Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Sketches
Page 64
Fourth Booth: Hello, big boy. (very breathy) Oo varda the ome. D'you want a nice time?
Mr Mann: Very good.
Fourth Booth: (butch) Thank you very much, sir.
(They pass the fifth booth, whose occupant is making silly noises.)
Mr Mann: And we control everything from here. (indicating the control desk)
Tick: Superb.
Mr Mann: Well then what sort of thing were you looking for?
Tick: Well, er, really something to make me a little less insignificant?
Mr Mann: Oh, I see sort of 'Now look here, you may be Chairman but your bloody pusillanimous behaviour makes me vomit!' That sort of thing?...
Tick: Oh no, no, no, not really no.
Mr Mann: Oh I see, well perhaps something a bit more sort of Clive Jenkins-ish? Perhaps - sort of (Welsh accent) 'Mr Sinarmy so-called Harold Wilson can call himself pragmatic until he's blue in the breasts'.
Tick: Oh no, I really want something that will make people be attracted to me like a magnet.
Mr Mann: I see, well, you want our 'Life and Soul of the Party' tape then, I think.
Tick: What's that?
Mr Mann: Well it's sort of "Ello squire, haven't seen you for a bit, haven't seen you for a bit either, Beryl. Two pints of wallop please, love. Still driving the Jensen then? Cheer up Jack it may never happen, what's your poison then?'
Tick: Fantastic, yes.
Mr Mann: Right, I'll iust see if we've got the tape.
(He puts the headphones on. Whilst he looks away, the whole of the back wall of people in booths, swing round on their chairs and do a little thirties routine, with their earphones on, kicking their legs, etc., they sing.)
SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION: 'SANDY WILSON'S VERSION OF "THE DEVILS" '
All:
Boo boopee doo
Boo boopee doo
Scuby duby duby doo-oo!
Hello operator
Is that the central line
Give me the Piccadilly number
Nine one o nine
Mr operator now that number's wrong
So come on everybody
Let's sing this song...
... Prouse in his first book wrote about... etc ....
(Gong sounds.)
Voice Over: Start again.
(The loony leans into shot and waves. Fade to black.)
* * *
Return to the sketches index
Travel Agent / Watney's Red Barrell
As featured in the Flying Circus TV Show - Episode 31
* * *
About the Sketch:
This sketch not only appeared in the Flying Circus TV Show - Episode 31, it also was performed live in the Movie - 'Live at the Hollywood Bowl' and it was featured on their albums - 'Monty Python's Previous Record', 'Monty Python's The Final Ripoff' and 'The Ultimate Monty Python Ripoff'. They also performed this sketch live on their albums - 'Monty Python live at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane' and 'Monty Python live at City Center'.
* * *
The cast:
MR. BOUNDER OF ADVENTURE
Michael Palin
MR. SMOKE-TOO-MUCH (TOURIST)
Eric Idle
SECRETARY
Carol Cleveland
* * *
The sketch:
Tourist: Good morining
Secretary: Oh good morning, Do you want to come upstairs?
Tourist: What?
Secretary: Do you want to come upstairs? Or have you come to arrange a holiday?
Tourist: Er.......to arrange a holiday
Secretary: Oh sorry
Tourist: What's all this about going upstairs?
Secretary: Oh, nothing, nothing. Now where were you thinking of going?
Tourist: India
Secretary: Ah one of our adventure holidays
Tourist: Yes
Secretary: Well you'd better speaker to Mr Bounder about that. (Calls out to Mr Bounder) Mr Bounder, this gentleman is interested in the India Overland
(walks over to Mr Bounder's desk)
Bounder: Ah good morning. I'm Bounder of Adventure
Tourist: My name is Smoke-too-much
Bounder: Well you'd better cut down a little then
Tourist: What?
Bounder: You'd better cut down a little then
Tourist: Oh I see! Cut down a little then.....
Bounder: Yes...I expect you get people making jokes about your name all the time?
Tourist: No, no actually it never struck me before. Smoke...to...much....(laughs)
Bounder: Anyway you're interested in one of our adventure holidays?
Tourist: Yes I saw your advert in the bolour supplement
Bounder: The what?
Tourist: The bolour supplement
Bounder: The colour supplement?
Tourist: Yes I'm sorry I can't say the letter 'B'
Bounder: C?
Tourist: Yes that's right. It's all due to a trauma I suffered when I was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat
Bounder: A cat?
Tourist: No a bat
Bounder: Can you say the letter 'K'
Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford
Bounder: Why don't you say the letter 'K' instead of the letter 'C'
Tourist: what you mean.....spell bolour with a K
Bounder: Yes
Tourist: Kolour. Oh that's very good, I never thought of that what a silly bunt
Bounder: Anyway about the holiday
Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've been on package tours several times you see, and I decided that this was for me
Bounder: Ah good
Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what's the point of being treated like sheep. What's the pointof going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."
Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I quite agree...
Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.
Bounder: (beggining to get fed up) Yes, yes now......
Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Pow ell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.
Bounder: Will you be quiet please
Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, w
eather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'.
Bounder: Shut up
Tourist: Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets
Bounder: Shut up!
Tourist: where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion.......
Bounder: Shut up your bloody gob....
Tourist: crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...
* * *
Return to the sketches index
Miss Anne Elk
* * *
About the Sketch:
This sketch not only appeared in the Flying Circus TV Show - Episode 31, it was also performed on their Album - Monty Python's Previous Record'.
* * *
The cast:
PRESENTER
Graham Chapman
ANNE ELK
John Cleese
* * *
The sketch:
Presenter: Good evening. Tonight: "dinosaurs". I have here, sitting in the studio next to me, an elk. Ahhhh!!! Oh, I'm sorry! Anne Elk - Mrs Anne Elk
Anne Elk: Miss!
Presenter: Miss Anne Elk, who is an expert on di...
Anne Elk: N' n' n' n' no! Anne Elk!
Presenter: What?
Anne Elk: Anne Elk, not Anne Expert!
Presenter: No! No, I was saying that you, Miss Anne Elk, were an , A-N not A-N-N-E, expert...
Anne Elk: Oh!
Presenter: ...on elks - I'm sorry, on dinosaurs. I'm ...
Anne Elk: Yes, I certainly am, Chris. How very true. My word yes.
Presenter: Now, Miss Elk - Anne - you have a new theory about the brontosaurus.
Anne Elk: Can I just say here, Chris for one moment, that I have a new theory about the brontosaurus?
Presenter: Uh... Exactly... What is it?
Anne Elk: Where?
Presenter: No! No, what is your theory?
Anne Elk: What is my theory?
Presenter: Yes!
Anne Elk: What is my theory that it is? Yes. Well, you may well ask what is my theory.
Presenter: I am asking.
Anne Elk: And well you may. Yes, my word, you may well ask what it is, this theory of mine. Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine,... is mine.
Presenter: I know it's yours! What is it?
Anne Elk: ... Where? ... Oh! Oh! What is my theory?
Presenter: Yes!
Anne Elk: Ahh! My theory, that I have, follows the lines that I am about to relate. (starts prolonged throat clearing)
Presenter: (under breath) Oh, God! (Anne still clearing throat)
Anne Elk: The Theory, by A. Elk (that's "A" for Anne", it's not by a elk.)
Presenter: Right...
Anne Elk: (clears throat) This theory, which belongs to me, is as follows... (more throat clearing) This is how it goes... (clears throat) The next thing that I am about to say is my theory. (clears throat) Ready?
Presenter: (wimpers)
Anne Elk: The Theory, by A. Elk (Miss). My theory is along the following lines...
Presenter: (under breath)God!
Anne Elk: ...All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.
Presenter: That's it, is it?
Anne Elk: Right, Chris!
Presenter: Well, Anne, this theory of yours seems to have hit the nail right on the head.
Anne Elk: ... and it's mine.
Presenter: Thank you for coming along to the studio.
Anne Elk: My pleasure, Chris.
Presenter: Britain's newest wasp farm...
Anne Elk: It's been a lot of fun...
Presenter: ...opened last week...
Anne Elk: ...saying what my theory is...
Presenter: ... Yes, thank you.
Anne Elk: ...and whose it is.
Presenter: Yes.... opened last week...
Anne Elk: I have another theory.
Presenter: Not today, thank you.
Anne Elk: My theory #2, which is the second theory that I have. (clears throat). This theory...
Presenter: Look! Shut up!
Anne Elk: ...is what I am about to say.
Presenter: Please shut up!
Anne Elk: which, with what I have said, are the two theories that are mine and which belong to me.
Presenter: If you don't shut up, I shall have to shoot you!
Anne Elk: (clears throat) My theory, which I posses the ownership of, which belongs to... (Sound of a single gun shot)
Anne Elk: (clearing throat) The Theory the Second, by Anne... (Sound of prolonged machine gun fire)
* * *
Return to the sketches index
Tory Housewives Clean-Up Campaign
As featured in the Flying Circus TV Show - Episode 32
* * *
The cast:
VOICE OVER
Eric Idle
FIRST PEPPERPOT
Graham Chapman
SECOND PEPPERPOT
Terry Jones
THIRD PEPPERPOT
Eric Idle
* * *
The sketch:
Voice Over: (newsreel voice) In the modern Britain, united under a great leader, it's the housewives of Britain who are getting things moving. (Red Devils flying; picture of Edward Heath) Here a coach load of lovely ladies are on their way to speed up production in a car
factory. (coach load of pepperpots, middle class, grey hair, Mary Whitehouse glasses; the coach says 'Tory Tours) And here we are boys, it's the no-hurry brigade hanging about for endless overtime. And just watch these gallant girls go into action . .. (cut to a factory yard; some workers in brown overalls are eating sandwiches out of tins; the clock says 1.15; the coach comes swinging in, the ladies pour out about to belt the men with umbrellas and handbags; the men flee back into factories) Not working fast enough? Well, there's an answer for that. (a man at a machine, producing something incredibly fast; a pepperpot holds an enormous sledgehammer) Yes, this is certainly the way to speed up production. (wide shot of factory interior; three pepperpots stand on a gantry above work floor, wearing armbands, saying 'P.P. ' and dark Mary Whitehouse glasses) This is the recipe for increased productivity to meet the threat of those nasty foreigners when Britain takes her natural place at the head of the British Common Market. (a group of strikers, picketing with slogans, 'Fair Pay', 'Less Profits', 'Parity', 'No Victimization') And how's this for a way to beat strikers. (pepperpots arrive, clinging to side of old Buick; they race in and start beating the strikers with the banners) Those spotty continental boys will soon have to look out for Mrs Britain, and talking of windmills, these girls aren't afraid to tilt at the permissive society, (art gallery exterior; pepperpots run in with bundles and ladders) Business is booming in the so-called arts, but two can play at that game, chum. (cut to art gallery interior, pan around paintings 'cleaned up'- trousers and cardigans being added to nude piaures and statues, Bermuda shorts on David, shorts on tubular structure, an attendant in shorts too). And it's not just the modern so-called plastic arts that get the clean-up treatment.
(Cut to a theatre stage. Desdernona on a bed. Othello with her.)
Othello: Oh Desdemona, Desdemona.
(The pepperpots race on to the stage and pull him off.)