Jam Chris Morris Talkback/Channel 4 DVD Import (region 0) Available from Amazon UK (multi-region DVD is playable in any player)

A cult figure who is both feared and revered in UK media circles (though still largely unknown), Chris Morris has made a career out of synthesizing elaborate media japes, rarely emerging for interviews and foregoing any "celebrity prankster" trappings in the process. To fans, his japes have entered into the realm of almost-mythical legend. In his early days at a local radio station in Bristol, for example, he filled a news studio with helium, causing great (though hilarious) embarrassment to the hapless newsreader whose bulletin was subsequently obscured by the change in voice pitch. Later in Morris's career, he was sacked from Greater London Radio (GLR) for broadcasting a devilish re-edit of the Queen's Speech, which opened: "This year, I am speaking to you not from Buckingham Palace, but from a cross".

After the success and controversy of The Day Today, Morris took an hour-long evening slot on BBC's Radio 1, presenting a mock-pop show that featured, amongst his then-trademark array of daffy news bulletins and a broad musical pallette, interviews with real (and genuinely unaware) celebrities. Assuming the fictional guise of pseudo-trendy interviewer Wayne Carr, Morris would conduct bizarre and ridiculous interviews with apparent authority. He once told Frankie Valli, for example, that his singing voice was reminiscent "of a French horn", before informing him that a strike by British Rail employees was "inspired by the music of the Four Seasons". Morris's comedy repertoire also featured spot-on musical parodies -- an REM song about the benefits of whaling, an Oedipal pastiche of the Pixies, fictional rapper Fur-Q's hit "Uzi Lover" (which, you guessed it, samples the hit by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey), and even a pre-suicide Nirvana providing the music for a commercial for sanitary towels ("Panty Smile -- a comfy pal who says Nevermind"), all of which have subsequently become internet-download successes. The Chris Morris Music Show, however, was pulled from the schedules after a prank in which Morris attempted to conduct on-the-spot obituaries for noted politicians, stating to his audience: "If there is any news of the death of (UK Conservative MP) Michael Heseltine in the next hour, we'll let you know".

Though no stranger to controversy, Morris's next televisual blurt was to prove his most controversial and devastatingly prophetic yet. Brasseye, made for independent broadcaster Channel 4, expanded The Day Today's news-spoof satire format to new heights of nerve-touching grotesquery. Even before the broadcast of the first episode, it was pulled from the air after several sketches were deemed offensive and unsuitable for broadcast, one of which concerned the Yorkshire murderer Peter Sutcliffe starring in a musical of his own life. More worrying to the network bosses of Channel 4 were the stunts in which celebrities were asked to speak on the behalf of fictional charities, all of them Morris's creations. Speaking on behalf of the "charity" F.U.K.D. and B.O.M.B.D. (aka "Free the United Kingdom from Drugs, incorporating British Opposition to Metabolically Bisturbile Drugs"), Conservative MP David Amess delivered an on-camera warning about the dangers of a new (albeit fictional) drug called "cake", which was said to stimulate the part of the brain called "Shatner's Bassoon", which dealt with time perception. All, of course, complete bollocks.

Brasseye was televisual comedy like no other, satire pushed to its most heinous extreme, Morris issuing an open invitation for celebrities and public figures to ridicule themselves, which they did with gusto. That they fell for the nonsense at all is largely down to Morris's curious and commendable ability to give an air of believable authority to his wild, surreally off-the-scale ideas. Many of his fans wondered exactly how much further out Morris could go, how much darker he could delve without something snapping. And so, on to Jam...

Where his previous televisual output concerned the pin-pricking of pomposity, Morris here turns his wry eye to satire of a very different, altogether more disturbing kind --that of modern morality itself. Performed with terrifying conviction by a frankly stunning cast (including Mark Heap, Amelia Bullmore, Kevin Eldon, the anarchist-schooled David Cann and occasionally Morris himself), Jam is a hideous warping of the cathode ray's potential. Needless to say, this is not for the faint-hearted or the easily disturbed, but for those willing to immerse themselves in its unflinchingly bleak worldview, Jam is tainted with genius of the most unnerving kind. Provocative to the nth degree, it consists of bleak scenarios concerning abortion, rape, incest, cot death, mental illness, bogus doctors, psychopathology and other societal ills, all shot through with lashings of grim humour that provokes stifled laughter of the nervous, hideously guilt-sodden variety. Starting life as a sketch-based late-night music show for Radio 1 called Blue Jam (a compilation of which was released by Warp Records in 2001), the sketches are set to an ambient throb, comprising music from the likes of Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Labradford, Bark Psychosis and countless others. Punctuated in its televisual guise by stirringly druggy visuals, aspect-ratio fuckery and all manner of filmic mischief, Jam is a true experience; it's as though your television has been subsumed and overrun by an evil, malevolent force, which -- given Morris's penchant for mind-warping broadcasts -- may very well be the point. The screen stretches and skews, the "action" (for want of a better word) is slowed down and pitch-altered, sketches bleed and fade into each other. In short, it's one of the most disturbing, grimly compelling (and horribly, horribly funny) slow-assaults upon the nervous system the medium of television has yet to yield.

Each episode unveils with a terrifying welcome -- a montage of nightmarishly freaky visual situations and dark, woozy music, set to Morris's broody, gibberish intonations that evoke a mish-mash of Cyberspeak, pop cultural references, Beat Poetry and lingual surrealism -- eg. "When dancing... lost in techno trance... arms flailing... Gorky Bez... then find you snagged on frowns... and slowly dawns... you're jazzing to the bleep-tones... of a life-support machine...that marks the steady fade...of your day-old baby daughter...then Welcome...oooh...astonishing sod ape....welcome...in Jaaaaaaaam". Though the distortion of language has long been a signifier of Morris's work, this, frankly, is off the scale.

Of the countless moments of grimacing, nerve-shredding social satire that comprise these sketches, many irreparably scald the lobes. In one sketch, Morris makes a rare appearance as a jaded porn star, regaling the camera with a monologue about "the gush", a terrifying phenomenon in which male porn stars become locked into uncontrollable ejaculation, unable to stop until they're dead. It's a disgusting idea, but one that unfolds even further into the annals of the bizarre and the wretched..."They tried throwing ice on his balls, they tried to destimulate him with a dog carcass, but the guy just kept popping the protein." Elsewhere, another truly horrifying sketch involves two parents, apathetically pondering the whereabouts of their six-year-old son. "Did he come home from school today?", asks the Dad. "No", says Mum calmly, "he should have been home about six hours ago". And so we fade to two weeks later, and after an unflustered phone call from the police -- "They found a body, love... (on phone) Well, no, we can't really come over and identify him now, we're just sort of doing something at the moment." It's straight-faced, deadpan humor as never before.

In another scene, a polite middle-class couple haggle with an estate agent over the price of a house before agreeing to a "sex arrangement", incorporating seven penetrations, four oral sessions and one of "bagpiping" (husband: "that's when he puts himself in your armpit") with the house's lecherous owner in return for dropping the price. Their reasoning? "Well, it's a fantastic house." In another, a plumber arrives at a house to do some work, before being told by the frantic woman of the house that he has been called round to fix the baby, and not the boiler. "The doctor says he's dead or something," she weeps, "but I know he can be mended, I know he can...it's just tubes really, isn't it?" After being offered £1000 an hour to "do the job", the plumber pauses and eventually accepts. You can only guess the rest.

This two-disc DVD includes the entire series of Jam, along with a second disc featuring remixed versions of all the episodes. As with all of Morris's work thus far, the medium truly is the message, and given his relentless creative control over all his projects, it stands to reason that his way with mischievous, head-fucking satirical media japes should extend to the DVD design as well. Indeed, many of the "special features" are so hilariously, ludicrously pointless that even the DVD itself assumes a kind of slyly satirical comment on the nature of the DVD format. Click "Undeleted scenes", for example, and you're greeted with a text-rant that informs you to storm back to your retailer and shout at the clerk, demanding to see the scenes that "weren't left out of the programme, not just the ones that were originally included". The "Forced Viewing" option is similarly tricksy, forcing the entire series to play back to back, rendering the DVD player's stop and fast-forward controls unworkable. Likewise, each episode can be viewed in a different, though equally redundant way. The "Lava Lamp" option causes the screen to stretch and bend impenetrably, the "Miniaturized Version" shows the episode in a tiny, unviewable box that bounces around the screen, while other suitably daft viewing options include "Speeded Up And Slowed To Original Length", "FFW Version", and "First 19 Seconds", all fairly self-explanatory. The only truly interesting extras (some fascinating rehearsal footage, plus some read-throughs and actor auditions) arrive in the form of hidden "easter eggs", with which this DVD is virtually bursting.

Since Jam was first broadcast in 1999, Morris has made a short film for Warp (the terrific BAFTA-winning My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117), conspired a devilish 9/11 parody for the Observer newspaper, which wrought wrath from all corners of the globe, collaborated with Amon Tobin on the single Bad Sex, re-mixed George Bush's State Of The Union address to grimly prophetic effect (and in collaboration with culture jammer Osymyso, released it on a 12-inch single), devised a spoof news website with his friend and The Day Today co-conspirator Armando Iannucci (www.thesmokehammer.com), and made international headlines with the 2001 special of Brasseye, which evoked a national panic, having dealt with the sore, open-wound topic of the British media's treatment of pedophilia. And yet, despite its desire to confound, confront and disturb, Morris's work is somehow imbued with a fierce morality. In an age in which desensitization seems almost tangible, Jam is a truly affecting piece of work, often tweaking the moral nerve-endings to painful effect. The laughter these twisted scenarios provoke is not that of a sigh-of-relief chuckle or a belly-laugh, but of a nervous, fearful whimper.

Nevertheless, there are moments of sadness, yearning and longing (and even warmth) that make Jam much more than a sick joke. For example, the sketch in which an eccentric, upper-class man mournfully regales to the camera his reasons for choosing to live outside: "We don't really need big kitchens, huge beds...it's all nonsense, really", he says, while his wife tries desperately to convince him to come inside, preventing him from freezing to death. "We're having lamb tonight...I never lock up at night, you know..." she weeps, but her husband simply can't be reached. In another sketch, a man saddened by a lifetime of failure with women decides that the only way he can achieve happiness is to marry himself. "Sometimes I meet a nice girl and think, 'I could have married her'", he says, "but I'm really very happy".

In much the same way that Bill Hicks drew links between pornography and Doublemint commercials, Chris Morris here applies a warped, twisted morality to the most banal of social situations, ever-ready to throw it all to the wind with the odd nod to snickering toilet humour and playful surrealism...like the scene in which Minnie Riperton's "Loving You" is the soundtrack to a silent sketch in which a woman is hiding in a tree, weeping whilst being flagellated with a spacehopper. Nevertheless, as an artistic progression, Jam may well be the work of a man on the edge, a big sick joke with a few clever ideas at its core, or the grandiose pouring of salt onto our moral wounds that it often appears to be. Or, quite possibly, all three. All told, it's an undeniably compelling, truly memorable, confrontationally thought-provoking and unyieldingly fascinating piece of television that, DVD packaging and all, stands alone as a truly original, darkly satirical work of macabre art.

-- Allan Harrison