But Alex Green loved it...

But this is July 2001: long before Russell Brand was allowed his own BBC radio show and a few months before Friday Night With Jonathan Ross came on air. This was the work of a prior comedy anarchist. A much better one, a much cleverer one. This was Chris Morris, and this was Brass Eye.

The nation was in turmoil. A special about paedophilia wasn't serious and they were making a 'joke' of it, 'A JOKE?!' yells The Daily Mail, in all its outraged glory. Morris had gone too fat. The media were pissed off, and comedians laughed it up. Aside, that is, from Richard Blackwood who had been tricked into making a bogus appeal for a fake game for paedophiles to be stopped.

The laughable headlines branded it 'unspeakably sick', 'the sickest TV show ever', and called to 'ban this sick filth'.

But the show itself was fairly tame, considering the horror Morris was producing just a year before, hiding in the schedules of Channel 4:

Jam was a majorly addictive sketch show created by Morris and co-written by the guys who wrote Father Ted. To the many of you who probably haven't seen it, it's basically a series of rather horrific and chilling sketches, with some ambient music creepily playing throughout. To support my argument that this was in fact more risque than Brass Eye, I will give you a few example sketches:

• A woman hires a plumber to fix her supposed "dead baby". This distraught mother persuades the plumber to, by paying him £1,000 an hour to do it. The confused plumber does so, resulting with a baby corpse with pipes and taps on the side of it. (we don't see the corpse, that would be wrong. But, then again, Morris would get away with it.)
• While his wife/partner is giving birth, a man begins to get aroused by the midwife who is flirting with him. He follows her out the room, leaving the wife/partner giving birth on her own, whilethe man and midwife have sex loudly in the next room.
• Morris does a good Dutch accent while portraying a porn star discussing The Gush; a condition which affects male pornstars where they ejaculate themselves to death. (Most disgusting line: 'And all your intestines are mushed out through your balls')
• Happy couples stroll round a park, without babies, but baby sized coffins instead. Gosh!
• Two parents arn't really bothered when they realise that their son hasn't returned from school. They phone up over a period of weeks, calmly inquiring wheather they've seen him. Eventually they get a call saying that the police have found a body and want the parents to go and identify it, they can't really be bothered. The child has been violently raped and strangled. The mother responds with: 'That's a bit much!'

Shocking indeed. But that only prompted at the most one mildly shocked article. Possibly because it was buried in the schedules with little promotion , nobody seemed to notice.

Which perhaps annoyed Morris, as there have been no subsequent series. Shame! But, Morris is the best comedian in history, in my opinion, so let's hope he makes some more shock comedy that's actually good. Not the lame shock that is shown these days. Tish and Fipsy!

Here's one Jam sketch:

Published: 5 Jan 2009