[mocko]

Slightly offtopic but anyone with a dark sense of humour would do well to check out Chris Morris's stuff - I get a feeling most younger Brits haven't heard of it. Day Today and Brass Eye, both still funny, are wonderful time capsules satirising Britain as it was thirty years ago.

But IMO his finest work was Blue Jam - the radio comedy not the TV incarnation, hour-long episodes of low-key music and surreal sketches. Absolutely brilliant even today. Archive.org has a copy at https://archive.org/details/chrismorris_bluejam. Best enjoyed late at night.

Trigger warning: basically everything. The BBC would never get away with broadcasting it now.

[louthy]

Blue Jam is amazing, but it was the TV version of it: Jam, that really blew me away. Dark as anything, surreal, challenging, spectacular use of language, amazing use of music, and video editing techniques … incredible.

I remember when it was originally aired, it would be on around 10pm. Then repeated around 4am, but with the visuals just bouncing around inside a small square (like a ‘Pong’ ball). Each episode they would mess with the visuals in a different way. Definitely will never see anything like that on Tv again.

Probably my favourite sketch (which is also on Blue Jam) [1], but there are so many [2][3][4][5]. Even the intros [6] were disturbing, and set you up for what was coming in the next 30 minutes.

[1] https://youtu.be/5SqHtWudI24 - 'Suicide with an escape clause'

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGex0kLgNok - 'Thick People as a Service'

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKxM4ToLLR8 - 'Symptomless Coma'

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhKla4MEstY - 'Living Outside'

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krsj2bcnRlM - 'Lizards'

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-i0XIux9vo - Intro compilation

[lordfrito]

Wow some seriously strange/funny/interesting stuff... Laughed my ass off at "Thick People as a Service"

American here. Reminds me heavily of Monty Python. I didn't realize there were other shows in such a similar vein. Will def checkout Jam / Blue Jam. Can you recommend any other shows I might not be aware of?

[cal85]

Look Around You [0] is little known even in the UK, but I think a lot of HN readers might love it. It's a surreal but perfectly observed parody of the 80s/90s educational videos we used to watch in school science classes.

[0] Episode 1: Calcium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU

[louthy]

The series of 'Look Around You' that is a pastiche of 'Tomorrows World' is amazing. The 'Music 2000' episode is my favourite [1].

This is an example of the original 80s TV show it was doing the pastiche of [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2myFLUDB74

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0dn0lcvWkY

[quietbritishjim]

It's more based on Open University programs made for showing in schools. But Tomorrow's World is a similar ilk.

[louthy]

That's the first series, the second series [1] is a parody of TW.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Around_You#Series_two

[amiga386]

Thanks, ants.

Thants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaI6kBVyu00

[notahacker]

I'm feeling nostalgic just over the clock at the beginning!

[dataveg]

Synthesizer Patel!

[frereubu]

One that I absolutely loved, but which rarely comes up, is Mr Don & Mr George by two Scottish comedians Moray Hunter and Jack Docherty. I think there was only one series, but it has a beautifully gentle, slightly surreal, slightly slapstick humour.

Edit: And for a much more brutal sense of humour, I don't think any political comedy has bettered The Thick Of It.

[olddustytrail]

I recommended Still Game to an American colleague and he found it hilarious even though I thought it would be a bit crude at times for an older gentleman. I guess the fact they're pensioners themselves softens the humour a bit.

[frereubu]

Maybe you should him on try Rab C Nesbitt next :)

[amiga386]

> Mr Don & Mr George

It was very funny, but also a spin-off to Absolutely!, which itself was a great series - 4 series! - with lots of funny characters:

* Calum Gilhooley, the most boring man in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebG3ZE4Ugqs

* McGlashan, the Scottish nationalist and anglophobe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND-SVKrvCxs

* Denzil and Gwenned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw7tQOyfwyk

* Stoneybridge Town Council: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njiH4i4Kkf0

* The Little Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGNc9VOipw0

They were Edinburgh's answer to Glasgow's Naked Video (Gregor Fisher, Elaine C. Smith, Andy Gray, Helen Lederer, etc.) although the welsh John Sparkes was in both, and had is own spin-off series, Barry Welsh is Coming

[Joeboy]

It's a fair bit less dark, but you could give Big Train a go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEBtpWQ7x8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ofz1OnlNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtllWIiOTuA

Edit: The League of Gentlemen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wB0OkcCps8

[louthy]

Love Big Train, some seriously good sketches. Here's some more of my favourites (outside of the ones you've already mentioned).

Unfortunately my favourite sketch, 'Cake Factory', isn't on Youtube any more. That was where I first realised how brilliant Simon Pegg was as a comedy actor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcAqR-Hs9II - Join the Army

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM - Do You Speak English?

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyj5cv5FPWA - Eagle Line Super Train

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxiOfepOxe8 - Evil Hypnotist

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIIAQME1Uhg - Jockeys in the Wild

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GmmAUbfhMU - Champion sprinter

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKRBYGhqI8Y - On Call Surgeon

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMh9CDNQhBg - Office Politics: Jesus vs Devil

[Joeboy]

Cake Factory was indeed a great sketch!

[rwmj]

You missed the classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKH9ECC_Qa4 (apparently not intended as an analogy for smoking, although it does work for that).

[mdp2021]

Big Train: directed by Graham Linehan - Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd...

(And the guard of the hospital in Darth Marenghi's Darkplace.)

[mdp2021]

> Can you recommend any other shows I might not be aware of?

Really, too many.

Other genius-level of strangeness? The Mighty Boosh, by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding (radio, TV, theater). - Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OZN1zyS7gY&list=PLflSnz9gSh... ; also live shows are on YT. The core are the TV series though.

Logical genius to the extreme, madness revealing? People Like Us, by John Morton (arguably the best thing ever made for the radio). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZ4mBz5Qcc&list=PLJPeS4Ugqq...

[mattkevan]

I’d recommend anything by Julia Davis, who was in the ‘thick people’ sketch. Her comedies are pitch black and very good, including Nighty Night and Hunderby.

For a sketch show I’d recommend Big Train - it went slightly under the radar, but has an absolutely incredible lineup of talent.

[Joeboy]

I love her Dear Joan and Jericha podcast, where she and Vicki Pepperdine play wildly inappropriate agony aunts.

[taylorius]

Slightly different, but Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror fame) had a series called Screenwipe, which lampooned the tropes of television in the mid 2000s. It was pretty funny, and quite dark in places.

[tudorw]

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/ might be a good place to start rummaging...

[gizajob]

You forgot “baby plumber” - I sent this to Americans a few times and they couldn’t even compute it as comedy

[mattbee]

Here's a great parody of Jam by Adam and Joe. I enjoyed Jam but when it misfired this was exactly how ridiculous it came across - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0t0Ocau-CUg

[lampington]

That was brilliant! Thank you for sharing it.

[louthy]

I didn't forget, I thought that might be a step too far for HN ;)

[mattkevan]

My housemates and I used to do Jam nights where we’d binge the whole series in one sitting, usually the Jaaaam version that was even more woozy and disorienting.

Ended up in some very strange headspaces at about 2am.

[mellosouls]

We should also remember On The Hour, the original radio precursor to The Day Today, though I think the TV series is more important.

My own favourite Chris Morris production is probably his Radio 1 series with the painfully embarrassing improvised tasks he'd set his hapless roving man on the scene.

I think that was also the one that got him temporarily banned from the Beeb for implying - but not outright stating - that Michael Heseltine (very senior British politician at the time) had died from a heart attack.

Edit: Ah, here. Typically facetious interview with "close personal friend, colleague and bass player of the Jam, Bruce Foxton"

https://youtu.be/SiTEtJN2LdU

"hit the ground screaming",

"which of your bass lines would be a suitable sort of lament", etc, etc

[AndrewOMartin]

> "The Ukraine declared its own independent laws of physics. Under the new legislation only natural-born Ukrainians were granted the right to have density, speed was calculated to equal boiling-point over height and friction was abolished, which caused increased mortality around hills, but meant that Ukrainians could glide over hundreds of miles with just one push. Meanwhile in Kiev over three hundred protesters were injured in gravity riots."

[petepete]

Chris Morris is still on form. Here's his speech from the LMC Conference from a couple of months ago.

https://youtu.be/vECEz1E0HWg

[evere]

Backed the full shows up here a few years ago if anyone is interested.

https://archive.org/details/OnTheHour

The Chris Morris Music Show was another humorous radio show he did in 1994.

https://archive.org/details/TheChrisMorrisMusicShow

[raffraffraff]

Oh, speaking of Radio shows, there was a hilarious spoof call-in show on BBC Radio front 2006 to 2013. That's really worth a listen.

https://archive.org/details/DownTheLineBBCRadio4

[getwiththeprog]

Thank you, very difficult to find.

[Cipater]

Thank you.

[inopinatus]

Circling back to the OP, On The Hour is the radio programme for which the character of Alan Partridge was originally developed in 1991.

[ealexhudson]

BBC probably wouldn't broadcast Blue Jam today, but only because it would get such limited audience. It's niche and of its time.

Similar shows today would include the Skewer, and to be honest I would rank that as more legally dangerous to run, it skirts libel laws much more closely.

[mdp2021]

And the movies: Four Lions; The Day Shall Come.

And especially the relevant interviews: the movies are the artistic depictions, but the real world facts that made it important to produce them - the rationale and the exposition of salient research material that became the movie - are explained by Chris Morris in talks.

[cm2187]

I never knew what to think of Four Lions. It's a hugely politically charged topic (suicide bombers, islamist terrorism, particularly perpetrated by UK residents/nationals). I watched it 10 years ago so perhaps I misremember it, but it didn't feel to me that the movie had any particular political agenda, it was just making fun of a band of clumsy terrorists.

[amiga386]

It picks up a political agenda near the end when it shows the authorities to be clueless, and suspecting entirely the wrong people, but more generally the film has political origins.

When 7/7 happened, we saw the CCTV footage; Yorkshiremen getting on a train at Luton. Three of the four bombers were from Leeds, they were born in the UK, what on earth possessed them to go to London and try blowing it up? Fanciful notions of being a mujahideen? Some disconnect of belonging to the UK when they were clearly brought up fully within it?

I'm pretty sure Morris said he made the film to answer that question.

Monkey Dust series 2 (broadcast 2003, two years prior to the attack) had a similar examination with its Abdul and Shafiq sketches. Their friend Omar preaching to them about jihad but their lives mainly revolving around what's on telly and their mum feeding them turkey twizzlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxQT1d1AvE

[foldr]

And of course, even Omar isn’t very keen on doing any of the jihad stuff himself.

[phpnode]

The key point that Four Lions makes is that the terrorists are not the highly devoted, strict followers of Islam that they claim to be. They are bored, directionless clowns and the devout want nothing to do with them. This is highlighted in the ringleader Omar's relationship with his brother - Omar and his wife tease and mock his brother for his strict adherence to Islamic customs. The devout brother tries to persuade Omar to abandon his terrorist plans, but is later targeted by the security services because they too assume that it's the strict, devout muslims that are behind it all.

[mdp2021]

Not the key point, I would say, but an important point.

It returns to OP's missing that the movie may have «any particular political agenda»:

there is a political point, which is "outcasts in search of an identity conflictually with their environment may have a political agenda, which causes a political problem". Disregarding such problem implies potential tragedy.

Edit (wrote in a rush): hence, that if there is a risk, quite worth of assessment, you'd better see things flatly, for what they are.

[netsharc]

A sort of "favorite" of mine is this speech by an anthropologist about muslim extremists.. indeed you can apply it to white supremacist terrorists too, they join up to the cause for a feeling of belonging and purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc

[frereubu]

I thought of it as satirising the picture painted by the security services of terrorist groups as Mission Impossible-type bad guys who were amazingly organised and professional, so they needed loads of money for counter terrorism. Don't get me wrong, I do value (some of) the work of the security services, but I think this kind of portrayal too easily allows people to ignore the fact that "terrorists" are often just directionless people drawn into that kind of world almost by accident. The Day Shall Come, released nine years later, expands on that idea.

[cm2187]

I am not sure you can get that message from the movie. In the end it does show them as dangerous, murdurous criminals. It doesn't take a PhD or lots of means to kill a large number of people. Which is also the difficult challenge posed to those security services.

[frereubu]

I didn't (intentionally) say they didn't end up as dangerous, murderous criminals. I said that they were directionless people - they weren't criminal masterminds in a glamorous world of high-tech equiment and fast cars, they were tragic characters who got sucked into a farcial which saw someone blow themselves up in a shopping precinct while dressed as a chicken. It's a fundamentally humanising film which hints at the reasons people join those kinds of organisations, which are much less high-tech and organised than the security services (intentionally or otherwise) paint them as.

[mdp2021]

Nobody is talking about a «political agenda» - art as a lucid portrait exposing salient traits is not involved in that -, and it was not simply «making fun».

The very fact that you write «a band of» suggests you are not seeing the universality of the depicted. It is not like the long dream in Mulholland Drive, that changes and deforms a reality: it is meant to be a description through a satirical lens. And it's not "wacky break": it's "Wackyland".

The right-winged that converts himself after studying the texts of the opponents with the original intent of deprecating them; the special radicalism of the converted "local"; the actual nature of the largely misunderstood special culture hosted in the alien lands; the tone based on constant references to actual events (those who hid weapons in a park and found them stolen; those who hid them in a playground and found the children playing with them; those who filled a boat with them and it sank...); the social and internal states, flow and dynamics of the involved... The causal relation leading to the "necessary conclusions". All of this is a portrait - an analysis.

And statements such as "I have hit them, so they must be the bad ones" are fed to the police - not the protagonists. «Clumsy» who? And the interrogator in the "extra-territorial" container, that seems to be imported directly from Joel and Ethan Cohen - «clumsy» who? No, not just "the protagonists".

Maybe, as suggested, you could check a few of the interviews that Chris Morris gave.

[hnhg]

It was also written about complex cultural issues in ethnic minorities by people who weren't from those minorities. I am a big fan of Morris, but there is something inauthentic (edit: I originally wrote "slightly patronising" but I think the film was made in very good faith) about that. Also there are no shortage of voices from those communities represented, so why should it be left to a bunch of people removed from them to tell their story?

[actionfromafar]

A good story can always use more writers, amirite?

[rwmj]

If you like Chris Morris, then you might also like Victor Lewis Smith who had a similar sense of humour. (I'm not going to get into an argument about whether one influenced the other. There was apparently a bit of bad blood.) He (VLS) died recently and the BBC did a retrospective: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kgd2

[mattl]

https://archive.org/details/vls-archive seems to have a lot of good stuff

[harel]

Blue Jam was so funny and horrific at the same time. I actually liked the TV version of it. Good to hear it mentioned.

[mjhay]

In a similar and even darker vein, the animated sketch show Monkey Dust is also fantastic.

[mhh__]

I don't think it's a coincidence that both of Chris Morris's parents are doctors.

[afavour]

The Suicide Journalist sketch has been rattling around my head ever since I first heard it.

[GordonS]

I remember staying up late as a kid, so I could listen to Blue Jam! Such amazing sounds! I seem to recall it was annoyingly late tho, like 2am or such.

[Bluecobra]

Thanks for this, I never heard of Blue Jam but I do own the Jam DVDs. I had to get a region free player to watch them.

[algesten]

I love the TV show also. It's just so surreal and dark.

[gybon]

Some brilliant sketches in there.

One of my favourites is the man who attends his own funeral: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HhBkC6B9I2U

[algesten]

My favorite is the detached upperclass parents who didn't notice their child not coming home from school: https://youtu.be/sydPKgC_Or4?t=1137

[tetris11]

I like to human think that Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a spiritual successor of sorts.

[thebruce87m]

> The cabin crew suggested we all go out and club it. I had no option. It was that or one of their B&Bs. I figured it'd be safer on the streets. For the first time ever I saw the Scotch in their natural habitat, and it weren't pretty. I'd seen them huddling in stations before, being loud but… this time I was surrounded. Everywhere I went it felt like they were watching me; fish-white flesh puckered by the Highland breeze; tight eyes peering out for fresh meat; screechy, booze-soaked voices hollering out for a taxi to take 'em halfway up the road to the next all-night watering hole. A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain’t never going back… not never.

[zeristor]

Is that you watching the YouTube video?

https://youtu.be/T8wIgQB9GIA

[thebruce87m]

Yes, lived in Glasgow for 10 years so it’s one of my favourites.

[thom]

Perhaps moreso Monkey Dust?

[ndsipa_pomu]

I'm a big fan of Monkey Dust, but due to legal complications with the music copyrights, they were only able to release the first season on DVD. Pirating is the only way too watch seasons 2 and 3.

[gsinclair]

Sounds awesome. Thanks so much!

[totetsu]

The kind of thing they ‘got away with’ was cutting in shots of black and brown people doing their cultural dances with shots unrelated Brits with a laugh track backing.

[Gordonjcp]

[citation needed]

[joiqj]

Sounds amusing.