In Great Britain, Sweeney Todd is a name frequently whispered, and has been whispered long before Tim Burton’s blood-soaked musical hit our screens. The name is on a par with Jack the Ripper, and his story has all the gruesome ingredients of the classic English horror story – albeit with the difference that to this day nobody is certain whether the mad barber really existed…

Certain is that he existed in cheap Victorian pulp novels – the so-called ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ – like The String Of Pearls: A Romance incidentally, the string of pearls happens to be the very object that sealed Sweeney’s fate in various film adaptations. Apparently there was a French ‘Sweeney Todd’ in 1825 who slit the throats of his customers, only to catapult them into the cellar via a mechanical chair. And a bakery was supposed to be next to his shop. Back on British soil in 1802, Sweeney Todd was condemned by the Old Bailey to be hanged, and a huge crowd supposedly saw him dangle at Tyburn (a former place of execution). However, no records were found about the court hearing or the execution.

To make up for this disappointment, Sweeney Todd’s performances on stage and in film were all the more dramatic! The String Of Pearls was presented as a melodrama and had its opening in 1847 at the Britannia Theatre in the London borough of Hoxton. In 1936, one of the best film adaptations of Sweeney Todd was produced, and its leading man Tod Slaughter (the name is no joke!) became synonymous with the Demon Barber Of Fleet Street – in film and on stage. Slaughter’s ‘Grand Guignol’ performance of the deranged Sweeney earned him plenty of fame and the nickname ‘Mr. Murder’.

In the forties, there was a Sweeney Todd - CBS Stage Series Radio Broadcast and in 1970 the whole saga was freshly baked, this time bearing the title Bloodthirsty Butchers. In the same year an episode featuring the barber was created for the ITV television series Mystery And Imagination. In 1973, playwright Christopher Bond came up with a twist to the story for the first time; the twist being that Sweeney Todd is a barber called Benjamin Barker who finds himself transported to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit – only to return fifteen years later and extract bloody revenge. Bond’s version was adapted by Stephen Sondheim into the successful Broadway musical that also served Tim Burton as a base for his masterwork that – in contrast to most previous TV-productions – thankfully and finally makes your throat tingle!