Snuff Box Uber Alles

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Q: How did you pitch Snuff Box? If you pitched it, that is.

    A: Berry: Nope, we didn't pitch it. We were asked if we wanted to do a sketch show, and so we did. They asked us for one episode for them to have a look at. We gave them half an episode and they gave us a series. Fulcher: We gave them half and told them to round it up to one.
Q: And what did you put in this first half?

    A: Berry: I can't remember, just the corridor- Fulcher: the hangman- Berry: It was mostly a manifesto we'd written, a page or something. Fulcher: The links and stuff that we were going to do. I think that's what they were excited by. Berry: we said exactly what it wouldn't be and what roughly happen in each show, that it would feature this kind of thing and this kind of music, and so on. So you really had a solid vision for it from then?

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Q: Finally, what is the Snuff Box score?

    A: Easy, two chords: D Minor7 and G9. That's all it is for six episodes - the equivalent of three hours. What a swizz!

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[nacho]

What a swizz!

[Reginald McGraw]

Wiskeeeeeey!

[nacho]

We've all been waiting for the next Snuff Box, yes? Well, Matt Berry's The Toast of London is very close to becoming the spiritual successor... Two episodes in and, so far, very good! The pilot aired a while ago, was ignored, and then series one started recently. The pilot isn't as good as the series proper, but is certainly a taste of what's to come. Below is a clip for the musically inclined (or...not), and the entire pilot itself.

And here's the entire pilot:

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I love to see Snuff Box get some love. One of the best modern Britcoms...and the only true successor to the surrealist school of British comedy.

The first episode of Snuff Box opens on two men walking down a long, white corridor devoid of decoration or context. “Sorry I’m late. Are we early?” one man asks. “No idea. I’ve lost my watch,” the other answers. With two lines, Snuff Box establishes itself as a work detached from normal space or time, and a viewer might conclude that the show is high-minded, avant-garde comedy.

That’s not wrong, but it’s not entirely right, either, which becomes evident moments later when the same conversation descends into puerility: “Not having cash? It sucks like a fuckety-suck!” complains the guy in the ill-fitting brown suit. Then they turn the corner into an execution chamber, where they hang someone. As it pivots from the existential to the profane to the grim, Snuff Box makes little effort to orient the viewer because disorientation is the point: The show has to overtly discard the expected rhythms of sketch comedy—the expected rhythms of life, really—before you can hear its own surreal song of death, vice, and horse piss.

A difficult-to-categorize blend of a sketch show and a pitch-black sitcom, Snuff Box’s six-episode run aired only once on BBC Three in 2006, with no promotion to speak of and a late Monday night time slot. That may seem like shabby treatment, and it was, but Box only existed because it filled in for another show that BBC executives liked even less. Snuff Box’s production company, Channel X, had previously created an animated series called Popetown for BBC Three, and the cartoon was withdrawn before it aired because of protests from Catholic groups. As a sort of make-good, the network offered Channel X a contract for another series, which became Snuff Box.

Since it was born as a way for BBC Three to close out the Popetown affair, Snuff Box ended up in a rare Xanadu of creative freedom: The show was practically guaranteed to reach the air, but network executives regarded it with indifference (when they regarded it at all). Creators and Mighty Boosh veterans Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, who play characters by the same names in the show, used this institutional apathy to their advantage. They refused to follow a conventional sketch format—a procession of largely unrelated three-minute snippets.

Instead, they built Snuff Box around the continuing narrative of Matt and Rich, two hangmen who laze around at a club for gentleman in their morbid trade. It’s gallows humor taken to a literal extreme, made possible only because network suits had written off the show before it began. “Since they had given up on us, it was like, ‘Okay, go ahead. Have your hanging,’” Fulcher said in a 2011 interview.

Berry’s character is a sybaritic womanizer who views humanity with the casual contempt you’d expect given that, in his line of work, everybody is just one 10-foot drop from oblivion. Fulcher—the “assistant to the hangman” and Berry’s de facto protege—plays a foul-mouthed man-child who nonetheless coasts through life in London because he’s American, so everyone expects him to be loud and stupid. Matt and Rich constantly prey on each other, yet it’s clear that the two executioners couldn’t survive alone. A symbiosis between parasite and predator.

The stories at the hangman’s club are complemented by more typical sketches, at least to the extent that the word “typical” applies to this surreal world. In one recurring setup, Fulcher plays an idiot with a lust for inanimate objects. In another, Berry is pummeled by store clerks in his quest to purchase a pair of silver cowboy boots. After Snuff Box’s BBC Three run came and went with little notice, YouTube clips of sketches like these fomented a cult following for the defunct show.

And it goes on at length:

http://www.avclub.com/article/snuff-box-was-too-dark-tv-and-too-smart-youtube-210547?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds