Sutcliffe! the Musical

I think the audience will go away thinking maybe he’s really a misunderstood man. Maybe twenty years ago he was taking the piss.

Tough one to pitch, this. A musical about the Yorkshire Ripper? Why not? Because it’s in bad taste? Yeah, that’s what makes it funny. Let’s not get bogged down in the morals of comedy and whether something like this is acceptable, as we’ll be here all day. Most of the time I like it as black as it can be. And this certainly delivers.

Whichever side of the fence you stand on, it actually happened, so you’ll just have to deal with it. I say it happened – the Brass Eye segment happened. Obviously Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t allowed to periodically leave prison to work on a musical about his life. That would be fucking ridiculous (and in itself is hilarious). But try telling that to John McCririck. He was probably too busy flapping his arms around in 1997 to be arsed to fact check.

The design is a replication from the show, vectored slash smartened up and rearranged a bit. A lot of the text was the same size, so some hierarchy has been brought to the table. The original poster was black but I’ve made some red and yellow versions, as well as a sort of Pop Art-esque tiled one. The thing I like about the design is that it’s not overbearingly Sutcliffe-y. In that it looks like a negative. If you invert the image, you see the gap-toothed bastard far too clearly, and we can’t have that.

You know, I usually try and keep things as diplomatic as I possibly can within these pages. I’m not usually big on vengeance but I will say that I’m glad Peter Sutcliffe is dead. And I hope it hurt. The horrible fuck.

Still, please buy this t shirt thanks.