THE COMEDY OF FISH AND MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN HISTORY
Terry Jones has passed away and it’s very sad, not least because he’d reportedly been suffering from severe dementia the last few years.
If you haven't guessed by now, I’ve been a Monty Python fan pretty much since high school (so 35 years or so, then). It’s hard to pick just one of his wonderful performances and characters, so here’s a less obvious choice. The Meaning Of Life may not have been Python’s best film, but this is arguably the best bit in that film.
I also ought to mention that Jones was impressive beyond Python - he was also a scholar of medieval history and a writer of children’s stories. Somewhere on my shelves is a copy of one of his fairy-tale books, Fantastic Stories, as well as his novelization of Starship Titanic (a computer game created by Douglas Adams) and a collection of his newspaper columns ridiculing George W Bush, Tony Blair and their War On Terror.
“What really alarms me about President Bush's "war on terrorism" is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It's rather like bombing murder.”
Anyway, between Jones and Neil Innes (the “7th Python” who passed on a few weeks ago), I’ve been revisiting a lot of Python lately - particularly the record albums (most of which I have), and much of it actually within my head, because I listened to them so much when I was younger that I memorized a great deal of them.
For those I didn’t memorize, I still have little snippets of them rattling around in my brain, some of them buried so deep that when they occasionally resurface, I don’t remember exactly where they came from.
Such as this sketch from Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which features professors discussing medieval farming practices in the form of reggae, call-and-response glam rock and bombastic rock opera.
Terry Jones isn’t in this particular sketch, but Neil Innes is - he was responsible for writing and performing the music parts, and it’s yet another example of just how brilliant he was at musical parody. The songs here are necessarily short, but no less entertaining.
On a broader note, only Python could think of combining a radio program on medieval agrarian history with Top of the Pops. And if anyone could release a music album about legal frameworks for 12th-century farming and make it enjoyable, it's Innes, innit?
Sowing with as many oxen as he shall have yoked in the plough,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1634197.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
If you haven't guessed by now, I’ve been a Monty Python fan pretty much since high school (so 35 years or so, then). It’s hard to pick just one of his wonderful performances and characters, so here’s a less obvious choice. The Meaning Of Life may not have been Python’s best film, but this is arguably the best bit in that film.
Click to viewI also ought to mention that Jones was impressive beyond Python - he was also a scholar of medieval history and a writer of children’s stories. Somewhere on my shelves is a copy of one of his fairy-tale books, Fantastic Stories, as well as his novelization of Starship Titanic (a computer game created by Douglas Adams) and a collection of his newspaper columns ridiculing George W Bush, Tony Blair and their War On Terror.
“What really alarms me about President Bush's "war on terrorism" is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It's rather like bombing murder.”
Anyway, between Jones and Neil Innes (the “7th Python” who passed on a few weeks ago), I’ve been revisiting a lot of Python lately - particularly the record albums (most of which I have), and much of it actually within my head, because I listened to them so much when I was younger that I memorized a great deal of them.
For those I didn’t memorize, I still have little snippets of them rattling around in my brain, some of them buried so deep that when they occasionally resurface, I don’t remember exactly where they came from.
Such as this sketch from Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which features professors discussing medieval farming practices in the form of reggae, call-and-response glam rock and bombastic rock opera.
Terry Jones isn’t in this particular sketch, but Neil Innes is - he was responsible for writing and performing the music parts, and it’s yet another example of just how brilliant he was at musical parody. The songs here are necessarily short, but no less entertaining.
On a broader note, only Python could think of combining a radio program on medieval agrarian history with Top of the Pops. And if anyone could release a music album about legal frameworks for 12th-century farming and make it enjoyable, it's Innes, innit?
Sowing with as many oxen as he shall have yoked in the plough,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1634197.html. Please comment there using OpenID.