That was originally about a broken radio, I think. Chapman changed it to a dead parrot. The man was a genius.
The Meaning of Life has some great sketches. The tiger in Africa, every sperm is sacred, and Mr Creosote. In fact, I’m going to show Mr Creosote to my students now - see if they get it (or throw up).
That’s the trouble with topical references. There’s a whole book (forget the title) that tries to list and explain all of the ones in Flying Circus.
The Rules sketch was so accurate in it’s portrayal of school …absolutely bang on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKg7IinlUfI
https://www.steynonline.com/9856/when-the-flying-circus-has-flown
“John was a boy that kept to himself,” recalled Mrs Hicks, Reg and Muriel Cleese’s next-door neighbor in Totnes in Devon, deploying the formulation traditionally reserved for the landladies of suburban serial killers. “I suppose he was all right with his Cambridge people, but us being country folk he wouldn’t say very much. At one time I looked after John for a couple of days and did his bedroom when his parents were away. He was writing something on his desk at the time. Course I didn’t look at it, but it was sarcastic sort of stuff about Churchill. I do often wonder what happened to him.”
The old-timers make a few comments and this kind of ritual schadenfreude and mostly inexplicable obsessing (“he made a bad movie, he liked American blondes”) is sure to follow.
Financially, liking American blondes did prove to be a bad move.
One point about Cleese is there was a clear affection for the characters he mocked. He might have pitied Fawlty but he didn’t despise him.
I remember him talking about the Torquay hotelier the character was based on and he wasn’t mean about the man.
Have you seen the interview in which he defends “Life of Brian” against the accusation that it was blasphemous? Cleese makes no secret of his atheism, but he nevertheless seemed to show a bit more respect towards people who hold religious beliefs than (say) Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens did. His argument was compelling: that they were not, in fact, mocking Jesus, but exploring what might happen if some completely ordinary person were caught up in a wave of public hysteria and adulation. LoB works, I think, only because it is not an atheist screed, but a genuine exploration of human nature. The funniest scenes are those involving people being dolts (“What have the Romans ever done for us?”, “You are all individuals”, and of course “Biggus mmmDickus”).
Muggeridge proved himself to be a complete cock in that debate.
A classic! Palin and Jones were excellent writers.