As a cutting edge music journalist with my finger in any pie with a pulse, you’d expect me to be right on top of every exciting and amusing aspect of popular culture. Well you’d be wrong. As a rule I like to wait before sampling any of contemporary culture’s delights, rather like letting someone else try the poisonous Globe Fish first to make sure the chef has prepared it right. I got into Nirvana after Kurt Cobain shot himself, I watch Little Britain on terrestrial TV months after it had been broadcast on BBC3, and I only found out the pope had died when I saw the pope-mobile for sale on EBay. By the time I get around to checking for a pulse, the subject’s already dead.

So comes the Empire Square DVD. Aside from an inability to cope with more than five channels, I’m certainly not going to manage to catch a five minutes cartoon segment shown late at night on Channel 4. Thankfully all of the short episodes have been collected in the one place, so who needs TV listings?

Empire Square is a series of animated shorts produced by Dave Rowntree, the drummer from Blur. The drawing are crude, digitized animations, like South Park but blocky. The main action is set around three weird characters, tourettes-ridden Richie, sassy Hooks, and the appropriately-attired Rabbit. They get involved in a variety of escapades whose main purpose is to elicit shock and violate taboos. Richie watches ‘Passion of the Christ’ and ends up being crucified by the other two. In a bid to earn money the trio shave a monkey and sell it on the internet as a baby. In reality it’s simple tabloid-rattling fare, not a patch on the insightful bad taste of South Park.

The makers use the short format well, introducing other elements and characters, often unrelated. It’s these that generally produce the best moments, like the ad warning that any child who illegally downloads music will have their details put on a database and given to a rock star paedophile ring. The three main characters aren’t all that likeable or interesting and there’s no real development shown as the series progresses. Granted the constraints of the format hinder this, but it doesn’t make up for it by being hilarious. Much of the humour is clever and topical but as such Empire Square resembles more the political cartoon in your newspaper than the kind of fully-rounded animated TV series we have become accustomed to.

words: Colm Larkin

Buy the Empire Square DVD online

Have your say here