-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth H. Thiers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 7:36 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Another Personal Monty Python Favourite


It's much better when you see Monty Python skits.  Very visual and lots of
little humourous things going on.

Beth T. the OT

Ok, show of hands here.  How many remember this Eric Idle monologue?  If
memory serves, he would rarely "come up for air" during recitation.  Lot's
of 70s references, which should make us oldsters feel better.  Anglophiles
like Kat and myself should be particularly appreciative (I know I am):

TYPICAL BRIT ON HOLIDAY:

What's the point of 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." 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. And 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 Powell can speak and then he throws up
over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't
realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful,
our
room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming
little
local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red
Barrel and cheese and onion 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.....