Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Enjoying Old Harry's Game
Over the past couple of days I have been listening to the BBC4 series Old Harry's Game that somebody has been posting to the alt.binaries.sounds.bbc Usenet newsconference. Recommended. Basic premise is that Satan is somewhat bored, and a fellow known as The Professor tries to convince him (with varying degrees of success from episode to episode) about the goodness of man. It may not sound like much of an idea for a comedy, but imagine Satan with a lower-class British accent (cockney?), a bumbling demonic assistant who's constantly trying to improve himself, Thomas, an extremely nasty piece of humanity continually singled out for perverse tortures (such as becoming a single-celled amoeba in somebody's alimentary canal), whom The Professor is trying to help out. There's also a cast of characters drawn from all of the various people sent to hell over the ages. Imagine a vacuous Helen of Troy accompanied by "her plain friend Daphne, who makes Helen look better by comparison", Satan punishing a Feng Shui expert for saying that the Lake of Fire is pointing in the wrong direction, or dealing with a cat-calling, rabid Charlotte Bronte who can now “let go”, after all those years of repression from staying with cousins who lived in Vicarages. Somehow it is hard to hate a Satan who devises such perverse tortures for people like stuffing all architects into one tiny box or keeping Popes permanently eight months pregnant. ;-)

Okay, maybe you have to be there. But it is funny, and worth a listen if you get the chance.