BLUE JAM SKETCH LIST
SKETCH GUIDE

ABOUT BLUE JAM

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

SOUND FILES

TRANSMISSION DATES

LIVE EVENTS

INTERESTING POSSIBLE FACT

CREDITS


ABOUT BLUE JAM

Blue Jam is the creation of Chris Morris.  It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 1 in November1997 and ran for three series of six episodes each, finishing in February 1999.  Morris, previously best known for On The Hour, The Day Today and Brasseye, all savage and hilarious deconstructions of the media and public life, created a complete alternative world in Blue Jam, a twisted world of lonliness, desperation, alienation and whimsical mong.  Savage, strange, cold, and brilliant, it's humour leaks into the mind using every device available to radio comedy and was broadcast in the middle of the night.

It should be said here that this site is intended mainly for the initiated, people trying to locate a sketch they have already heard of just browsing through the shows they remember.  If you are a new-comer to Blue Jam, it is strongly recommended that you visit our Links page, where you will find pages with far better introductions to the show, as well as a wealth of information and news about Morris and his diverse works, transcripts, sound clips, and so on.
 

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

Each individual show is given its own page.  The entries are arranged to the same structure as the original shows, opening with the gloopy word twist of the intro meld.  The sketches proper are put in a numbered list with a chosen title.  I should emphasise that these are just our titles for sketches, made in the process of putting the Guide together.  Running sketches, ones with themes that reccur over a number of episodes or a number of times in one episode, are given generic titles, such as Monologue, Doctor's Surgery, Unemployed Welshmen, Kiddie Mafia and so on.

Where available, the titles are linked to zipped Real Audio files which you can download to play.

Under each title, in slightly smaller font, is a short quote taken from that sketch and any funniness can only be attributed to the brilliance of the shows writers, including Morris, Graham Linehan, Arthur Matthews, Peter Baynham, Kevin Eldon and Robert Katz, author of the monologues.

Also listed are the "DJ Inserts", short interludes where various Radio One DJs are, in a variety of twisted ways, humiliated, tortured, distorted, killed or made to shake hands with an elephant. At present, these are not attached to sound files.

In addition to this there is a sketch index, where every sketch is listed alphabetically by title, with a link to the page for the episode it's in.  But be warned, there are some 134 sketches listed here, so it takes a little time to download.
 

SOUND FILES

As already mentioned, where available, entries for sketches are linked to zipped downloadable files of the entire sketch. These have been supplied by the wonderful Mr Matt Honeyball at The Felchspoon. To listen to them you will require Real Player G2, obtainable from here.  At present, these are only available for episodes one to five of series one, but more are planned soon.

The sketches were performed by Morris himself on intros and monologues, and the rest by a resident group of actors, consisting of David Cann, Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, Amelia Bullmore and Julia Davis, with guest appearences by the likes of Peter Baynham, Sally Phillips and Phil Cornwall.

A word of caution here, though. Brilliant as these sketches are in isolation, they were written and produced to heard in the context of the whole programme, melting in and out of the music chosen to set the mood for that episode. If you are a new-comer to Blue Jam, the best way to listen to these sketches for the first time in Real Player is to visit Cabinessense, where whole shows are available to download, usually in two halves.  That said, that's only a guess and Morris could have cobbled them together any old how, but it's best to be safe with these things.
 

TRANSMISSION DATES

Whilst these are not mentioned on the entries themselves, it's worth mentioning something about them here, especially with regard to the repeated run of the first series, which uses a different running order to the one used here.

When the first series was originally broadcast in November 1997, Radio One executives laid down a rule that all material used in Blue Jam should be delivered to them before transmission.  On the sixth show, the last of the series, someone (and it doesn't take too many guesses to guess who) switched tapes just before transmission, so that, about ten minutes into the programme, an item went out that Radio One had not agreed to, a tape edit of The Archbishop Of Canterbury's speech at Princess Diana's funeral.  The show was immediatly pulled and replaced with a re-run of episode one.

When the first series was repeated in February 1998, it now contained only five episodes.  In addition they began the re-run with what was originally episode two, then running in the same order until they reached what was now episode five, which had previously been episode one.  What had been the first ten minutes of series one episode six was now used for the beginning of episode one of series two.

If that makes any sense to anybody, please drop me a line as I have no idea what I've just written.  Anyway, here are all the transmission dates, complete with repeat dates for series one.  There were also repeats in the very early hours of Sunday morning, but that'd be getting silly.

Series 1
Episode 1 14-11-97 (repeated as Episode 5 20-3-98)
Episode 2 21-11-97 (repeated as Episode 1 20-2-98)
Episode 3 27-11-97 (repeated as Episode 2 27-2-98)
Episode 4 04-12-97 (repeated as Episode 3 06-3-98)
Episode 5 11-12-97 (repeated as Episode 4 13-3-98)
Episode 6 18-12-97 (first ten minutes repeated Series 2 Episode 1)

Series 2
Episode 1 26-3-98
Episode 2 02-4-98
Episode 3 09-4-98
Episode 4 16-4-98
Episode 5 23-4-98
Episode 6 30-4-98


Series 3
Episode 1 21-1-99
Episode 2 28-1-99
Episode 3 04-2-99
Episode 4 11-2-99
Episode 5 18-2-99
Episode 6 25-2-99


LIVE EVENTS

Two 'live' performances of Blue Jam were produced in 1998 - one at the Battersea Arts Centre and one in a fringe theatre in Oxford. For more details, please see our Live Events" page.

SORT OF INTERESTING POSSIBLE FACT

One sketch in Blue Jam comes from the dim and distant past that was 1992, it would seem. In Series 1 Episode 1, Morris is heard interviewing a member of the public who tries to complain about the state of broadcasting and ends up getting tied in knots by Morris's fucked up headbending. This is believed to have come from an out-take from a pilot show made for London Weekend Television called "It's Only TV". Hosted by Angus Deayton, it was to have been Morris's first TV role proper, doing small insert pieces where he interviewed complaining viewers. The series was never made and the pilot went unbroadcast, but Morris is, it would seem, never a man to throw anything away. For more information on this pilot and a billion other fascinating bits and bobs, see Some Of The Corpses Are Amusing, under the Hidden Archive section. The incident is also refered to in an article Morris wrote in 1994 for The London Evening Standard called "Bad Complaints", which can be found at Glebe's Thrift Funnel, under the Read All About It section.

CREDITS

These are they who diligently listened to the shows and wrote down the sketch lists, as well as making various comments and corrections to this site as it went along.  As always, thanks a billion.

Matt Honeyball, Hazel Farquharson, Stephen Lafferty, Toby Aldridge, Split Pelican and Graeme Payne.

This site was contructed under the benign dictatorship of Peter Gordon

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