A clump of plinths

The joke surely with Monty Python is that these trainee doctors, accountants, solicitors and bank managers, who met at college when they were reading law or medicine, never really stopped being those respect- able middle-class things. There’s an air of put-on daftness about the Pythons; this is an end-of-term cabaret by the chumps from Management and Personnel. They remind me of those prats in the front row of the last night of the Proms who think it wildly funny to bob up and down in time to Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’; or they are the committee of the Goon Show Preservation Society, eating damp sandwiches and ordering half a shandy and doing Eccles voices; or they are the weekend volunteers for a steam railway, turning up for duty in home-knitted woollen pullovers.

John Cleese (whose real name is Jack Cheese) was the son of a punctilious insurance clerk in Weston-super-Mare.