[[You may know Richard Littler from the astounding dystopian alternate fiction/bleak humour series Scarfolk (previously). He’s been working on an on-again/off-again animated series that is, at long last, on. I was honoured to be offered the opportunity to launch the series here today!]]
Dick and Stewart is a series of short animations set in either Britain’s dismal past or the Britain that’s soon to come. It’s hard to tell nowadays, isn’t it? Either way, just imagine what it would be like if children’s TV programmes were written by George Orwell or Franz Kafka. Or the government itself.
The stories follow the adventures of the eponymous Dick and an eyeball, which is all that’s left of his best friend, Stewart, following an accident. It’s written, animated and directed by Richard Littler (Scarfolk), produced by Andy Starke of Rook Films (A Field in England, Free Fire, In Fabric) and read by Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh).
While each episode will address a different dystopian but topical subject, such as propaganda, civil defense, ‘fake news’, gaslighting and other forms of governmental corruption currently blighting western politics, the pilot episode, which is called ‘I Spy with my Little Eye’, concerns surveillance, an unsurprising theme given that, last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK government’s bulk interception of data was against human rights.
