Hacker Cinema
Monkey Dust
2003 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Shaun Pye, Harry Thompson
Monkey Dust is a British satirical cartoon, notorious for its dark humour and handling of taboo topics such as bestiality, murder, suicide and paedophilia. There were three series broadcast on BBC Three between 2003 and 2005. Following co-creator Harry Thompson's death, no further series were made.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Yes, but there's a lot of old media available on torrents that is not available elsewhere such as on on streaming services. I'm a bit of a datahoarder and will often download obscure films/tv just because they are obscure and difficult to find. It's surprising how media from the 1980/90s is only available on a couple of torrents. A more recent example (early 2000s) would be the BBC series Monkey Dust that only had the first series released on DVD due to issues with the music licensing and possibly the content which was contentious.
The episode was also made at a time when it was fashionable to hold the view that the country was gripped by a kind of irrational hysteria about child sexual abuse. Monkey Dust's 'pedofinder general', from around the same time period, reflects a similar attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCywGhHQMEw
Decades later this all looks rather naive. The BBC, especially, could hardly make a program satirizing exaggerated concerns about child sexual abuse, given that the Savile scandal proved that many such concerns had in fact been taken nowhere near seriously enough.
I'm a big fan of Monkey Dust, but due to legal complications with the music copyrights, they were only able to release the first season on DVD. Pirating is the only way too watch seasons 2 and 3.
It picks up a political agenda near the end when it shows the authorities to be clueless, and suspecting entirely the wrong people, but more generally the film has political origins.
When 7/7 happened, we saw the CCTV footage; Yorkshiremen getting on a train at Luton. Three of the four bombers were from Leeds, they were born in the UK, what on earth possessed them to go to London and try blowing it up? Fanciful notions of being a mujahideen? Some disconnect of belonging to the UK when they were clearly brought up fully within it?
I'm pretty sure Morris said he made the film to answer that question.
Monkey Dust series 2 (broadcast 2003, two years prior to the attack) had a similar examination with its Abdul and Shafiq sketches. Their friend Omar preaching to them about jihad but their lives mainly revolving around what's on telly and their mum feeding them turkey twizzlers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxQT1d1AvE
> Monkey Dust Series 3 is another series that is now impossible to buy legally. They used various people's music but didn't have the rights, so it got broadcast and then they couldn't sell it on DVD.
This has become a reoccurring thing in the streaming world. Dramas have taken to changing the songs, and in the case of Dawson’s Creek the theme [0].
I one time tried to watch an episode of Bevis and Butthead streaming, and the parts where they comment on videos were dead silent except for their remarks. Weird
[0] https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a34671665/why-dawsons-creek-theme-song-different-netflix/
Limmy's Show Season 3 is the exact same: https://twitter.com/daftlimmy/status/542009546588581888
The fact that the BBC could make this mistake several times does strike me as incompetence.
The Monkey Dust situation is a real shame, as it was such a ground-breaking and innovative comedy programmes of its time. Ridiculous that something so influential can now only be watched thanks to piracy. Also kind of ironic considering some of the themes of Monkey Dust...
The Wikipedia article also says this: "Another reason for the lack of DVD releases of the later series is thought to be the 'teenage jihadi' sketches being considered unsuitable in the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings that occurred a few months later."
>all those cheaply made hollywood "historical" movies
There's a British cartoon from 2003 called Monkey Dust, where a recurring feature is completely historically inaccurate Hollywood movies ("Dedicated to all the Americans who died in the early Middle Ages").