The Telly Terror 3: Jam – Casual Parents
October 27th, 2011
We’ve already had one frankly astounding post on scary parents as part of Notes From the Borderland, but this clip from Chris Morris’ Jam depicts a very different sort of parental horror, one in which the child’s viewpoint is removed along with the child, and which instead of a tidal wave of bloody emotion you’ve got the drifting currents of casual alienation:
“He’s made a great spaceship… Incidentally, did he come home from school today?”
And yet, from the first few lines onwards, it’s obvious that these parents aren’t completely disinterested in their missing son. They do eventually realise that he hasn’t come home from school, and while they might not want to go to all the bother of identifying his body, they’re still annoyed enough to want to “have a word” with his murderer.
In other words, they’re dimly proud enough of his existence to be cross that he’s gone, but beyond that their level of attention is mimicked by the drifting camera-work, which passes by the parents in a 4am haze, vaguely curious as to what they’re doing, but not enough to stop itself from floating off every few seconds to look at something else…
Flashback to 1997: the year in which I bumbled through this clip on Channel 4 while watching TV with my parents.
The gaudy graphics of the transition should probably have clued us all in to what was really going on – after all, it’s only in the past decade or so that news shows normalised this level of visual excess, and those OTT musical stings still provide a strong clue that you’re staring through the looking glass even today.
Back in 1997 though, we watched on, not really sure what we were watching. Something about the tone was convincing – the opening arm-wrestling competition between Chris Morris’ presenter and Mark Heap’s guest radiates an artifice that seems too tacky to be fake, but this innocuous beginning only made the sudden lurch into group-hatred seem all the more distressing. You can almost taste the nastiness as Morris chastises Heap for having “bad aids” (i.e. the kind you catch off of your boyfriend), and as the panic in the audience becomes more apparent, you realise that you’re watching a demonstration of how much pressure a tall, well-spoken gentleman can apply without seeming to apply much pressure at all. Of course, this technique is more aptly displayed in the scenes in which Chris Morris manipulates real people into doing and saying idiotic things, but I didn’t know that at the time.
“Like everyone else in this audience, I’m thinking ‘What about us? What about me, now?’”
I’m pretty sure that my parents didn’t know what was going on at first either. Oh, sure, by the time we got to the stuff about how everyone in the audience who was yawning could catch aids if someone machine-gunned Heap’s “aids guy” to bits, I think we’d all figured it out. But the few moments before that, where I wasn’t sure if what I was watching was real or fake, made for properly queasy telly. I think the fact that my parents seemed uncertain too only made it more terrifying – it opened up a little door to the Borderland, right in the middle of our living room…
Flashbackforward to a few paragraphs ago: By the time Chris Morris got round to adapting skits from his Blue Jam radio series to TV, I was pretty confident that he’d never catch me out again, at least not without making a prank phone call directly to my house.
That doesn’t mean that his work had lost its power though, far from it. Even without parental confusion factored in, the sketches in Jam still have a sort of terrifying blankness to them, and this blankness makes an unusual amount of sense in this particular scene. While the child in question has already been “buggered quite a lot and then strangled” before the action starts, it’s still all-too-easy to put the kid’s viewpoint back in there, to imagine the distanced viewpoint of the piece to be the viewpoint of the dead child, realising that what he always suspected was true, that adults only care about their progeny out of a sort of withered sense of duty, and what’s worse, that he’s unable to pretend that he cares about anything anymore either.
Fuck me, and I thought it was scary when my parents couldn’t tell me what was going on for thirty seconds, eh?
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Other posts in the Notes From the Borderland series:
13 Responses to “The Telly Terror 3: Jam – Casual Parents”
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October 27th, 2011 at 11:52 pm
Bobsy added a comment on to the end of his last Telly Terror post to say that Threads is what he’s afraid of, and fuck, I get that. But I’m a weak-willed and self-centred young man, so what I’m really, truly terrified of is the idea that no one cares about anything (or more specifically, that no one really cares about me!) .
October 28th, 2011 at 12:04 am
Alternatively: Bobsy added a comment on to the end of his last Telly Terror post to say that Threads is what he’s afraid of, and fuck, I get that. But I’m a weak-willed and self-centred young man, so what I’m really, truly terrified of is the idea that sometimes people will go along with horrible things out of a sense of dulled obligation (or more specifically, that I could be capable of going along with horrible things out of a sense of dulled obligation!).
Either way, Chris Morris kind’ve has my number, no?
October 28th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I’m not afraid of anything, because come on, it’s Gilliam time (bitches!), but that David Cann guy is good, and if I could I’d wear his face while I was out trick or treating on Monday.
October 28th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
About five years ago David Cann was on Eastenders. Watching him chatting in that fantastically calm, authoritative manner to Ian Beale etc was bizarre. I found myself waiting for the dialogue to just barely slow down, and something from the back annals of Warp Records to slip on in the background. It’s probably on youtube.
There really is nothing better than putting the DVD on in the post-club, twilighty, strangers are passed out on your living room floor early morning hours.
October 28th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
‘the Jam DVD for clarification, fact fans.
October 28th, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Total Agreemence, Queen B. Is it wrong that I sometimes listen to the Blue Jam radio shows while I’m getting ready in the morning?
And Tel, I think that might be the second sensible thing you’ve ever said on this site.
October 28th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Do I seem like the kinda guy who gives a fuck about “sensible”? I remember asking Jeff Bridges to fist a gibbon for a scene in Barry Munchausen. “Are you sure that’s, like, sensible man?” he asked. “Are you sure you want to make amazing movies that will alter the dreams of children for decades to come?” I replied.
So sure, whenever I hear the word “sensible” I get the stench of an animal’s vagina in my nostrils, but do I have any regrets?
No. I don’t.
October 28th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Aye, awright Tel.
November 29th, 2011 at 11:36 pm
[...] properly horrible ‘Joanna’, which played on all of my fairly obvious issues relating to indifference and abandonment when I read it on the bus home, and left me feeling quite paranoid in the process. [...]
December 12th, 2014 at 11:58 pm
[...] had a hectic week so forgive me for making this short. By way of compensation, here’s a post on Morris’ ‘Casual Parents’ sketch that was partially cannibalised for this section of The Function of The [...]
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