The Penny Dreadfuls: The Comedy Troupe

It’s penny dreadful week! Let’s see how much mileage we can squeeze out of this puppy  continue our homage by today featuring a British sketch comedy troupe who go by the name The Penny Dreadfuls.

Obviously, in writing the past two days’ posts i had to google the living crap out of “penny dreadful” and since these guys kept coming up i made a note to feature them when i was done.

Here’s a sample:

Their specialty these days is doing radio show comedy sketches. One thing adore about the BBC is that they have kept alive the art of radio storytelling. When i was young i used to listen to old time radio shows and dramas. I would even perform them myself. I’d sit in front of a cheap tape recorder with my record player for theme and background music, and a variety of of items for sound effects. i would then enact comic book plots and later actual scripts of The Shadow radio plays.

In the states that sort of thing died out with television, but amazingly, in England, it was kept alive and remains thriving, with many great comedy groups exploring eh medium. (Some one remind me to do a post on The League Of Gentlemen later this week)

If you’ve never heard the original radio version of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy seriously, you’ve haven’t really experienced that classic properly.

Thus we present another radio bit from The Penny Dreadfuls. They did a series on The Brothers Faversham (i assume perhaps a tip of the hat to The Brothers Karamazov ), with an episode featuring the life and death of each of the 4 brothers. This one is Leonidas, Victorian Britain’s most reckless living explorer.

And lastly, a bit from their presentation of Guy Fawkes, a slightly historically inaccurate retelling of the adventurous story of Guy Fawkes and the events of the infamous gunpowder plot of 1605.