Here comes Luke, he’s on work experience: he’s got a swagger, baseball cap, estuary accent and a flat monotone, so something could be rubbish or “the dog’s bollocks” but you wouldn’t really know. If the short cartoon Work Experience looked familiar, with its odd animal-people and chaotically drawn characters with straggly hair, then yes, it was a cousin of Modern Toss, the wonderful animation creation of Jon Link and Mick Bunnage, which observes our world through benignly perverse eyes.

Luke has swallowed the business jargon of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den. So when his mum calls up to him about the kind of bread he wants his sandwiches on, he thinks about what Sir Alan Sugar would do. His dog follows him to work. In the mêlée, Luke forgets the sandwich, and somehow Link and Bunnage spin out a brilliant flight of fancy involving a courier and urgent phone calls to get that sandwich to him. He doesn’t want pickle. Uncle Keith drives him to the office in a taxi, but he’s not a taxi driver. He has just bought it: it’s got a Euro 96 advert on the side.

Immediately you know Luke, and you know the pen-pushers at his workplace, obsessing over complaints procedures and “inductions”, which Luke hopes will be his route out of work experience but isn’t – it’s to teach him how to sit at his desk safely. A computer screen reveals a flashing office layout that’s like “The Matrix with chairs”. Luke’s passive-aggressive approach to handling humdrum office life and the cul-de-sacs of opportunity around him is to interrogate his colleagues, but in that flat monotone: an insidious, inspired way to drive them mad.

Luke’s dog bites the courier, who hates dogs and who then ends up in casualty, where he eats Luke’s cheese sub – the sub he bought for Luke when he and courier central control decided not to get the cheese for the sandwich in the supermarket. One day Luke’s astute devotion to “Theo Paphitis’s motivational thought for the day” will pay off. “The Hungry Warrior Must Prioritise His Arrows” is one to live by. But Luke’s ultimately a bit down on mantras. “You can’t build a mansion on the sand” is superseded by the more apposite: “Don’t bring your dog into work.”

Work Experience was a jewel: it was funny, it had the brevity of the best short story, studded with colour and detail. And it’s an original: no other cartoon looks or sounds like it. The fear is someone powerful will wake up to Link and Bunnage’s brilliance and order 25 episodes of their next creation, and things will go awry – though you doubt that Link and Bunnage (Bunnage is a great name isn’t it? I could say it over and over) would ever let quality control slip. Keep it an acquired taste, guys.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010