It's not often that we're home to animated shorts in these parts but this Steve Coogan-voiced effort is well worth making an exception for. Entitled The Beautiful City, it's a noir set in a night-time metropolis and salted with the fatalism of 24 Hour Party People.
99 John - a drug dealer operating out of the back of an ice-cream van - is our conduit to this weird and wonderful world. This is not a man who's interesting in putting a flake in that; his business is flogging pills from the back of the van and wryly chronicling the goings-on of the city. The hitch? He's mute, making us his only witnesses.
This episode is the first in a series of animations that'll be available for free download later in the year and feature the voice talents of Kathy Burke, Keith Allen and Howard Marks.
