Category Archive for: ‘Wicked Pig’

On the fifteenth day of Christmas,
The bakery gave to us all:
An introduction to the first Wicked Pig film
which was asked for and then never used

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Anybody who has spent any time around the Bakery kitchen in the last 6 months will be aware that Chef Dan and I have been exhausting ourselves producing vast quantities of material for our wise overlords at Sty TV. Once we have baked and iced all this video content, we are usually instructed to cut it into bits, get rid of the icing, and pick out all the fruit. The resultant stale crumbs are then uploaded to YouTube.

Below is an introduction which we were asked to produce to complement the first Wicked Pig Challenge video. Once upon a time there was supposed to be an introduction like this for all 4 episodes (Ours is not to reason why). After producing and submitting this first introduction, we were then informed it was never going to be used. Although the last few seconds were trimmed off to make a short movie teaser.

Please consider this a Bakery curiosity, hurriedly cobbled together while we were in the middle of millions of other things. But we thought it should see the light of day. Enjoy:

And in case you’re not familiar with it, here is the frankly unfeasible buyacredit.com

On the ninth day of Christmas,
The bakery gave to us all:
A long overdue film for Sty TV

Several million years ago, we produced the third in our series of comedy challenges for Sty TV. Instead of being released, our employers have seen fit that it undergoes more re-editing and censorship than a hardcore porn flick at a W.I. charity screening . . . or a 1939 German movie titled “Hitler is a Massive Bender.”

Anyway, here, now, is the day we never thought would come: the release of the officially-sanctioned edit of ‘The Wicked Pig Challenges: Episode Three.”

Dan and Richard’s comedy double act is on the rocks; Richard is unhappy with the quality of the Wicked Pig films, and wants to do better stuff; Dan is the eternal optimist, and believes he can forge on with the latest challenge. Is this the end for Sty TV? . . .

At long last Sty TV have unveiled our second challenge video, sponsored by Wicked Pig pork snacks. Richard and Dan have a week to become fully-fledged celebrities…

P.S. Apologies for the title card grafted onto the beginning which is almost as long as the feature itself. Sometimes our baking gets re-iced after it leaves our kitchen…

Some would call it a meeting of minds.

Others, the inevitable union of kinsmen.

Yes, it was bound to happen sooner or later: Richard and Dan have finally joined forces with Zoo magazine.

This puts me in mind of another recent comedy/marketing alliance: between the Edinburgh comedy awards and Fosters piss-water, which resulted in the Frank Chickens becoming Comedy God (yes they did! Look here! How fantastic! Well done to all who voted!)

Kazuko Hohki, lead member of Frank Chickens, rather gloriously said to BBC Scotland that “Frank Chickens were not comedians, they were a band of performance artists.” And, magnificently, that she does “not understand stand-up comedy,” because “her English language skills aren’t good enough to listen to someone talking for an hour.”

You’ve got to take your hat off to Stewart Lee for turning such moribund marketing on its head so triumphantly, so authentically and so damn amusingly.

Meanwhile, Dan and I are awaiting the results of the above Zoo competition which will determine a future challenge. It closes tomorrow. None of you are exempt, and we don’t choose the winner – they do – so ENTER WITH YOUR INGENIOUS SUGGESTIONS!

Our sponsors would get very upset if we published anything that might give Zoo a bad reputation in the minds of our audience. We are however encouraged to give you a link to the contents of their website. Please feel free to scour this paragraph for any traces of irony.

I’ll leave you with a choice quote from a recent illuminating article from the Guardian which notes:

“If you have a . . . marketing budget and think you’d like to sponsor a comedian, you’ll need a thick skin and a robust sense of humour.”

Our second Wicked Pig challenge film is coming very soon, and the topic is celebrity…

Appropriately enough, the gormless faces of Richard Dadd and Dan Fryer have been turning up in all sorts of odd places recently. Here is a roundup of some of them:

1) This week’s edition of YourCanterbury includes an interview which is by turns sarcastic, sobering and hyperbolic (left – click image to enlarge) as well as a generous plug for this ‘ere Bakery website. Our thanks to Florence, the journalist.

2) The University of Kent ran with ‘Kent alumni named Britain’s next comedy double act’ and even embedded our video on the University homepage for a short time . . . despite YourCanterbury having labelled our campus-based occupations “the most boring jobs in the world” above . . .

3) Amongst such worthy headlines as “What entrepreneurs want from their accountants” and “100 days later – what has the Coalition done for you?” can be found an article about our egg portrait business model, which concludes “it’s probably more of a lesson on how not to set up a business” at the official website of Real Business ‘The Champion of UK Enterprise’

4) The Canterbury Times (formerly Adscene) along with the Kentish Gazette and This Is Kent website have all featured variants of this article which includes an extremely accurate quote from Dan. Accurate apart from the bit about being “over the moon” (he didn’t say that) . . . oh, and the bit about us writing together for 5 years (we haven’t been) . . . and the bit about “showing the world what we can do” . . . okay, he didn’t say any of it. Makes you wonder why they even bothered interviewing us. Oh that’s right, they didn’t.

5) One of the proudest moments of our Internet career so far: we appeared at the top of the B3ta newsletter!

6) And apparently we also deserve a brief blog entry on Ant and Dec’s “No.1 Fansite on the Web”

This is all a bit odd.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled for more, and remember the second Wicked Pig challenge is imminent!

Here at last, is the first of our Challenge Films for Sty TV!

And a trailer…

Richard and Dan are currently embarking upon the first of the Wicked Pig Challenges for StyTV, which will hit your computer screens very soon.

Their first challenge is to make a fiver into a fortune…

Meanwhile, all previous records for Bakery video viewing figures have been shattered by our  Sty Tv Introduction video which has now been seen by over 23,000 people!

It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. It’s . . . more than the population of Aberystwyth.