Scene Fifteen
BRIAN runs off towards the crowded market square . . . inside the soukh . . .—This market set was Gilliam’s pride and joy according to Palin. Palin mentions that the Ex-leper scenes were, for example, being shot so fast that Gilliam was concerned none of his crew’s hard work was going to be seen. Gilliam laments this a bit, as well, calling himself the film’s “resigner” as opposed to “designer,” he felt like he had to give up so much.1
. . . many strangely bearded and oddly dressed PROPHETS . . .—These are only named in the printed script, and are known in order as the “Blood & Thunder Prophet” (Gilliam), the “False Prophet” (Charles McKeown), and the “Boring Prophet” (Palin).
Once again the Pythons have homaged I’m All Right Jack. In the scene where a crowd has gathered outside Stan’s aunt’s home, protesting the strike and praising Stan, a self-styled prophet wearing a placard marches through the shot, declaring: “. . .and the children of Babylon are destroyed, and become an abomination in the eyes of lasciviousness.” His placard reads: “The day of wrath is at hand.” There were many in Britain across this era of inflamed union activity who believed that doomsday would inevitably follow in the wake of such societal disruption. (Things would get much worse by the mid-to-late-1970s, when work stoppages and strike days missed often brought Britain to a halt.) The words and phrases appearing over and over again in newspaper columns included “anarchy,” “ungovernable,” and a bewailing of the “bloody-minded” moments of “mounting chaos” as labor and the economy soured.2
The first century seems to teem with this kind of prophetic figure and especially in the region of Jerusalem, the Holy City. The Romans might have been in charge, but they looked away from religious fervor when it didn’t impinge on civic order. John the Baptist was perhaps the prototype for these strange prophets and was described quite favorably (in stark contrast to other period “messiahs”) by Josephus,3 as Goldberg describes:
One wonders what the difference is between John and the men whom Josephus disparages as “deceivers” . . . and “enchanters” . . . such as Theudas and the Egyptian. It isn’t simply that John did not represent a direct threat to Rome—Josephus always stresses the folly of those who do oppose Rome—as many of the others also seemed apolitical. All of these, including John, seemed to be killed solely because they had a large following, which in itself was seen as a threat to those in power: there was room for only one crowd and only one leader. We are left to conclude that Josephus himself was touched favorably by the philosophy of John, just as many of his countrymen were. While he was probably working from a source that was itself positive toward John, his choice of that source would have reflected his own attitude.4
In 1974, on a Belfast campaign platform for Tory outlier Enoch Powell, the Rev. Paisley even mentioned that he saw himself as a modern-day John the Baptist. (In this same speech, he also compared the current government of the Republic of Ireland to the communist, guerrilla government of North Vietnam.5)
There were a number of such figures in the first century, according to Kotker. Paul crisscrossed Asia Minor, Greece, and the Holy Land preaching eternal life with belief in Christ, preaching in synagogues and on the streets, and founding Christian churches. The promise of a salvation into eternal bliss had many guises, though. There were Persians preaching of the god Mithras, Egyptian priests presenting Isis cults, and “missionaries of the Greek goddess Demeter” offering “mysteries” in a cave near Eleusis.6 Around 44, according to Smallwood, there emerged “a series of impostors who added to the general unrest by posing as messiahs and attracting large followings with their promises of signs and wonders and deliverance from oppression.”7 One of these, appearing in and around Jerusalem, was Theudas, mentioned by Goldberg above, who promised Jesus-like miracles, according to Josephus:
Now it came to pass, that while Fadus was procurator of Judea,8 that a certain magician whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and follow him to the river Jordan; for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it; and many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them; who falling upon them unexpectedly, slew many of them, and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, and cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem.9
Like Pilate, Marcellus, Marullus, and Agrippa before him, Fadus walked the tightrope between controlling and antagonizing his Jewish subjects. The “Egyptian prophet,” also mentioned by Goldberg earlier, allegedly led a sicarii revolt according to Josephus, and was clearly seen as a threat to Rome, which John the Baptist never was.10
This locus of speechifying could also be found in the London of the Pythons’ time, at Parliament Square. This tacitly approved area for peaceful protest and demonstration was in the news in May 1974 when an IRA bomb exploded there, injuring eleven.
A STRANGE FIGURE . . . two severed hands on a pole . . . —This is who the printed script calls the “Blood & Thunder Prophet,” a mud-caked man of the wilderness, played by Gilliam; Palin calls him “gargoylical.”11 The “severed hands on a pole” could simply be a grisly version of the carved hand, the manus, placed atop many Roman standards, and seen earlier in Pilate’s chambers.
There were plenty of modern prophets the Pythons could have chosen as inspiration for these biblical-era figures, many quite close to home. Northern Ireland provides two such figures. Seen by many in the press as a cross between a seventeenth-century “religious fanatic” and an American televangelist, the Reverend Ian Paisley raged against the pope and popery and for a Protestant Ireland from the mid-1950s onward.12 He was called a “blood-and-thunder Evangelical” and an “Old Testament figure” many times, his public speaking was so renowned, and unfiltered.13 On the death of Pope John XXIII, for example, Paisley said: “This Romish man of sin is now in hell!”14 He called John Paul the “scarlet woman of Rome,” was certain that alcohol was “the devil’s buttermilk,” and he regularly called “down the curse of God” on anyone who wanted to stretch “hands across the border.”15 It was Paisley who was instrumental in undermining the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974, which led to many more deaths before accepting a very similar agreement in 1998. He alternately sounded like the Blood & Thunder and the False prophet as he denounced the evil practices of men: “How base and despicable God’s people become! Did you ever notice that? How base and despicable the people of God can become when they’re covered with the sin of unbelief!”16
In February 1969 Paisley was campaigning in Belfast, covered by Philip Howard for the Times and a photographer from Paris Match, “who [had] been following ‘the circus Paislee.’” Howard describes a “blood and thunder” moment, one with all the theatricality and noise of our snarling prophet:
The small grinning boy clashes his cymbals as vehemently as if he is banging together the heads of the Pope, Captain Terence O’Neill, the B.B.C. and the conspiratorial, Romanist-infiltrated press. . . . Here . . . a considerable crowd of voters huddle together, to have their hearts warmed by the Demon King of the election, the Rev. Ian Paisley . . . [who] thunders for 50 minutes, from the back of a Land Rover, roaring out great guts of rhetoric. O’Neill is a traitor, a tyrant, a viper who wants to bring back the darkness of priestcraft, to make everyone kiss the big toe of Old Red-Socks (the Pope). “The press is against me. The TV is against me. The Old Devil is against me. But we believe that the God who was with us at the Battle of the Boyne will intervene. No surrender.”17
Politician Leo Abse18 writes of both Paisley and Powell, two of the loudest voices of the day, bringing “Jerusalem” and modern-day Britain together:
We can no more annihilate our aggression than we can rid ourselves of the toxic waste of a fast-breeder reactor. The buried aggression seeps through: and so we have the Church Militant. The pacifism of Christianity unhappily leads not to the New Jerusalem but to Belfast. And in the environment of Ulster the Reverend Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell can in their pulpits preach doctrines which guarantee the continuation of the admixture of race and religion which is destroying the province.
The danger of their doctrines is, of course, their terrible exclusiveness. They are envious of the claims of the chosen people whose Book they read, and overcome their jealousy by usurping the Jews and either explicitly or gnomically present themselves as the new elect, undeterred by the catastrophe that the Jews, by hubris, brought down upon themselves. Their creeds . . . have a long and sometimes ugly tradition: the ideal of the superior Holy People, the true Israel, separate, scrupulously protecting its identity through adherence to the Law, always brought with it the corollary of intolerance to foreigners and prohibitions against marrying out of the community. The Nehemiahs and Ezras of Judaic literature are the source books of our contemporary chauvinistic Christian preachers and politicians.19
In February 1969 a Gerald Scarfe exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery featured scathing likenesses, coincidentally, of both Paisley and the Pope.20
In the other pews of this argument was Bernadette Devlin, equally vocal and equally certain that her point of view—a united Catholic Ireland as the true Ireland—would win the day. She was a witness to both the Battle of Bogside and Bloody Sunday, and was elected to Parliament in 1969. For her maiden speech, Devlin spoke directly about the situation in Ireland, a breach of protocol, it seems, but one she admitted and embraced. In this portion of her speech, she is taking to task Lord Chichester-Clark—MP for Londonderry since 1960, and Prime Minister of Ireland from May 1969—asking how well he understood Ireland:
The hon. Member for Londonderry said that he stood in Bogside. I wonder whether he could name the streets through which he walked in the Bogside so that we might establish just how well acquainted he became with the area. I had never hoped to see the day when I might agree with someone who represents the bigoted and sectarian Unionist Party, which uses a deliberate policy of dividing the people in order to keep the ruling minority in power and to keep the oppressed people of Ulster oppressed. I never thought that I should see the day when I should agree with any phrase uttered by the representative of such a party, but the hon. Gentleman summed up the situation “to a t.” He referred to stark, human misery. That is what I saw in Bogside. It has not been there just for one night. It has been there for 50 years—and that same stark human misery is to be found in the Protestant Fountain area, which the hon. Gentleman would claim to represent. . . . The people of Northern Ireland have been forced into this situation. I was in the Bogside on the same evening as the hon. Member for Londonderry. I assure you, Mr. Speaker—and I make no apology for the fact—that I was not strutting around with my hands behind my back examining the area and saying “tut-tut” every time a policeman had his head scratched. I was going around building barricades because I knew that it was not safe.21
These kinds of exchanges continue to this day. Demaris concludes of Devlin: “She shares with Paisley, however, a major portion of the blame for the polarization of opinion on both sides that has led to so much bloodshed in Ireland.”22
Blood & Thunder Prophet—The phrase itself is drawn from Colley Cibber’s play Love’s Last Shift (1696), and has been heard in over-the-top football punditry and from opera critics describing particularly effusive productions. In 1965 Granada television was producing two Thomas Middleton plays, The Changeling (1622) and Women Beware Women (c. 1624), “under the general heading BLOOD AND THUNDER,” according to the Spectator (appearing in the “Not by Shakespeare” column).23 These are primarily prophets of the eschatological harbingers, those who “see” the last days and the torments of death and hell. (Josephus railed against these types.) When Brian takes his place alongside them, he attempts a more Christ-like, beatific tone, and that, coupled with the open-endedness of his preaching, gains him followers almost immediately.
B & T Prophet: “. . . ride forth on a serpent’s back . . .”—These are cobbled together from across the Old Testament, generally, but also Revelations. For example, Isaiah 27:1: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
B & T Prophet: “. . . eyes shall be red with the blood of living creatures . . .”—There are more than three times as many mentions of “blood” in the Old Testament as in the New Testament. Blood can be a part of purification, as in the Blood of the Lamb, or more punitive, as in those with spotted garments. In Revelations, the “woman . . .[is] drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” (17:6). In Ezekiel, Jerusalem has become the harlot, and is “polluted” in her own blood (16:6), which may be what this prophet’s on about. The “whore of Babylon” character appears in dozens of woodcuts, and is often associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the pope, as in a vivid illustration from the 1545 edition of the Luther Bible.24 The Pythons are pulling from the more hyperbolic portions of the scriptures for both the Blood & Thunder and the False prophets.
(draft) B & T Prophet: “. . . the hill of excitement . . . a great rubbing of parts . . .”—This sexualized language is from condemnatory sections of the Bible, too, with connections to later English literature, and thence to the Pythons. The “earthy” poetry of Sidney and Spenser come to mind, first as the Pythons sexualized the hymn Jerusalem in Flying Circus Ep. 4:
The glossing of “England’s Mountains Green” as overtly sexual becomes much easier here, especially if “a man’s life” is meant to include copulation . . . . “Mountains” can be either (or both) the female’s breasts or pubic area. See Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and his object of lustful affection’s “Cupid’s hill.” Also, cf. the Gardens of Adonis in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where the “stately Mount” is just one erotic section of this highly sexualized landscape.25
The “sweet gum” and “precious dew” in the “pleasant arbour” is Sidney at his most salacious, most Ovidian. The potential for “rubbing of parts” on this “hill of excitement” seems highly denunciable by this pelvis-thrusting prophet. These “secret parts” of the daughters of Zion are to be discovered by the Lord because they are “haughty,” “wanton,” and “mincing” (Isaiah 3:17).
FALSE PROPHET—Played here by Charles McKeown, but there’s no reason or indication to believe he’s any more or less truthful than any of the other street preachers here. This may have been a reflection of the Pythons’ study as they prepared the film, perhaps accessing Josephus and his denunciations of false prophets like the Egyptian, discussed earlier.
FALSE PROPHET: “. . . a nine-bladed sword . . .”—There are sharp, two-edged swords in the scriptures, swords becoming ploughshares, and many references to death, justice, and suffering by sword, but none with multiple blades. In Revelations are beasts with seven heads and ten horns, which is likely where this mixed reference began. In Ep. 23 of Flying Circus, Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse of St. John, The Dragon with the Seven Heads is used by Gilliam as part of a mail delivery animation.26
FALSE PROPHET: “. . . which he will wield on all wretched sinners . . .”—This prophet is properly fixated on numbers, as Arthur was in Holy Grail, but he’s also nearly quoting from Isaiah 3, where Judah and Jerusalem are castigated by the Lord:
9 . . .they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. Woe unto their soul! for they have rewarded evil unto themselves.
10 Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him: for they shall eat the fruit of their doings.
11 Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him. . . .
24 And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.
25 Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.
26 And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.
(One of Brian’s followers later will want to be healed of his “bald patch,” perhaps believing it’s a curse from on high.) This prophet perhaps most resembles John the Baptist. John had retreated away from cities and into the wilderness, preaching in the desert about the wretchedness of sin and the fact that when the Messiah did finally come, judgment came with him. He is mentioned by Josephus and in the Bible, and for good reason:
John was a stirring preacher. With his unkempt beard and his rough clothes, his face weathered and tanned by years of exposure to the desert sun, he must also have been a striking figure. And his uncompromising and stern command “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” helped him gather a devoted following in the years around A.D. 25. To the Jews he was another of that line of fiery prophets who had long preached in Jerusalem and in the countryside of Palestine. As others before had done, he called on the people to follow the ethical teachings of the Torah as well as its ritual prescriptions.27
We have our own line of prophets here, calling to repentance, or just condemning.
FALSE PROPHET: “. . . and that includes you sir”—This specificity, this personal touch, is mentioned as a key component for the particularly effective public speaker, according to Murray Sayle, covering Rev. Paisley for the Sunday Times:
Whatever one thinks of his doctrine, Paisley is a master orator. He is the only speaker I have heard who comes close to Fidel Castro. Their techniques are oddly similar, probably as old as the art of mob oratory itself: an almost schoolmasterly exposition broken by asides, savage humour, endless repetition of key phrases, picturesque abuse, and above all a total absorption in the changing moods of the audience.28
Brian will borrow the touch in a moment, when he effectively addresses one man in his audience, and the man happily thanks him.
FALSE PROPHET: “. . . the horns shall be on the head . . .”—The beast in Revelations has ten horns on its head, but a cuckold is also horned. In Daniel, he describes the dream beasts he’s seen, including a fourth, ten-horned beast with “great iron teeth.”29 By verse twenty, he’s explaining that the fourth beast is actually a fourth kingdom on Earth, and the ten horns are ten kings. In Revelations, creatures are multiple-headed, multiple-horned, and multiple-crowned—the bewildering array of creatures and sights in the apocalyptic works isn’t really exaggerated by our prophets here. The cuckolded husband has typically been depicted wearing horns, but he is most often laughed at, not feared or even pitied.30 The leader of the Knights Who Say Ni in Holy Grail is also wearing horns on his helm, as did Tim, but they’re both also more ridiculous than feared.
BORING PROPHET: “. . . rumours of things going astray . . .”—The Children of Israel regularly went astray, as do the Lord’s “sheep,” with Jesus being the Good Shepherd who will find them. The “great confusion” this prophet mentions may simply be the dense works he’s referencing, including Daniel, Revelations, and especially Isaiah, who offered: “But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.”31 Jeremiah was also certain that his enemies would be smitten with “everlasting confusion” and they “will not prosper.”32 The Second Coming may have been imminent for many during this period, or it may have been well in the future, but eschatological writings often mention the confusing, tumultuous days leading up to Christ’s triumphal return. Following this line of prophets we have encountered prurience, fear and shame, and now spiritual bewilderment—all things Brian will encounter on his short journey to the cross.
“. . . little things with the sort of raffia work base . . .”—He’s waxing Goonish here. The Goons often list things absolutely necessary to carry out a particular task—retrofitting the Albert Memorial into a rocket ship, for example, or the crucial gear needed to reach Shangri-La or scale Everest—including two of the “one thin thing with lumps on,” and one of the “one long thin object with no fixed abode.”33 Palin notes that he simply talked and talked here, spinning pseudo-scriptural nonsense so that they could choose from minutes of footage as they edited.34
Palin’s quiet, rambling preacher version might be based on Peter Cook’s popular E. L. Wisty character, who was himself based on a high butler Cook had known while at Radley.35 One of the odd, droning stories this man delivered to Cook involved—coincidentally, for our purposes—a “Bee of Ephesus” that flew around the crucified Christ.36 See also the Pythons’ ramblings of pseud-talk in Meaning of Life church sermon (“And spotteth twice they the camels before the third hour . . .”), in Holy Grail with the reading monk (“. . . and sloths, and carp, and anchovies . . .”), and in Flying Circus where Idle is in the dock, spouting faux-Shakespeare (“. . . or wakes the drowsy apricot betides . . .”).37 This kind of obscurant, reference-laden, and frowsy speech comes from the Modernists (Eliot, Joyce), from the Goons, and has been a hallmark of the Pythonesque from the beginning.
BORING PROPHET: “. . . shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers . . .”—There was a “prophet” during this period who spoke of sacred, secret things buried by Moses on Mount Gerizim. This Samaritan prophet convinced thousands to follow him to the sacred mountain in 36, but Pilate sent troops to head off the crowd, leading to an all-out battle (many of the Samaritans were armed) and the eventual execution of the Samaritan leadership.38 This was the incident that led to Pilate’s recall to Rome, and perhaps to the termination of his prefecture that same year.39 The Boring Prophet isn’t calling anyone to anything, so he’s likely no threat to Rome or the Sanhedrin.
BORING PROPHET (OS): “It is written in the Book of Cyril . . .”—There are a number of apocryphal texts, those not included in the Bible, for example, but still considered scriptural to many. Cyril was a bishop of Jerusalem, in the fourth century, but there was also critic Cyril Connolly, already mentioned in the Python song “Eric the Half-a-Bee,” and even Cyril Smith, the largish Liberal MP for Rochdale mentioned in Flying Circus Ep. 45.40
HARRY: “Oh. Twenty shekels”—Even if a talent was worth 3,000 shekels, 20 shekels seems like a rather high price for a false beard. Remember, though, the Ex-leper asked for a talent earlier, before settling for half a denarii.
HARRY: “We’re supposed to haggle”—Here Idle seems to be playing Harry like a “spiv,” a shonky character who appears in his element during but especially after the war in Britain, when rationing was firmly in place. Harry is selling a beard to a man, which is likely not illegal to Rome or in violation of Sanhedrin laws, except that Brian clearly tells Harry that it’s for “the wife.” With it, the wife will likely participate, against Jewish law and custom, in a religio-judicial ceremony not meant for women. Harry is abetting the flouting of the law, at the least. In postwar Britain, the spiv flourished when sub-legal trade became available and even oddly fashionable, when rationed (or exotic) food items might only be had through black market means. In Parliament there were groans about the “spiv economy,” one that flowed almost without notice beneath the actual, heavily taxed economy, siphoning money from the state’s coffers and lining the pockets of bookmakers and black marketeers.41 The government even tried to have these spivs and “drones” (an idler, a non-worker) registered with the (Labour government) authorities so that their time and energies could be better managed by the state—sent to the mines alongside Polish former POWS, for example. It came to be known as “The Spivs and Drones Order.”42 The Socialist Party of Great Britain looked askance at both the Labour government’s windy attacks on these “parasites” and the ill-defined spivs themselves:
It has been said that the Spiv is at least a rebel. Some people have even sentimentalised him as a kind of revolt against the conditions imposed by the nature of capitalist exploitation. The Spiv’s own anti-Government and anti-authoritarian outlook might seem to lend colour to this view. The Spiv, however, generally lacks the class loyalty and class sentiment that goes to the making of the class-conscious social revolutionary. The zeal and selfless devotion of the socialist, with his illimitable vista of a world based on production for use and the Brotherhood of Man, lights no fires in the mind and imagination of the Spiv. A good time and plenty of fun at the expense of others gravely limits his social horizon. Pleasure and “the easy way” becomes basic to his existence. His mode of life constitutes a form of social parasitism which conflicts with the healthy social instincts of the vast majority of workers.43
After much talk in the press and in Parliament, not much changed until the economy stabilized, desirable food became more available, and the spiv fascination petered out naturally. In his memoirs published in 1971, Lord Butler opined that with the cessation of state controls over food and the sales of goods and importation by the mid-1950s, characters like Harry disappeared, practically overnight.44 Harry isn’t an idler, certainly, since he sells both rocks for stonings and beards for disguises, and he doesn’t seem to be gouging (another complaint from the Socialist Party assessment), but he does seem to be making his living on the Jewish authority system’s teat, benefiting from what observant Jews need to participate in an approved, even sacred act like a stoning. Perhaps Harry has just positioned himself perfectly, in a business sense, with goods that he knows practicing Jews need and want. This has a first-century Jerusalem iteration, as well. The moneychangers and sellers of temple cult material (like those who sold animals for sacrifice, who baked shewbread, made incense, weaved and knitted for the temple curtain, and so on) made cultic participation—mandatory on some levels—more possible for many Jews.45 If the Pythons had decided to include the religious aspects of Jewish life in the film, then people like Harry would have sold doves to the poorest Jews, who couldn’t afford “more expensive animals such as sheep.”46 However proper his capitalist intentions and practices, Harry and these purveyors were the types, among others, that Jesus forcibly cleared from the temple as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. In Life of Brian, the merchants tend to be more backdrop and set dressing than characters, not unlike the vaguely defined villagers digging for filth, attending a deadly wedding, or carrying a witch for execution in Holy Grail.
But is this capitalist go-getter and his milieu simply a distraction from the Jews’ awful lives of servitude to Rome? Later, supporters of the Baader-Meinhof group and the student unrest in Europe after 1968 thought as much in relation to postwar Germany: “The so-called economic miracle was invented as a distraction to stop us thinking about our Fascist past. Consumerism put the lid back on history. We were no longer meant to know what our past meant.”47 In our case, is it to distract the people of Jerusalem from dwelling on the fact that they are ruled by Romans? The PFJ might think so.
BURT appears, he is very big—This is John Case again, his only surviving appearance in the film. He was cast to play Pilate’s wife who, in earlier drafts, physically fought off the PFJ during their “waid.”
On the night that a vote of confidence was called for in the House, 28 March 1979, it was reported by Donoughue that one of the hoped-for votes the government did not get was from the Irishman Frank Maguire, who seemed to respond to a similar, Burt-like looming influence: “I saw Stan Orme, who told me that he had done everything to get [Gerry] Fitt48 and Maguire into the lobbies [to cast a vote], but nothing would move them.” Donoughue continued: “Maguire’s wife had come with him—along with two sinister Republican ‘heavies’—and they forbade him to vote.”49 Fitt and his family had already been intimidated by the IRA, when
sympathisers broke in, one night in 1976, as the Fitts were getting ready for bed. They were fended off by Gerry, in his underwear and waving a Browning automatic, issued officially to him during the period of the power sharing executive. But no amount of protection could stop the Fitt home being a target to Loyalists and the IRA.50
The possible threat from the IRA against, ostensibly, one of its own was one of those threads woven daily through British newspapers and evening news stories.51
Burt is also clearly Harry’s employee, meaning Harry is one of Keith Joseph’s anointed ones. Harry is an entrepreneur who sells rocks for stonings, enriches the economy with gourds, and offers beards for women who want to participate in the Jewish male religious world. With the Tories in opposition from 1974, Joseph found himself in the wilderness, but using particularly interesting language, this prophet52 preached a consistently conservative message to local constituencies and Party conferences and in the House of Lords:
Through constant repetition of his favourite themes, he hoped that he could still exert some influence over “the climate of opinion.” The entrepreneur was praised on numerous occasions, and the scarcity of these market place gladiators was bemoaned in speech after speech. . . . He made several attempts to encapsulate the work of the entrepreneur—“the character who works the magic, the Aladdin who creates the jobs.”53
Harry would have been an ideal figure for Joseph.
HARRY: “Haggle properly”—This is a long-standing stereotype also affixed to the Scots, being thrifty and always ready to bargain. The Goons mention Bluebottle’s Scottish uncle who hides him in a “brown paper parcel” under the seat of a bus so that he doesn’t have to pay the boy’s fare; Neddie’s Scottish uncle “Laird McGool” invites Neddie in to warm himself by a “roaring candle”; and in “Robin Hood,” a Jewish character (Sellers) tells Robin Seagoon—who’s been told a thousand “splonders” is needed to save him from the Sheriff—to “offer him nine-fifty and take a chance.”54 Karl Marx called haggling “the language of the Jews,” according to Gilman:
The Jew as money-changer is the prototypical Jew, who speaks a language of commerce which is deceptive but which remains immutable. The mask of the Jew may shift. He may articulate his deeds in English, German, or French, but these national languages are mere camouflage for the language by which he dupes his prey, the language and rhetoric of the Jews, “haggling.” And this remains constant.55
There were several very public hagglings going on in this period. As already discussed, the Callaghan administration attempted to keep the trade unions on board through 1976–1978, hoping for a stable economy more favorable for a successful election. The unions refused to “haggle properly,” pay increases were demanded and then granted, destroying the government’s attempted curbs on inflationary activity. During the IMF loan crisis in 1976, the Americans and the IMF refused to “haggle properly,” as well, holding the British government to onerous reductions on spending before the loan was granted. The haggling would change dramatically once the Thatcher years kicked in, when the unions were no longer as welcome at the policy-making table.
BRIAN: “Tell me what to say Please!”—This is a marvelous portmanteau Pythonism: miscommunication as part of a financial transaction. Brian is desperate to buy a beard as a disguise, and he even has sufficient money for the purchase, but he doesn’t understand the “Jewish” language necessary to complete the transaction. This is because, textually, the transaction itself is the comedy bit, not a setup for a following scene or pay-off. (Think of the back-and-forth between the king of Swamp Castle and the guards watching Herbert in Holy Grail as an earlier example.) This two-minute bit has its own internal language and pace that must be learned by Brian for the scene to end, which means it’s also slightly disconnected from the rest of the film, a kind of pause in the narrative flow.56 But it’s also about as Pythonesque as a scene can be. In Ep. 23 of Flying Circus, a French film is being reviewed, and the reviewer notes that the film is about the “breakdown in communication in our modern society”:
In a nutshell, this defines Flying Circus. There are very few examples in the series of a successful communication or transaction. In most cases, the message is misunderstood, delivered improperly, or perceived incorrectly. . . . The communication issue is key for the Pythons, and is based on the recent interest in semantics and semiotics, the growing awareness that meaning isn’t just “there,” it is imbued by and for society/culture, and that meaning can and does fluctuate depending on context. The separation of a word from its “meaning” allows for new meanings and even multiple meanings to be temporarily affixed to a word—there now exists the possibility of “wiggle room” in the world of language. Modernist authors like Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and Eliot pushed this separation, this slippage, this interchangeability, and the Pythons came along at just the right time to explore that new ambiguity in the television format.57
The Pythons are exploring communication in transactions here, as well, and Brian will eventually have to run away, just short of completing the deal for the free gourd (though he keeps the gourd).
Again, the headlines offered plenty of painful haggling for the Pythons to cull through, including a sticking point when the government held firm at a 4.5 percent offer but the unions demanded a flat 5 percent in 1976. Chancellor Healey and the unions went back and forth, with PM Callaghan refusing to back down.58 After more than a month of this, the government capitulated, and the unions got their 5 percent. At this moment, many in the government likely saw “TUC” as just another terror group acronym. And just two years later, the explosion of pay demands that eventually crippled the economy and sank the Labour government started at 5 percent, then rapidly became 10, 13, and eventually 22 percent for road haulage drivers, the government having no clue what the unions would ask for next.59 That was “the red flag to the inflationary bull,” Jenkins concludes.60
HARRY gives BRIAN a gourd—These gourds were plentiful in the region, and quite prominent, as it turns out. The colocynth is an architectural inspiration in both the Solomonic temple and the Tel Dan gate.61 Gourds figure into a story involving Elisha in 2 Kings. There, a stew containing poisonous wild gourds was prepared for Elisha’s “company of minor prophets,” and Elisha added flour to dilute the poisonous effect, rendering it harmless.62
HARRY: “Yes but it’s worth ten”—What’s economic peace worth? This was being asked by Labour insiders during the latter days of the Callaghan administration. As mentioned, the government had agreed that inflation could be dealt with if pay rises stayed at or lower than 5 percent. Reg Birch and the like were having none of it. The government ended up surrendering more than 20 percent pay rises to the trades, and the “Labour Go Home” writing was on the wall. Opposition leader Thatcher tolled the bell in her 1978 Party Conference speech, damning the self-interested bargaining:
Now, you, the trade union leaders, have great power. . . . But look at the position of your members today and compare it with the position of workers in other free countries. Can you really say, can anyone say, you have used your powers well? . . . You want higher wages, better pensions, shorter hours, more government spending, more investment, more-more-more. But where is this “more” to come from? There is no more. There can be, but there will not be, unless we produce it. . . . And here, let me say to trade union leaders, you are often your own worst enemies. Why isn’t there more? Because too often restrictive practices rob you of the one thing you have to sell—your productivity.63
Thatcher would ride this horse to a General Election victory in May 1979.
HARRY: “Seventeen. My last word. I won’t take a penny less . . .”—Harry of course ends up sealing the deal seconds later at sixteen shekels, down from his original asking price of twenty. He has already told Brian that “it’s worth” ten shekels, but that he paid twelve shekels (or it cost him twelve shekels to manufacture it). The point is the haggling unfixes the value from the commodity, and in the flurry a rather arbitrary (and in this case lower) price is agreed upon. This kind of exchange is found throughout the run of The Goon Show. In “The Mystery of the Marie Celeste,” for example, a reward for information starts at £5,000 and ends up, when it trickles down to Bluebottle, at “seventeen and ninepence.”64
HARRY: “Ah, well there’s one born every minute”—Famous quote attributed to nineteenth-century circus impresario P. T. Barnum.
Notes
1. Gilliam, Gilliamesque, 182.
2. “Why Are We All So Bloody-Minded?” Times, 25 August 1970: 9.
3. Josephus, AJ, 18.5.1 (Whiston, 382).
4. See Goldberg, “The Popularity of John the Baptist.”
5. “Mr Powell Shows His Unity with Ulster,” Times, 30 September 1974: 4.
6. Kotker, HLTJ, 98. These cave mysteries remain mysterious; adherents were “sworn to secrecy,” and kept that oath (99).
7. Smallwood, JURR, 257.
8. Circa 45 or 46, according to Whiston. Cuspius Fadus followed Agrippa I as procurator of Judea, ruling 44–46 (JURR, 257–62).
9. AJ 20.5.1 (Whiston, 418).
10. See Acts 21:37–38, where Paul is mistaken for the dangerous Egyptian; also, AJ, 20.8.6 (Whiston, 422), and WJ 2.13.5 (Whiston, 483).
11. Palin, Diaries 1979–1979, 494.
12. Donoughue calls him “the awful Paisley” (DSD 2.165). Fascinating, too, that following the hung parliament outcome in the June 2017 general election, the Conservatives under Theresa May reached out to and brought into bed Paisley’s party, the Democratic Unionist Party, securing a coalition government.
13. “O’Neill Carries Fight to His Enemies,” Sunday Telegraph, 16 February 1969: 1.
14. “The Sayings of Ian Paisley,” Belfast Telegraph, 12 September 2014.
15. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 293.
16. From a sermon delivered 1 March 1968.
17. “Third Force Emerges as Paisley Thunders,” Times, 21 February 1969: 3.
18. Waugh called Abse a “socialist MP” with an interest in “pretty serving boys” (FCY, 15 December 1974).
19. “Spong and British Politics,” Spectator, 21 October 1977: 12.
20. Paul Grinke, “Stuffed Dummies,” Spectator, 13 February 1969: 21.
21. The entire Commons exchange is available via Hansard at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1969/apr/22/northern-ireland#S5CV0782P0_19690422_HOC_271.
22. Demaris, Brothers in Blood, 294.
23. “Not by Shakespeare,” Spectator, 1 January 1965: 12.
24. Probably based on an original Lucas Cranach the Elder illustration.
25. Larsen, MPFC: UC, 1.71.
26. MPFC: UC, 1.350.
27. Kotker, HLTJ, 50; italics added. John’s is an example of transcending the “it’s written that’s why” school of belief (mentioned by Mandy); he reminds his followers of the importance of the spirit and the letter of the law.
28. “Inside the Mind of Ian Paisley,” Sunday Times, 9 February 1969: 13.
29. Daniel 7:7–8.
30. Larsen, BAFHG, 450.
31. Isaiah 34:11.
32. Jeremiah 20:11.
33. “The Albert Memorial,” 23 March 1958; “Shangri-La Again,” 8 November 1955.
34. Palin, Diaries 1969–1979, 494.
35. Thompson, Peter Cook, 24–25, 175–77.
36. See Wendy Cook’s So Farewell Then (2006), and Thompson’s Peter Cook (1997).
37. Cleese delivers this sermon in Meaning of Life, Palin is reading from the Book of Armaments before they blow up the rabbit in Holy Grail, and a prisoner, Mr. Larch (Idle), has lapsed into an “Olivier impression” in Ep. 3 of Flying Circus (ATW, 1.3.29; MPFC: UC, 1.50–62).
38. Brandon, “Pontius Pilate in History and Legend,” 528.
39. The Syrian legate, Vitellius, essentially sacked Pilate before his trip to Rome, and Tiberius passed away just before Pilate arrived in Rome for his audience. The demonstrable record for Pilate disappears at this rather crucial juncture.
40. Auberon Waugh called Connolly “our Greatest Living Englishman,” tongue in cheek; “Eric the Half-a-Bee” appeared on Monty Python’s Previous Record album.
41. “Tax Structure Monstrous,” Times, 19 July 1947: 4.
42. This became the Regulation of Employment Order 1947, and was enacted in December 1947, though to middling success. See also Thomas, Villain’s Paradise.
43. Socialist Standard, October 1947.
44. “The Choice between Genteel Bankruptcy and Floating the Pound,” Times, 20 May 1971: 12. Rab Butler had been Chancellor of the Exchequer 1951–1955.
45. Jeremias, JTJ, 25–27.
46. Safrai, The Economy of Roman Palestine, 100.
47. Dieter Kunzelmann, student leader, Kommune Eins, from Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror (BBC, 2002).
48. Fitt would be targeted by the IRA later, as well, when his family home in Antrim was burned to the ground in 1983.
49. DSD, 472.
50. Anne McHardy, Guardian, 26 August 2005.
51. This is discussed in more detail in Arnold Kemp’s Confusion to Our Enemies (2012).
52. Marr actually calls Joseph an “Old Testament prophet denouncing his tribe” (HMB, 355). Wilson would call Tony Benn “an Old Testament prophet without a beard” (Financial Times, 12 May 1975: 30). Many of these raging, fire-and-brimstone types seemed to be on the Left, and often predicting doom under Tory policies.
53. Denham and Garnett, Keith Joseph, 420; italics added. See also Bogdanor’s version of this quote found in “Thatcherism, 1979–1990.”
54. “Emperor of the Universe,” 3 January 1957; “The Treasure in the Lake,” 28 February 1956; “Robin Hood,” 2 December 1956.
55. “Karl Marx and the Secret Language of the Jews,” 35. Found in Jessop and Wheatley, Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Vol. Veo. Marx is depicted several times in earlier Python work (MPFC: UC, 1.378–79).
56. This is one of those sketches that could play as well on an album as on film. Visuals aren’t necessary for the humor to come through, a tribute to the Goon Show’s influence.
57. MPFC: UC, 1.350.
58. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun, 468–69.
59. Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution, 21–22.
60. Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution, 22.
61. King and Stager, LBI, 81.
62. LBI, 82; 2 Kings 4:40–41.
63. Conservative Party Conference speech, 13 October 1978 (margaretthatcher.org).
64. 16 November 1954.