Inner City Sumo

We take fat people from the inner cities, put them in big nappies, and then get them to throw each other out of a circle that we draw with chalk on the ground. Very cheap to make. Do it in a pub car park.

Lifted from Alan’s oft-quoted Monkey Tennis bit, Inner City Sumo has been a long time coming. In the sense that I’ve had it on my radar for ages and was in two minds as to whether to do it, just based on the fact that I think loads of others would have already given it a stab. As it turns out, not that many have. So here it is.

The elements of the design should be fairly obvious but here goes anyway – the typography is both graffiti-esque and mildly Japanese. We’re not starting out with subtlety here, are we? Well, strap in, because we’ve also got a sumo rope round the whole thing. Fans of the literal absolutely losing their minds. If you do like things a little deeper, you can see the Japanese symbol 市 displayed in the background. Far from being arbitrary, it also doubles down on the urban element and says ‘city’. To top it off, we’ve got the whole thing representing the flag of Japan. Which admittedly only works on the white t shirt version but people like variety, what can you do?

The show (I’m Alan Partridge, I mean) was originally broadcast in 1997, so at that point in time something like Inner City Sumo did come across as preposterous but by modern standards…I’m not so sure. If you consider such abberations as Touch the Truck, Love Island and whatever the fuck that celebrity ski jumping thing was, you’d have to say it’s a wonder that something similar hasn’t been commissioned.