Pump Up The Jam

Technotronic, Philomena Cunk and the joy of excess...

For Cunk On Earth, we wanted to do a version of the gag we liked doing where Philomena’s grand historical story would keeping getting stuck on a repeated overlong clip of the opening titles of Brush Strokes, the show knocked off course like a dog returning to a weird smell.

This had been so much fun to drop into Cunk On Britain – the wait-for-it, the idea that the first episode of Brush Strokes going out was, in historical terms, a fixed point of measurement, the same as the moon landing or the birth of Christ.

But the clip this time would need to be an international one, not a warm-but-parochial sitcom, because this new Cunk series was pointedly ‘global’, and would be released worldwide on Netflix. There are, apparently, countries where people think ‘Jacko’ was a sort of pop star, not a loveable sitcom painter and decorator played by Karl Howman. Unbelievable.

I think it was Charlie’s idea to use the video for the house single Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic, and use its entrance into the pop charts as our unbreakable historic fixture, from which all recorded time could be judged. Inspired. And stupid. That’s the charm.

I was later told that clearing the music rights to the song in all possible territories took the production team almost as long as making the rest of the series. Sometimes the more effort a dumb gag takes, the funnier it becomes. This was wilfully far-too-difficult. Which is hilarious. Because the show didn’t need the clip at all – that was the joke – and nobody watching would even know how skyscrapingly hard it was to clear. Viewers don’t give a shit. It was a production hairshirt that the show insisted on wearing, and that is exactly why comedy is sometimes amazing.

Anyway, to add a bit more value, towards the end of the edit, the writers were asked to provide some pop-up on screen ‘facts’ about the song, like they used to do on ITV’s The Chart Show, because why not. ‘Can you send over a few pages of gags we can pop on the screen while the video clip is playing?’

I just looked up the document I sent over, because I worked out we used about 15 gags over the whole series, and I remember writing loads more. From the file date, this was about two years ago almost to the day, and I think I spent a couple of hours doing it, in a cafe, typing really fast and trying to disconnect my brain enough to free associate, which is fun, like riding a bike downhill.

What follows is my whole, unedited, submitted gags document that I sent over that afternoon. And what I found was slightly insane. Which made me laugh.

I don’t normally share stuff like this. It’s rough scraps. But I was writing in a frenzy, and the result of that is just… weird. The merciless repetition of Technotronic Pump Up The Jam gags, written too fast, becoming funny, stopping being funny, refusing to stop… it just made me laugh. I find excess funny, and I like the pattern of rising and falling exhaustion when a joke won’t stop – turning what were intended as one liners into a shaggy dog. How long are you going to do this for? THIS LONG. Nobody was meant to see these jokes in this form, but it is oddly pleasing.

Not all of the gags here are great. Some are just riffs on a theme or trying to find the right shape for a joke. There are nice echoes of Viz and Framley which might not be right for Cunk. But bear in mind that each member of the writing team would have been submitting a similar list that afternoon. And what you see on screen is a microscopic proportion of the material generated for the show. And that’s true for most good comedy. It’s a hungry beast.

It makes me laugh when people say comedy is ‘lazy’. That’s almost never the case in my experience. You might not like the particular bits that ended up in a show, but they won’t be all that was written or filmed. Most of the annual Wipe shows ran double their broadcast length in the first edit. The first Cunk Moments of Wonder segments from the weekly Wipe shows were something like 15 minutes long in assembly (meaning that was what they ran after they’d been cut to shape), before being trimmed to 3 minutes or so for broadcast.

Cunk On Earth, like most gag-comedy, eats jokes. It’s a broken comedy show, built over one-liners, then edited within an inch of its life. There are world-renowned experts on Assyrian friezes who spent a whole day with Diane asking them fucking stupid questions (picked from lists like the one below), and who ended up with one line in the series, or a baffled reaction shot. Which seems both hugely unfair and very funny indeed. The profligate waste-of-time is part of the texture of the joke.

There is so much glorious wastage in making these shows, but the flavour of the stuff that doesn’t get used, like the bayleaf in a comedy casserole, soaks into the thing. I love that excess. I think it’s somehow the essence of comedy, like the hours that stage magicians spend learning to hide a coin.

Right. Here are WAY too many Chart Show facts about Technotronic’s Pump Up The Jam. Because I can’t believe how long this list is.

Enjoy!

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TECHNOTRONIC GAGS BRAINSTORM - JAN 2022:

·      The name Technotronic is of Norman French origin. It means “maker of scissors”.

·      The video for this song was filmed in Dorset, using the breathtaking local views.

·      The director of this video went on to make the films National Treasure 2 and Trolls: World Tour.

·      Shortly after filming this video, everyone in Technotronic caught shingles.

·      This song was so popular, it remains the only single to reach number nought in the charts.

·      The bassline for this song was played by Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel.

·      The lead vocal is a sample of HRH Princess Anne, slowed down.

·      The hi-hat sounds are sampled from controversial film Triumph Of The Will, starring Adolf Hitler.

·      The lyrics to the song give clues to a buried golden hare that has never been found.

·      The club remix of this song is so long it is still not finished playing in the studio where it was recorded and so has never been released.

·      So many copies of this single were pressed that at one point Technotronic were using 95% of the world’s plastic.

·      This song was sent into space aboard the New Horizons space probe, to show aliens the high point of human civilisation.

·      The Hotel Du Technotronic in Dubai plays this song 24 hours a day in all its rooms.

·      Technotronic get food by shopping, ordering takeaways and spinning webs.

·      The plot of this song was borrowed by John Le Carre for one of his novels (he has never revealed which).

·      This song is the only hit single to have been written by a cow.

·      This song inspired a baroque series of murders in 1991 where victims were pumped full of jam.

·      This song is the solution to Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and can be sung as counterpoint over the main orchestral theme.

·      According to producer Jo Bogaert, the jam in the song is damson.

·      The Jam’s Paul Weller recorded a “reply song” called Deflate The Technotronic, but it has been sealed in concrete for the good of mankind.

·      The guitar solo on the 12 inch version of this song is by former UK Prime Minister John Major.

·      This song is the official national anthem of the country Canada.

·      The reason this song is so catchy is because it only contains two notes.

·      If this song is played near cats, they jump a metre in the air, thinking there is a snake.

·      According to their wishes, this song will be played at the funeral of [ALTS] naturalist Sir David Attenborough / President George W Bush / Downton Abbey star Dame Maggie Smith. / [ALT: if worried about possible celeb death around broadcast, maybe ‘was played at the funeral of Sir John Gielgud’]

·      If you play this song backwards, you will gain the gift of human flight.

·      The music for this song is by Leonard Bernstein, and the words are by Henry Kissinger.

·      This song is one of the few hit singles in the key of M.

·      Artists who have covered this song include Luciano Pavarotti, Bruce Springsteen and Roy Orbison.

·      Other artists to have had a hit with this song include Kate Bush, Lana Del Ray and The Gipsy Kings.

·      You can tell if it is going to rain by waiting to see if Technotronic lie down in a field.

·      If you hollowed out the moon, Technotronic would fit inside it 80 billion times.

·      A colony on the moon would realistically be able to support around 2000 members of Technotronic, using current NASA estimates of resources.

·      If NASA had sent Technotronic to the moon rather than astronauts, they would have had to wait until 1987, when the band formed.

·      This song was originally written for the film Transformers: The Movie, and sung by Orson Welles.

·      This song was the original theme to the film Schindler’s List.

·      Several of the notes in this song are too high for humans, and so are sung by a dog.

·      Producer Jo Bogaert, when asked what the song was about, said “jam.”

·      The pump used to move the jam in this song is a rotary vane positive displacement pump.

·      The song was banned on UK radio after schoolchildren began pumping their friends full of jam.

·      The song was recorded in a special underwater studio, to create optimum pressure for the jam pumps.

·      The song is built over a sample of the George Formby classic ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’.

·      The original demo for this song was played on the Alpine Horn, and was exactly one hour long.

·      In the event of nuclear attack, this song will play over public address systems in Hungary, due to a coding error.

·      A foxtrot to this song won Dancing With The Stars 2018 in Kazakhstan.

·      The lyricist of this song, Bop Oerls, was made poet laureate in Belgium in 1994.

·      The word ‘jam’ in the song is a mistranslation of the Belgian word for ‘bouncy castle’.

·      A remix of this song featuring a controversial guest rap from murderer Peter Sutcliffe was released accidentally in Japan.

·      The song was deliberately released 40 years to the day after the invention of the Etch-A-Sketch.

·      The cover of the single featured a painting of the band by UN Secretary General Javier Perez De Guellar.

·      The dancers in the video do not include Pink, Sir Anthony Hopkins and 28-times Olympic medal winner Michael Phelps.

·      The special effects for this video cost over $600 million.

·      When this video was first shown, Victorian audiences screamed, fearing that it was real, and that jam would pump into the cinema.

·      The original screenplay for this video, by William Goldman, was auctioned in 1999 for $11 million.

·      A member of Technotronic can pump six times their own body weight in jam every three minutes.

·      A mime version of this song, performed silently for the deaf, got to number 6 in the Belarussian charts in 2014.

·      The original release of this single came with a free horse.

·      At Sir Elton John’s birthday in 1991, he was presented with a cake in the shape of this song.

·      This song was banned in Thailand since the word ‘jam’ is a slang term for fish-sex.

·      The rights to this song were sold to the French electricity board in 2011 who use radio plays to help power Paris.

·      This song won the Academy Award in 1989 for loudest song.

·      In 1992, a pair of trousers worn by one of the dancers in this video was valued at £2m on British TV programme Trouser Hunt.

·      The story for the video was loosely inspired by the 18^th Century whaling novel ‘Moby-Dick’.

·      Grass is only green because it contains gooseberry jam, pumped into it by this song!

·      At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, this song won the only gold medal ever awarded for techno.

·      Mount Everest is as tall as 5000 members of Technotronic.

·      Technotronic are warm-blooded and give birth to live young, making them mammals.

·      Like most primates, Technotronic use tools to help them find food... and record floorfillers like this one!

·      More people are killed every year by household toasters than by Technotronic!

·      There is no word for Technotronic in Chinese. There they are called Dance Many Music People Number One Indeed Group.

·      There is a tribe of Pacific islanders who worship Technotronic.

·      Every member of Technotronic has a unique pattern of lines on the ends of their hands, called a “finger print”.

·      Technotronic keep their bodies working using a fluid called “blood”.

·      Technotronic’s ‘queen’, featured singing in this video, is the only member of the band who lays eggs.

·      This song is in 4/4 time, which adds up to 8, the number of legs on a spider, which is Technotronic’s favourite arthropod!

·      The song is 125 bpm, 102 less than the height in centimetres of Robert Wadlow, the world’s tallest man!

·      The song is in B flat minor, the same key as Umbrella by Rihanna, even though only 50% of the members of Technotronic own umbrellas. Spooky!

·      There has never been a case of a human being attacked by Technotronic in open water.

·      This song reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, the same number that you would get if you counted the legs on one member of Technotronic.

·      Technotronic share 50% of their DNA with bananas. The band like bananas, and often share them.

·      The surface of Technotronic’s home planet, Earth, is 70% water.

·      The tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, which is over 424 members of Technotronic tall.

·      This single was released in 1989, almost three years after the first episode of hit UK sitcom ‘Brush Strokes’, with which it shares a planet.

·      If Technotronic were laid end to end, they would reach from New York to London, provided there were big enough gaps.

·      Technotronic got their name by combining the word ‘techno’, meaning a sort of dance music, and ‘tronic’ meaning ‘tronic’.

·      If you count the teeth in one of Technotronic’s mouths, counting one tooth every beat of this song, it would take 32 beats.

·      If one member of Technotronic stood in Paris and another in New York, the distance between them would be 3636 miles, almost the same as the length of this song in minutes (3’36”)!

·      Other pop groups who begin with ‘T’ include 10CC, unless you do it with numbers.

·      If you started boiling an egg at the start of this song, and stopped at the end, you would have cooked the egg for 3 minutes and 36 seconds.

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And that’s that.

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My new book BE FUNNY OR DIE How Comedy Works And Why It Matters is in bookshops on March 7th.

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