Modern Toss at Brighton Dome

Famously the BAFTA winning political comedy The Thick of It hired a 'swearing consultant' and if they were ever looking for some new blood they could do a lot worse than cartoonist and animators Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, the creators of Modern Toss.

You may have seen their work on Channel Four, The Guardian and greeting cards stores all over the land.

Their five-day tenure at the Dome coincided with the recent comedy festival and marked the duo’s 20th year anniversary and included a q&a and a wonderful showcase of their unique work.

Visitors to Brighton Dome Corn Exchange were greeted with huge communist-style banners of two of their many hilarious one-frame cartoons, but featuring a badly disgruntled foul-mouthed employee instead of a heroic portrait of a beloved leader.

To describe them as irreverent would be the understatement of the last millennium and the next.

The self-proclaimed ‘cack-handed trouble-makers’ expertly pick at the scab of contemporary life. Their targets include the workplace, the art world and the whole darn market economy.

There’s an awful lot I can’t mention here and even more that can’t be quoted on a family-friendly website, with widespread use of expertly employed profanity.

The exhibition even featured a wonderfully inventive but, conventionally, utterly obscene, ‘periodic table of swearing’.

All manner of insult and sweary combinations were loudly invoked with the press of a button on a large token-operated keyboard.

The tokens were available in exchange for hard cash and could unlock other models and dioramas, including ‘a foul mouthed entrepreneurial cockney mouse’ (pictured) and the miniature hunting ground of the ‘drive-by abuser’.

There was also some footage from their shows on Channel Four, featuring Swing News – mock news reports performed entirely by jazz musicians “all the news from end of a trombone”.

Modern Toss remains the puerile antidote to an age of creeping pomposity.