Bangmouth Village is the best worst soap opera ever made. Written and directed by Shropshire’s worst writer, Christopher Bliss, the story begins on the day a notorious bad boy, Billy Bangmouth (played by Christopher) is released from prison. What follows is a village-wide web of lies, adultery, drugs, violence, mystery, gossip, death, and everything else soap operas are best at. But, and we cannot stress this enough, IT IS DREADFUL. The dialogue doesn’t fit the action, the casting is way off, the characters change their mind impossibly quickly, nonsequitors are rife and people keep leaving the scene to go to the toilet - Christopher’s go-to way of getting a character to exit.
The Room meets Emmerdale on steroids, this is a modern soap opera that’s come straight from the mind of a visionary idiot. Bangmouth Village is a deeply absurd mix of deadpan commitment to badly executed genre tropes, and unapologetic laugh-a-minute silliness. Humour comes from strong-but-wrong decisions on the dialogue, acting, costume, props, set, and even camera movements. The whole show radiates his off-kilter, misguided energy, his total commitment to intense drama, and his surprisingly endearing lack of awareness of how the world really works. He clearly has very little knowledge or life experience of anything outside his own Shropshire village, but he believes in himself, and has confidently announced himself as the worst storyteller the world has ever seen.
Despite being rife with badly conceived ideas and obvious inconsistencies, the series looks totally slick and professional, creating an absurd comic paradox, and leaving us with more questions than answers: Who gave Christopher the money to make this? Why are the crew and the actors going along with it? And where on earth are these crazy storylines leading to? Well, there’s only one way to find out...
Christopher Bliss is the alter ego of writer/comedian Rob Carter, who wrote the series. It’s directed by Big Red Button and produced by BabyCow and Blink, and all episodes are being released on the Bangmouth Village Youtube channel - www.youtube.com/@Bangmouth - with new episodes dropping on Thursdays.
Starring: Rob Carter, Justin Edwards, Harriet Kemsley, Kellie Shirley, Ed Easton, Joe Barnes, Grace Hogg-Robinson, Kyle Lima, Ryan Lane, Francis Ezekiel, Harrison Dadswell and Rajesh Khalhan.
Watch the first episode below
