Complete AND

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Luke Episode Fourteen

Dempsey

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Monty Pythons Flying Circus

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Featuring
New Cooker Sketch

Face the Press

Tobacconists (prostitute advert)

The Ministry of Silly Walks

the piranha brothers

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Episode Fourteen

A man in evening dress, sitting in a cage at the zoo.

man (john) And now for something completely different.

Pan to show Its man in next cage.

ItS . . .

its man (michael)

Animated titles.

Bond Street is a shopping street in Londons West End known for its highfalutin fashion stores. Maxwell is a fake store name.

Cut to studio: interviewer in chair. Superimposed caption: FACE THE PRESS

interviewer (eric) Hello. Tonight on Face the Press were going to examine two different views of contemporary things. On my left is the Minister for Home Affairs (cut to minister completely in drag and a moustache) who is wearing a striking organza dress in pink tulle, with matching pearls and a diamante collar necklace. (soft fashion-parade music starts to play in background) The shoes are in brushed pigskin with gold clasps, by Maxwell of Bond Street 1 The hair is by Roger, and the whole ensemble is crowned by a spectacular display of Christmas orchids. And on my rightputting the case against the Governmentis a small patch of brown liquid(cut to patch of liquid on seat of chair) which could be creosote or some extract used in industrial varnishing. (cut back to interviewer) Good evening. Minister, may I put the first question to you? In your plan, A Better Britain For Us, you claimed that you would build 88,000 million, billion houses a year in the Greater London area alone. In fact, youve built only three in the last fifteen years. Are you a bit disappointed with this result? minister (graham) No, no. Id like to answer this question if I may in two ways. Firstly in my normal voice and then in a kind of silly high-pitched whineYou see housing is a problem really
Cut back to the interviewer. The minister is heard droning on in the background. The soft fashionparade music starts again.

More fashion fakery.

interviewer Well, while the minister is answering this question Id just like to point out the ministers dress has been made entirely by hand from over three hundred pieces of Arabian shot silk (at this point we can hear the ministers high-pitched whine beneath the fashion music) especially created for the minister by Vargars of Paris. 2 The low slim-line has been cut off-the-shoulder to heighten the effect of the ministers fine bone structure. Well I think the minister is coming to the end of his answer now so lets go back over and join the discussion. Thank you very much minister. Today saw the appointment of a new head of
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Monty Pythons Flying Circus

minister Dont I say any more? interviewer No fear! 3 Today saw the appointment of a new head of Allied Bomber Command Air Chief Marshal Sir Vincent Kill the Japs Forster. Hes in our Birmingham studio
Cut to close-up on what appears to be a monitor with Sir Vincent on itin outrageous drag, heavy lipstick, big bust etc.Draped on a chaise-longue. A small black boy is fanning him.

British slang for "too right!

sir vincent (john) Hello Sailors! Listen, guess what. The Minister of Aviation has made me head of the RAF Ola Pola.
As he talks we zoom out quickly from the set to reveal it is not a monitor in the studio but a TV set in a G-plan type sitting room. A housewife (Mrs Pinnet) sits watching, wearing an apron and a scarf, and with her hair in curlers. The doorbell sounds. She switches the TV off and answers the door which opens straight into the living room. There in the street stands a truly amazing figure of fun. A man in a bowler hat with an axe sticking out of it, big red joke nose, illuminated bow tie that revolves, joke broad shoulders, clowns check jacket, long johns with sock suspenders, heavy army boots and leading a goat with a hat. 4 Close-up.

This is a close description of the amazing getup, though hes actually wearing a pinstripe jacket with large red-and-white-striped lapels and cuffs; blue shorts; we cant see his feet; and his tie is flashing, not revolving. Otherwise, dead-on.

Line continues outside in street and goes into animation sequences which eventually bring us through to close-up on a small ad, which is one of many on the door of a small newsagents shop. A shabby man is running an evil eye down the adverts, puzzling, looking for something. He walks up to the counter. He has a reflex wink.

It was, and may well still be, difficult to acquire adult entertainment products in the U.K. (though the Internet has probably helped.) Sex shops tended to be in seedier parts of town, and there was great stigma in entering such a place, hence Idles desperate hope that pussies, chests, and drawers (as in underwear) could be procured in the relative safety of what looks like a regular store.

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The camera pans along line of gas men all turning to each other and muttering incomprehensible technicalities, the line stretches across to front door. 17 customer (eric) Good morning. shopkeeper (terry j) Good morning, sir. Can I help you? customer Help me? Yeah, Ill say you can help me. shopkeeper Yes, sir?

Here, as Idle turns back to Jones, Idles glasses fall off his face and he catches them in his left handa brilliant piece of fielding, and one that somehow fails to crack them both up.

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Here,Quid is British slang for pounds, as in money. And so we see for the first time Cleeses extraordinary creation, the silly walk, now a classic Python sketch. His hitch and turn of his leg inside the store still baffles and delights, all these years later.

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customer I come about your advertSmall white pussy cat for sale. Excellent condition. 18 shopkeeper Ah. You wish to buy it? customer Thats right. Just for the hour. Only I aint gonna pay moren a fiver cos it aint worth it. shopkeeper Well its come from a very good homeits house trained. customer (long think, goes to door, looks at ads again) Chest of drawers? Chest. Drawers. Id like some chest of drawers please. shopkeeper Yes, sir. customer Does it go? shopkeeper Er, its over there in the corner. (indicates a wooden chest of drawers) 19 customer Oh. (goes to door, runs his finger down the list of adverts) Pram for sale. Any offers. Id like a bit of pram please. shopkeeper Ah yes, sir. Thats in good condition. customer Oh good, I like them in good condition, eh? Eh? shopkeeper Yes, here it is you see. (picks up pram) customer (looks, pauses, goes back to the door, runs finger again) Babysitter. No, its a babysitter. Babysitter? shopkeeper Babysitter. customer BabysitterI dont want a babysitter. Be a blood donorthats it. Id like to give some blood please, argh! (shopkeeper shakes head) Oh spit. Which one is it? (shopkeeper slips him a card from out of his pocket) Blond prostitute will indulge in any sexual activity for four quid a week. 20 What does that mean?
A city gent comes into shop. He has a silly walk and keeps doing little jumps and then three long paces without moving the top of his body. He buys a paper, then we follow him as he leaves shop. 21
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Monty Pythons Flying Circus

city gent (john) Times please. shopkeeper Oh yes sir, here you are. city gent Thank you. shopkeeper Cheers.
The city gent leaves the shop, from which we see a line of gas men stretching back up the road to Mrs Pinnets house, and walks off in an indescribably silly manner. 22 Cut to him proceeding along Whitehall, and into a building labelled Ministry of Silly Walks. 23 Inside the building he passes three other men, each walking in their own eccentric way. 24 Cut to an office; a man is sitting waiting. The city gent enters eccentrically.

One of the most iconic moments in all of Python: Cleese silly walks past the line of gas men stretching up a British streeta moment of great surrealist comedy.

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minister Good morning. Im sorry to have kept you waiting, but Im afraid my walk has become rather sillier recently, and so it takes me rather longer to get to work. 25 (sits at desk) Now then, what was it again? 26 man (michael) Well sir, I have a silly walk and Id like to obtain a Government grant to help me develop it. minister I see. May I see your silly walk? man Yes, certainly, yes.
He gets up and does a few steps, lifting the bottom part of his left leg sharply at every alternate pace. He stops.

Whitehall is the street on which the British government buildings are found. Wonderful, again, to watch folks in the street watch this mad man walk by in a bowler hat.

minister Thats it, is it? man Yes, thats it, yes. minister Its not particularly silly, is it? I mean, the right leg isnt silly at all and the left leg merely does a forward aerial half turn every alternate step. man Yes, but I think that with Government backing I could make it very silly. minister (rising) Mr Pudey, (he walks about behind the desk in a very silly fashion) the very real problem is one of money. Im afraid that the Ministry of Silly Walks is no longer getting the kind of support it needs. 27 You see theres Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing, Education, Silly Walkstheyre all supposed to get the same. But last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of Silly Walks than it did on National Defence! Now we get 348,000,000 a year, which is supposed to be spent on all our available products. (he sits down) Coffee? man Yes please. minister (pressing intercom) Now Mrs Two-Lumps, would you bring us in two coffees please? intercom voice Yes, Mr Teabag. minister Out of her mind. Now the Japanese have a man who can bend his leg back over his head and back again with every single step. While the Israelisheres the coffee.
Enter secretary with tray with two cups on it. She has a particularly jerky silly walk which means that by the time she reaches the minister there is no coffee left in the cups. The min9
Episode Fourteen

Its notable that only Cleese has the comic control to make his walk truly legendary Jones, especially, merely jerks around a lot.

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The end of this line is lost in the laughter of the audience.

A typical Python moment: a lovely non sequitur suggesting weve missed something, or that everyone is quite mad.

Here, Cleese flattens his legs out almost sideways, and he has some long, long legs. The audience loses its mind, and we lose any sense of what hes saying. It matters not.

John Cleese
e once had a wife named Alyce Faye, and she always called him Jack. Which is notable only because his real family name, before his father changed it in 1915, was Cheesenot Cleese. John Cleese (a.k.a. Jack Cheese) was born in Englands West Countrythe seaside town of Westonsuper-Mare, to be precisea couple of months before the start of World War II. His parents were olderhis father was 46, and his mother 40which he claims made him more reserved than other kids, more careful. He was also tall, well into six feet by his teens. Even now his website lists him as writer, actor, and tall person. At Cambridge University, Cleese studied law and joined its Footlights performance group, where he met Graham Chapman. So successful was his work that one of the shows, Cambridge Circus (previously A Clump of Plinths) transferred from Edinburgh Festival to London and then to Broadway. In America he met Terry Gilliam and Connie Booth, an actress he would later marry (and with whom he wrote Fawlty Towers). Back in the U.K., in the mid-sixties, and like the other Pythons, he wrote for David Frost; he also acted on Frosts shows and gained a modicum of early TV fame (he was hard to miss, being so tall and so funny). Later he, with Chapman, would write episodes for a popular sitcom, Doctor in the House, and on the back of that success they were asked to do a series of their own. Needing more support than he got from the difficult Chapman, he hit up Palin and the rest. And the Python troupe came into being. On the Flying Circus he perfected his knack for characters who shouted a lot, and whose fuses were short. Writing with Chapman, his penchant for wordplaywhat contributed to his thesaurus sketcheswas matched by his physical brilliance, most notably in a sketch he later came to despise. A signal creation of Cleeses, the Ministry of Silly Walks is one of the most memorable pieces of physical comedy ever filmed. One only has to watch Terry Joness or Michael Palins attempts to play along to see how mesmerizing and shimmering are Cleeses silly walks. That said, he had to be convinced to do the third series of Python (he was worried they were repeating themselves), and by the fourth series he was gone altogether, a loss that spelled the end of the show after just six episodes. He was crucial to the Flying Circus, and the British comic public missed him too much. But he could do angry like no other comic actor, which put him in good standing for his post-Python career. Written with his then wife, Connie Booth, whose first appearance in Monty Pythons Flying Circus came as the trusting blonde in the Lumberjack Song, Fawlty Towers first aired in 1975 and was an instant classic of comedy TV. The show followed the farcical efforts of Basil Fawlty (played by Cleese) to run a hotel in Torquay, on the English south coast. Badgered by a harridan wife, Sybil (played by the great comic actor Prunella Scales), and featuring Booth as an innocent chambermaid and Andrew Sachss masterful portrayal of a bumbling Spanish waiter, the twelve episodes are pretty much perfect. In 2000, the British Film Institute voted Fawlty Towers the best television series of all time, and its hard to argue with that. Cleese followed up this success with a number of beloved movies. A Fish Called Wanda features Cleese and Palin working together again in a crime caper; and Clockwise, in which a man cant get anywhere on time, proves Cleese had lost none of his comic genius. Since that time, however, hes become most known for his corporate training videos through his company, Video Arts, founded in 1972 with Anthony Jay and other TV stalwarts. In them, he turns boring corporate saws into something one wouldnt entirely hate to sit through. Even more recently hes starred in the show Alimony Tour, the title of which speaks for itself.
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Monty Pythons Flying Circus

COMING IN NOVEMBER 2012

Includes every script of every episode plus thousands of annotations, photos, and terry Gilliams iconic artwork.
Monty Pythons Flying Circuss influence on television and on comedy is toweringit has be compared to the Beatles influence on music. It is one of the most popular, enduring, oft-quoted, and inspiring shows of all time. Now the complete scripts for every one of the 45 episodes of The Flying Circus every silly setup, every clever conceit, every snide insult, and every saucy aside from these classic sketchesis included in the forthcoming: Monty Pythons Flying Circus: Complete and AnnotatedAll the Bits. This massive book also includes more than 2,000 color photographs and illustrations, all the stage directions, and over 1,000 insightful and informative annotations. Its all hereall the bits. Everything the most obsessive Python fan could every want. Read the annotated, illustrated text of the famous sketches including The Ministry of Silly Walks, The Dead Parrot, Banter in a Cheese Shop, Spam, The Funniest Joke in the World, The Spanish Inquisition, The Argument Clinic, The Fish-Slapping Dance, The Lumberjack Song, and all the rest. The extensive annotations cover the plethora of cultural, historical, and topical references touched upon in each sketch. Sidebars and commentary throughout include profiles of the principlesGraham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and John Cleeseand insider stories from on and off the set, including arguments, accidents, and practical jokes; set design and shooting locations; goofs and gaffes; and much more. Also included are hundreds of stills and artwork from the shows.
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Luke Dempsey is deputy editor of the memoir A Supremely Bad Idea. A native of Englandand a massive Python fanhe currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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