodes, and it was unnecessary to release as a 2 disc set.

Jam rocks my nut
I have been waiting for a release of Jam on video or DVD since it first aired. It became a cult show amongst all my friends at university at that time, many of us already familiar with Chris Morris' work on The Day Today and Brasseye, and with the previous radio version Blue Jam. But when Jam came along it really hit a nerve with its surely darker than legal level of comedy. The hugely controversial Paedophile episode of Morris' Brasseye now seems, stylistically at least, quite tame in comparison. Many may find it confusing that Jam is considered comedy at all, with its unsettling atmosphere of psychological torment and disfunctional brutality, and maybe it goes too far, but there is nothing else like it. Comedy is naturally disruptive, and Morris is really pushing back the boundaries with the absurd world of Jam, proving himself one of the foremost innovators working in television. Except now he's made the My Wrongs short film and will probably be the next David Lynch.
I also met him once and he's really nice, he wasn't in slow-mo or swearing at children or anything. So be really clever and buy the DVD.

Is Morrisian an adjective?
First of all this is truly extraordinary.

Secondly, it's not comedy at all. True, I laughed out loud a few times but the overall feeling is one of deep discomfort, occasional shock and a lingering dense of dislocation. Jam can infest your world view to the point where it's Pinteresque silences and Beckettesque vignettes seem to reer up in your everyday life. And I'm not sure if I'm pleased about that.

Morris has managed to create and broadcast the most extreme, offensive and deeply disturbing programme ever transmitted. That it is so much more than a load of shock tactics and lavatorial excess a la Jackass is all the more impressive. It's a vision of hell where all relationships are awkward, all authority is absurd and untrustworthy and insanity slips into reality with worrying ease. The thin veneer of everyday life is constantly being confronted by the darkness beneath it. And that is the world of Jam.

Highlights - the lizard TV, the 6 yr old Ms Fixit, the intro to episode 4 (the dung breath men), the casual parents. I could go on.

Theres little to fault here. The acting is mostly flawless and utterly beleivable. No mugging and overacting at all.

The extras are a little repetetive though there is a pretty good joke involving undeleted scenes.

Morris is the one true original working in British "comedy" and he now deserves his own adjective.