While browsing the Electric Picnic forums, I came across some YouTube material from Monkey Dust - some of the best stuff I’ve seen YouTubed in a long while now.

Monkey Dust is a very black humoured animation series that deals with some fairly sensitive material - in a very insensitive way, but it does it exceptionally well.

One article I read about Monkey Dust quoted the Observer as saying:

A piece of genuinely brilliant programming. Damn, it feels good to be treated like a grown-up for once. Monkey Dust alone has justified the existence of BBC Three. Dark, compelling and utterly unmissable television.

It seems the principal creators, and writers are Harry Thompson and Shaun Pye but the animation is outsourced to a variety of animation firms and animators, resulting in the bizarrely successful visual mixmatch of styles.

Other writers and directors are involved heavily also, which probably explains how so much material is packed into every episode that I’ve seen, and how it stays fresh.

The show often contains stuff which I’m retiscent to embed here, such as sex scenes and extreme violence, but I highly recommend watching them if you’re not sensitive to such stuff - the rating on the DVD is 15s.

One character, who sticks in the mind, to me typifies the type of humour on Monkey Dust is the ‘PaedoFinder General’ who essentially without needing to go through any kind of justice system, subjects suspected paedophiles to trial by media and executes them.

by the power vested in my by a sky news text vote…

Monkey Dust season one is available on Amazon.co.uk and I believe the other two seasons are available through BitTorrent, but I don’t have url’s for the downloads.

There’s a lot of Monkey Dust stuff on YouTube worth watching, I particularly liked this excerpt - it has a good mix of stuff in it, watch for the fairy tale at the end, but be warned it’s got good amounts of sex and violence in it!

More info on Monkey Dust from Wikipedia

I’ll leave you with this clip - The Diary of Ann Frank: