I’ll never forget the day I stumbled across Teknikal Diffikulties (abbreviated to TekDiff for people in a hurry). The concept grabbed me straight away, a one man sketch comedy that was well written, well paced and incredibly funny! How many times do you see all three of those in the same show? And...more importantly...why haven’t YOU heard it yet?
“Cayenne” Chris Conroy is the brainchild behind the project. Since early 2005 he has been working constantly on his audio comedy production. From the early days of short and unconfident episodes of silliness, Mister Conroy has taken critique and praise and become not just a proficient audio engineer but a very funny and likeable guy who knows he has a body of work he can be proud of.
In the past year, TekDiff has changed into something better-rounded; a serialised 30-minute comedy show that wouldn’t sound out of place on Radio 4. Like the best comedy shows of our generation, Cayenne can deploy a mass of memorable characters into bizarre, Python-esque “stream of consciousness” situations that always result in a laugh. A fan of TekDiff recently compiled a list of the entities dreamed up by Mister Conroy and brought to life through audio, and that list has now overshot three hundred!
What really blows me away about TekDiff is the attention to detail and the time and effort that goes into a project like this. Cayenne is a one-man army. He doesn’t get the actors round to read their parts, then edits the sound effects in. Cayenne does everything. Every voice you hear, every car horn you hear and every chuckle you expel is as a result of time, patience and talent of one man in a whisper room no bigger than a public phone box. I believe there’s a lot of people in the Podosphere that put a lot of effort into what they do, but I will go on the record and say that Chris Conroy is the hardest working man of them all.
Currently on the RSS feed Cayenne is finishing off an audio drama called “The Account” so for the funnies, you may need to dig back a bit. As for this “Account” thing I speak of...that’s another review for another time.
I think that if Cayenne could improve one thing about TekDiff it should be its marketing. The show is one of the best things on the Internet right now. It’s unique, it feels fresh and it could have mass appeal if only more people knew about it. I’ve searched high and low and there is no one person offering this sort of download one a near-weekly basis. If you’re a fan of Monty Python or any surrealist comedy, or if you have the ability to laugh and smile then I insist that you get ahold of Teknikal Diffikulties. Once you hear it and fall in love with it, tell others. Spread the word because Cayenne needs to be heard – he bloody deserves it!
