24: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: David Firth (Salad Fingers)

British comedy-horror animator David Firth is known universally for his Salad Fingers series, and has been putting up short films on his website fat-pie.com for decades. He has worked with the BBC and the likes of David Mitchell among many others. I think Lynchean – in that David Lynch manner – is the most apt word to describe his subtle blend of the creepy, eerie, nightmarish qualities of his cartoons with a very dark sense of humour. Catch him on Twitter and get yourself a Salad Fingers toy for Halloween. Before I forget – this background music is by the late Clara Rockmore on the Theremin instrument, and it ran through David’s Spoilsbury Toast Boy film, which is creepy as hell. This is like a Desert Island Discs of his stuff, as I play a bunch of clips of his best stuff, while he talks about them - all these clips belong to David Firth and the full versions can be found on fat-pie.com. Thanks David for allowing me to play these clips, and I hope it gives newcomers to his work a sense of what we’re dealing with here! I’ll put links to the full episodes of each of the clips I show in my blog on andrewgoldpodcast.com. Also check out his ambient music on Locust Toybox on Spotify – I’ll be using one of his clips for the outro. But now it’s the podcast - we talk about a lot of stuff, including where David gets his ideas, his dreams, his nightmares and his process as well as things like cancel culture and Pete Townsend. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What makes you a heretic? Journalist Andrew Gold believes that, in an age of group-think and tribes, we need heretics - those who use unconventional wisdom to speak out against their own groups, from cancelled comedians and radical feminists to cult defectors and vigilantes hunting deviants. Learn from my guests how to rebel, think differently and resist social contagion. From Triggernometry's Francis Foster and the world's most cancelled man Graham Linehan to ex-Hasidic Jew Julia Haart and gender critical atheist Richard Dawkins. These are the people living with the weight of their own community's disappointment on their shoulders.