Blue Jam

Follow this link for complete archives of a dark, surreal slice of British Radio history.

The show in question is entitled Blue Jam, and a description is going to be a hard thing to pull off. It was the mastermind of a man named Chris Morris, and went out late late at night (3 a.m., in fact, so as to be as far as possible away from daylight) on BBC Radio1, a national station which plays, during the day, chart pop music aimed at the 14-24 age bracket.

So along comes Morris with this show that is so utterly sui generis, not to mention surreal and nightmarish. Each episode is an hour long, and consists of monologues and sketches interspersed with music. If that makes it sound even remotely like a radio version of Saturday Night Live, banish that thought from your mind. Essentially it's a 60-minute aural fever dream, the kind of thing you might find floating through your head as you lie, shivering yet bathed in sweat, with a fever of 103, waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

But in a good way.

Seriously, give it a listen.