Comedy duo The Exploding Heads are set to release the world’s first NFT sitcom, which will only ever have an international audience of just one person.
The dream of every comedy writer is surely to have their work enjoyed by as many people as possible. Not so the Exploding Heads. Anthony Richardson and Mark Davison have a specific audience in mind for their new sitcom: one person.
The Exploding Heads’ new project Gophers: A Pizza For Emma Bunton (recorded at That Lot Studios with script input and production assistance from comedy legend David Schneider) will be the first full-length audio sitcom to be sold as an NFT (Non Fungible Token). NFTs are linked to the baffling world of cryptocurrency and have taken the art world by storm in the last few weeks, with collectors keen to purchase one of a kind digital works. Hip-hop artist Ill Bill sold his ‘one and only’ recording of his album “Silk Road” earlier this month and just last week the digital artist Grimes jumped on the NFT bandwagon by selling some art as an NFT. Even twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has listed his first ever tweet as an NFT.
The Exploding Heads may not share quite the same profile (yet), but they’re keen to make some history of their own - once the recording of Gophers is bought by the highest bidder, nobody else will ever be able to listen to it. It will be encoded in such a way that the audio file cannot be copied or shared.
A link to the NFT listing can be accessed here. The auction ends on April 2nd.
In Gophers, Anthony and Mark play odd-job men willing to carry out those tasks that no celebrity is willing to do. Episode One sees them frantically making and delivering a pizza for Emma Bunton, who’s filming a nature documentary in the woods outside their house. Throw in a dangerously drunk work colleague and a beat boxing Dame Judi Dench, and you have the kind of anarchic comedy episode that this NFT, cryptocurrency online insanity was perhaps tailor made for.
It’s an episode that took them a year to write, record, sound design and edit so why are they insisting on only ever sharing it with a single fan? Well, it could obviously backfire horribly though the duo hope to use any money generated to fund the rest of the series, and if they should ever hit the big time, then who knows - this one and only recording of the first ever episode might soon be spoken about in the same hushed tones as a long lost, previously undiscovered Beatles song!
Anthony Richardson and Mark Davison have made short-form comedy sketches for a decade, their sketch “The ‘Lympics Are Coming” made the Guardian’s “Best Online Clips of the Year,” and their surreal punditry show “How Will They Line Up?” has been a mainstay of US sports broadcaster ESPN’s website for the past seven Premier League Seasons. in 2018 they wrote and presented a daily show throughout the World Cup - “BallsUpSki” - that included a topless chef, a mouldy cake and a hairdo that caught fire - genuinely unlike any other football show available at the time (or, indeed, before or since). Their brand new weekly podcast Footballland, a satirical take on football via the medium of a giant theme park in Qatar, was launched in October last year, and Gophers is their debut audio sitcom.
